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 help re-enchant the writing process—helping students sharpen their reading and analytic skills, think with each other, and move towards more genuinely embodied authorship in their formal writing.

Making Struggle Visible: Writing in the Age of AI

When generative AI can offer quick and competent answers, the classroom 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 where the learning really happens.

This online practice lab will use IWT methods 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. These conversations can help teachers see what students understand, but their deeper value may be more relational: they give students a chance to rehearse ideas, explain choices, receive live feedback, and become more present in the learning community. We will leave with practical classroom strategies and with sharper language for explaining to students why doing their own thinking in writing still matters.

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.

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 interrogate the metaphors that shape our thinking about writing. Should writing flow smoothly? What obstacles create writers’ block? Is there a recipe for good writing? Together, we will take a playful, thoughtful approach to exploring these formative analogies and imagining new ones, considering their implications for teaching and learning to write.

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.

Writing with AI

Description coming soon.

Before the Thesis: Building Literary Thinking through Curiosity

How do students arrive at ideas worth arguing? Too often, literary analysis begins with the expectation that students produce a thesis before they have had time to notice, wonder, question, 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. Through a series of reading, writing, discussion, and reflection experiences, participants will move from observation to pattern, from question to possibility, and ultimately from claim to thesis. Along the way, we'll examine student writing, experiment with classroom-ready protocols, and consider how small shifts in our teaching can help students discover ideas rather than simply generate them. Rooted in Institute for Writing & Thinking practices, the workshop will emphasize low-stakes writing, close observation, collaborative inquiry, and writing as a mode of thinking. 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.

Research in the Age of AI: Preserving Critical Inquiry

The rapid adoption of Large Language Models and specialized AI research 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 that are not always transparent to student researchers. This shift raises a pressing pedagogical question: how do we prepare students to use AI as a genuine research aid without eroding the foundational skills of searching, evaluating, and synthesizing scholarship that underlie strong research papers and analytical essays?

This workshop invites participants to explore that tension directly. Drawing on writing-to-learn strategies—reflective journaling, annotated bibliographies, metacognitive prompts, and structured peer discussion—we will examine how students currently make sense of the research process, where AI tools enter that process, and how those tools can be positioned to complement rather than substitute for critical inquiry. Participants will leave with concrete 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.

Writing-to-Read as Ethical Inquiry

Essays that put forward an ethical argument are a standard feature of the secondary school curriculum, but most such essays start with tacit assumptions about what is ethical. This workshop uses an array of writing-to-read practices to help members interrogate how they arrive at ethical judgments and recognize whether they are in fact making such judgments independently or rephrasing ones they’ve received from other sources. The aim is to help make students 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. LeGuin's story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” and Flannery O'Connor's “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

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 re-do what they’ve already done. At the same time, it’s one of the skills that differentiates good writers from highly skilled ones. Most importantly, it’s 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 an after-effect of writing, but as the main affair. Playing mainly with one another’s writing as source texts, 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 other 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!

Celebrating Language Diversity

A lullaby, an anthem, a vow, a tax return, a 5-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 quote a classic text by Heath, 1983) by engaging questions that connect texts with students’ own experiences of language, culture, and learning. Such questions center the interplay of heritage, community-based, and schooled literacies and the power of their co-existence. Drawing from the fields of literacy studies, translation studies, sociolinguistics, Black studies, indigenous studies, and poetry, participants will consider what language means to people, and to a people. As language is often a means of justifying structures of control and access, to explore loving language will also necessarily engage power analysis, with formal education a central site of struggle. As a community of learners, 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 and preparing approaches to both classic and novel texts that build on and expand students' linguistic range.

Fostering Creative Reading

On August 31, 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered the Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard University to identify the qualities and challenges facing those 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.” A person’s capacity to read texts rigorously, with investment and courage, and without depending on others’ interpretations reveals them 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 an active and creative set of practices. We will consider how to create and develop reading cultures in our classrooms. In the process, we will identify not only how a range of writing-to-read approaches help students remember what they have read, but also build deep connections with the works they encounter, regardless of whether or not they find them “relatable.”

Writing-Based Debate and Discussion

This workshop will build instructor capacities around bringing debate and public speaking into classrooms across the curriculum. Joining IWT techniques together with Debate Across the Curriculum commitments to student voice, oral feedback, and the ethical commitment to see multiple sides within most issues, we will use our time together to both participate in as well as plan debate units. In this hands-on, interactive workshop, we will think, read, and write about best practices for classroom debates as well as walk through several practical exercises that faculty can implement to integrate debate and public speaking into their classes. We will focus particularly on how to plan for debates of increasing complexity, from spontaneous debates to well researched long-table/parliamentary debates. In particular, we will discuss formats, judging and feedback criteria, as well as assessments.

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 your teacher!) who you expect might like, or even need, to receive your words. We’ll explore examples (in addition to Spicer, we’ll text render across letters by Emily Dickinson and MLK, as well as those by contemporary writers like Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil), to consider when and how what writers do in letters exceeds the constraints of a singular recipient. In the second half of the workshop, we’ll try out and reflect on how epistolary practices can help students develop essay topics and ideas that feel motivated and organic, and that can also evolve into works of polished writing that are collaborative, or multimodal.

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, and beyond the English classroom.

Close Reading Jukebox

Even if 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 writing together about how those texts move us, and how we can think both critically and creatively about poetry and song lyrics we find intriguing. In a time when our students’ reading of texts is increasingly outsourced to savvy-seeming tech platforms, we will share songs, listen to them together, describe them in writing, and attempt to capture the feelings their lines evoke as well as 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 members of the workshop. We will insist on the human sensitivity to rhythm and sound as prerequisites 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 attempt some song writing, or compose a poem about a particular song. We will see how these creative endeavors move us toward (or away from) argument and analysis. IWT practices will help us write out and revise our evolving understandings of our collaborative playlist, leading the way to a rubric of reading and reflection we can ultimately share with students.

Writing (and Thinking) with the Animals

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

Reflective Writing: The Power of Process

Description coming soon.