Notebooks: Making Space for Thought

In our techno-forward age, it’s easy to overlook the notebook as a radical technology that has long shaped not only writing, but also reading, thinking, and self-knowledge. But in the era of AI, the notebook can be a sanctuary for humanistic learning. Notebooks offer a provisional, experimental, self-reflective space where we can respond to texts, try out ideas, ask questions, and engage in productive play before we make our thoughts public. In this workshop, we will look at notebooks (and sketchbooks) and explore ways we can use them in our classrooms to re-enchant the writing process—helping students sharpen their reading and analytic skills, think with each other, and move toward more authentic, embodied authorship in their formal writing.

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Making Struggle Visible: Writing in the Age of AI

When generative AI can offer quick and competent answers, the value of struggle can become harder for students to see. Why draft, revise, annotate, question, or sit with uncertainty when a plausible answer is instantly available? And yet those slow, unfinished, awkward moments are often where the learning happens.

This online practice lab will use IWT practices to help teachers make the work of thinking more visible, social, and worthwhile in the age of AI. Participants will write, read, respond, and reflect together, trying short activities that help students generate first thoughts, stay with difficulty, revise their ideas, and experience writing as discovery rather than merely as production. We will then step back from each activity to ask what kind of learning it supports, how it might be adapted for different classrooms, and how it might help teachers respond to AI without relying primarily on detection or prohibition. The workshop will also introduce short oral check-ins or tutorial conversations as one promising form of AI-resilient assessment. We will leave with practical classroom strategies and with sharper language for explaining to students why doing their own thinking in writing still matters.

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What Essays Teach

As concerns about the influence of generative AI on student writing increase, teachers have the opportunity to rethink what essays can do for learners, both individually and in community. This workshop starts from the belief that essays will continue to have crucial roles to play in education, less as demonstrations of what students already know, and more as sites of practice that let students play out what they would like to know or linger with what troubles and puzzles them. We will engage with the essay as a creative form; with “essaying” as a practice of inquiry for grappling with productive problems; and with “essayism” as a stance that we can cultivate across disciplines. By centering writing practices in how we gather ideas and materials, draft, revise, and share our work with others, we will consider the essay as an evolving space for thinking.

A returning favorite from 2025-26!

Metaphors We Write By

In their influential study Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that “our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” Taking their premise as a starting point, this workshop models IWT practices to examine the metaphors that shape our thinking about writing. Should writing flow smoothly? What obstacles create writer’s block? Is there a recipe for good writing? Together, we will playfully and thoughtfully explore these formative metaphors, imagine new ones, and consider what they mean for teaching and learning to write.

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Annotation: Cultivating Thinking on the Page

Annotation, the art of noticing and making meaning on the page, is an important reading and writing activity. In this workshop, we will explore creative annotation strategies that move beyond margin notes and underlining to invite students to think in writing as they read. These activities help build close reading skills, analytical thinking, and genuine engagement with texts. Working with both readings and images, participants will experiment with annotations as a bridge from informal writing to longer pieces of writing, including essays. In the age of AI, annotation is a way to build student confidence about reading and expand their thinking and writing about texts. Open to all disciplines, this four-hour workshop draws on IWT practices to explore a lively range of annotation strategies—collaborative, inventive, and playful—to help us support our students’ learning.

A returning favorite from 2025-26!

Writing with AI

Generative AI has disrupted teaching and learning across disciplines. In this workshop, we will approach generative AI tools with intellectual curiosity as well as caution. How can generative AI be a powerful and playful partner in the classroom? We will write in collaboration with a range of AI tools and consider how to reimagine assignments and teaching strategies. Working together, we will develop approaches that help students to honor their own thinking while using AI thoughtfully, judiciously, and creatively.

A returning favorite

Before the Thesis: Building Literary Thinking through Curiosity

How do students arrive at ideas worth arguing for? Too often, literary analysis begins with the expectation that students produce a thesis before they have had time to notice, wonder, or linger with a text. This workshop will explore how curiosity and sustained attention can become the foundation of stronger literary thinking and more authentic analytical writing. Together, participants will move from observation to pattern, from question to possibility, and from claim to thesis. Along the way, we'll examine student writing, experiment with low-stakes writing and other classroom-ready practices, and consider how small shifts in our teaching can help students discover ideas rather than simply generate them. Participants will leave with adaptable strategies they can use across texts and grade levels to help students build arguments that emerge from genuine curiosity rather than a formula.

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Research in the Age of AI: Preserving Critical Inquiry

The rapid adoption of AI tools has transformed how students locate, filter, and process scholarly material. The process is more efficient, but it can also privilege certain sources, framings, and citation patterns over others in ways not transparent to student researchers. This raises a pressing pedagogical question: how do we prepare students to use AI as a research aid without eroding the foundational skills of searching, evaluating, and synthesizing scholarship?

This workshop invites participants to explore that tension directly. Drawing on writing-to-learn strategies—reflective journaling, annotated bibliographies, metacognitive prompts, and structured discussion—we will examine how students make sense of the research process, where AI tools enter it, and how those tools can be positioned to complement rather than substitute for critical inquiry. Participants will leave with classroom strategies for teaching source evaluation, guiding students to interrogate AI-generated suggestions, and designing assignments that make students' reasoning about their research choices visible and assessable. Ultimately, the workshop aims to help teachers turn AI-assisted research into an occasion for deeper critical thinking, rather than a shortcut around it.

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Writing-to-Read as Ethical Inquiry

Essays that put forward an ethical argument are a staple of high school and college writing, but most such essays start with tacit assumptions about what is ethical. This workshop uses an array of writing-to-read practices to help participants interrogate how they arrive at ethical judgments and recognize whether they are in fact making such judgments independently or repeating ones they’ve unconsciously absorbed from other sources. The aim is to help students become more conscious, morally nuanced readers, writers, and thinkers. Our writing and dialogue will draw on such texts as the Grand Inquisitor section of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Ursula K. Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," and Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

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The Art of Radical Revision

You gave them detailed feedback in the margins, you gave them time, you made it a substantial portion of their grade, and yet, when your students were assigned revision, the changes they made to their writing—not to mention their thinking—were minor. Sound familiar? Revision is often one of the hardest things to teach because students experience it as needing to redo what they’ve already done. At the same time, revision is an essential part of helping students think beyond what they (or anyone else) already knows. In this workshop, we’ll focus on revision not as a follow-up to writing, but as the main affair. Playing with one another’s writing, we’ll dig into how IWT practices can activate major changes to both creative and critical writing—and thinking—with a dose of revisionary wisdom from writers like Bernadette Mayer, Selah Saterstrom, and the Oulipo collective. Revising revision from chore to game and surprising encounters with the unknown: it’ll be fun!

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Celebrating Language Diversity

A lullaby, an anthem, a vow, a tax return, a five-paragraph essay: all examples of what people do with language, for love and for other reasons. To consider language diversity, language justice, and language sustenance, this workshop will listen for people’s “ways with words” (to borrow Shirley Brice Heath’s phrase), connecting texts with students’ own experiences of language, culture, and learning. Participants will ask what language means to people, and to a people. Because language is so often a means of justifying structures of control and access—with formal education a central site of struggle—exploring language will also necessarily engage power analysis. Educators in this workshop will read and write about this struggle and the possibilities and desires that give it life, with the goal of practicing approaches to both classic and unfamiliar texts that expand students’ linguistic range.

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Fostering Creative Reading

On August 31, 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered the Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard University, identifying the qualities and challenges facing young people who hoped to make an intellectual and moral impact on their country. The speech, when published, became widely known as “The American Scholar.” The capacity to read texts rigorously, with investment and courage, and without depending on others’ interpretations, Emerson argued, marks a person as someone who will contribute new ideas to the world: “There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.” This workshop will explore how we can use in-class writing to reframe reading as a set of active and creative practices, and how we can build a culture of reading in our classrooms. In the process, we will consider how writing-to-read approaches help students not only remember what they have read but also form deep connections with the works they encounter—whether or not they find them “relatable.”

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Writing-Based Debate and Discussion

This workshop will help instructors bring debate and public speaking into classrooms across the curriculum. Joining IWT practices with Debate Across the Curriculum, which prioritizes student voice, oral feedback, and a commitment to considering multiple sides of issues, this hands-on workshop will invite teachers to both participate in and plan debate units. We will think, read, and write about best practices for classroom debates and work through practical exercises that participants can adapt to their own classes. In particular, we will consider how to plan for debates of increasing complexity, from spontaneous exchanges to well-researched long-table or parliamentary-style debates, and address formats, judging and feedback criteria, and assessment.

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Epistolary Essays

“It’s so much easier to write something if you’re writing for someone,” the poet Jack Spicer wrote in a letter to one of his many correspondents. In this workshop, we’ll consider the energizing effect of writing for or towards someone (other than a teacher!) who might like, or even need, to receive your words. We’ll explore examples: in addition to Spicer, we’ll work with letters by Emily Dickinson and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as those by contemporary writers Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, considering how the writing in a letter can reach beyond its designated recipient. We’ll then turn to how epistolary practices can help students develop essay topics and ideas that feel genuine and organic, and that can also evolve into polished pieces that are collaborative or multimodal.

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Uses of Poetry

William Carlos Williams famously wrote, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” In this four-hour workshop, we will work with a range of texts, from traditional lyric poems to contemporary experimental and documentary poems (where, in fact, we do sometimes find the news). Students can fear poetry due to its presumed difficulty and mysteriousness. This workshop will begin with strategies for reintroducing the pleasures of reading poetry together and consider how such pleasures can open channels for student risk-taking as well as critical and creative thinking. Using IWT writing-based teaching practices, we will collaboratively explore how we can activate poetry in our classrooms to help students analyze complex and open-ended texts in all genres, within and beyond the English classroom.

A returning favorite from New Kinds of Attention

Close Reading Jukebox

Although poetry is rooted in song, we tend to think of poets as entirely different from, for example, Top 40 tune-meisters. In this workshop we’ll trouble that difference, gathering a corpus of written, sonic, and video texts and exploring how those texts move us. In a time when our students’ reading is increasingly outsourced to tech platforms, we will share songs, listen together, and write to capture both the feelings their lines evoke and the meanings they suggest. With Hanif Abdurraqib, Hua Hsu, and Natalie Diaz as our guides, we will listen to and closely read songs nominated by participants, insisting on the human sensitivity to rhythm and sound as a prerequisite to meaningful interpretation of any written, spoken, or sung text. While no one will be expected to sing or dance during this online workshop, we may try some songwriting, or compose a poem about a particular song, noticing how these creative endeavors move us toward (or away from) argument and analysis. IWT practices will help us revise our understandings of our collaborative playlist into a rubric of reading and reflection we can share with students.

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Writing (and Thinking) with the Animals

“Animals are good to think with,” French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously wrote. In this workshop, we will explore some of the ways that humans narrate animals’ lives. Reading collaboratively, we will examine texts that attempt to “smell beauty”—that is, to inhabit the thoughts, motivations, and sensations of animals; that anthropomorphize or “humanize” animals; or that celebrate animals as “other” (and sometimes better) than human. Believing and doubting animal-centered classics of close observation, adventure, and fantasy, we’ll model new ways to bring texts about animals, their habits, and their habitats into our classrooms, and discover possibilities for more embodied modes of writing.

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Reflective Writing as Process and Practice

Process writing, a cornerstone of IWT’s writing-based teaching, is an essential reflective practice. We make space for reflection at the end of most writing sequences, assessing how our initial thoughts have evolved by exploring them in writing and by hearing the writing of our peers. Working across genres and disciplines, this workshop will investigate the principles and practices of metacognitive writing and focus on how to make process writing integral to our teaching. In an era when AI writing tools privilege results over process, we will discover what can happen when our classrooms make reflection central to our students’ learning.

As our Online Practice Labs series—and the school year—comes to a close, we will also consider reflective writing as a way of ending: the closing rituals that help students look back on a semester's work and carry forward what they've learned.

A returning favorite