July Workshops

Writing and Thinking workshops will run in 4 time zones: Eastern Time, Pacific Time, Central European Time, and Moscow Time, 9am-1pm. Please register for the section that best suits your schedule. The workshop in Moscow Time will be conducted in Russian.

This foundational workshop introduces participants to IWT’s writing-based teaching practices, while giving participants an opportunity to reflect on how they approach their own writing and how they teach writing. The goal of the work is to create, nurture, and sustain a writing-based classroom. Sessions focus on writing practices, engagement with texts, revision strategies, and developing learning communities in the classroom. The workshop is purposely communal and collaborative: teachers read and write together, exchange ideas, and respond to one another’s work. Through these activities, teachers become more aware of the scaffolding behind the composing process and better perceive the roots of their students’ struggles to produce expressive and engaged writing. Together, we discover how writing generates equity, community, and responsibility within a classroom. Teachers of all subjects who want to understand how shared writing practices can generate rich thinking and learning are invited to participate.

Writing to Learn will run in Eastern Time and Central European Time, 9am-1pm

Like Writing and Thinking, Writing to Learn introduces participants to IWT’s foundational writing-based teaching practices, but with a particular emphasis on their application to specific subject areas and disciplines. This workshop is multidisciplinary: it models writing strategies that help students explore complex ideas in diverse contexts, such as historical primary sources, literary texts, tables and statistics, essays from the social sciences, and STEM texts. These writing-to-learn practices support close reading, encourage students to learn from one another, and help them make personal connections to the people, places, and concepts they study. The workshop focuses on using writing to build an initial understanding of texts—a crucial first step in creating formal essays or reports—and to revise this preliminary thinking as their understanding deepens. We will explore how writing-to-learn practices can reshape how we teach and how the academic lecture, collaborative learning practices, and the act of listening can reinforce one another within the classroom.

Restorative Words, Restorative Practices will run in Eastern Time, 9am-1pm

Restorative Words, Restorative Practices introduces participants to IWT’s foundational writing practices, while giving participants an opportunity to learn how restorative justice can be integrated into their classrooms and learning communities. Rather than solely placing restorative justice outside the classroom, as alternative conflict resolution, we bring RJ principles of community building, accountability, active listening, and shared, empathic learning inside the classroom. In this spirit, workshop sessions relate IWT’s writing-based teaching strategies and restorative justice practices to explore how they support one another. The workshop is multidisciplinary, and we will read and write texts across genres as participants explore their own writing and activities for helping their students’ writing, reflection, and creative and critical thinking. Teachers of all subjects who want to understand restorative justice and how writing generates thinking are invited to participate.

Inquiry into Essay will run in Eastern Time, 9am-1pm

This workshop introduces dynamic and generative writing-to-learn practices designed to coach students through the drafting and revision process for analytic essays. To begin, it considers how we define the essay and ways this definition can shift according to the purpose and content of the project. Writing together, we  experiment with the kinds of exploratory writing that can help students find points of entry into challenging texts, explore and articulate their readerly perspective, and affirm their ability to uncover fresh insights. Working on their own essays, participants will focus on the creative and collaborative tools for teaching the analytic essay. We highlight strategies for pulling together fragments of good writing into a coherent whole; practice the kinds of inventive and exploratory writing that can produce a draft; and explore the use of the conventions that characterize formal writing. This workshop is designed for teachers who are familiar with the strategies introduced in Writing and Thinking or Writing to Learn (or in similar workshops elsewhere) and who want to focus on coaching students through the drafting and revision process.

Thinking Historically through Writing will run in Eastern Time, 9am-1pm

“History teaches us a way to make choices, to balance opinions, to tell stories, and to become uneasy—when necessary—about the stories we tell,” writes Sam Wineburg in Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts. We all have a tendency to process new information through the lens of our entrenched beliefs and values. This tendency can be particularly visible when students grapple with the challenges posed by historical documents. How can teachers help students encounter historical texts in a way that invites them to revise their thinking and helps them become more nuanced, critical readers of history? More importantly, how can teachers help students see that history is relevant to them personally—that they operate within a historical context and have the power and agency to make historical change? 

The workshop focuses on writing-to-read strategies for analyzing primary documents, secondary texts, and visual artifacts so that participants learn how historians interpret evidence and construct stories based on those interpretations. Many imaginative teaching strategies enrich and enliven students’ appreciation of the past. Writing is the least used and yet perhaps the most versatile of these strategies, since it allows students to discover a world that differs from the present and to appreciate different—and often conflicting—interpretations of key moments in the past.

Writing to Learn in the STEM Disciplines will run in Eastern Time, 9am-1pm

This workshop introduces writing-to-learn strategies that help students develop their understanding of complex ideas in science and mathematics. In STEM classes, writing is most often used to assess what students know—or don’t know—on tests, lab reports, and assignments. By contrast, this workshop focuses on using writing as a tool for constructing knowledge. It introduces writing practices that help students find points of entry into challenging texts and concepts, interrogate their understanding when it is still fuzzy, tentative, or mistaken, and revise their thinking. Working together, participants experiment with collaborative and exploratory writing prompts that stimulate close reading of scientific and mathematical texts, problems, and images. In addition, we will explore how writing practices can deepen engagement and spark curiosity—an important first step in becoming more invested and reflective in the process of solving a problem, reasoning through an explanation, or carrying out an experiment.

Creative Nonfiction: Telling the Truth will run in Eastern Time, 9am-1pm

Creative nonfiction reports back to us from what we call the real world—its subject matter is “documentable . . . as opposed to ‘invented’ from the writer’s mind,” as Barbara Lounsberry puts it. Its subgenres are many: the personal essay; the essay of place; nature writing; family portraits; memoir; writing about war, travel, adventure, food, and more. Creative nonfiction tells stories based in fact, often heavily researched, but always filtered through the lens of what Joan Didion calls “the implacable ‘I’.” It is crafted with tools borrowed from fiction’s toolbox: narrative voice, character, plot, description, dialogue. What good creative nonfiction offers, writes David Foster Wallace, is “clarity, precision, plainness, lucidity, and the sort of magical compression that enriches instead of vitiates. . . . It serves as models and guides for how large or complex sets of facts can be sifted, culled, and arranged in meaningful ways—ways that yield and illuminate truth instead of just adding more noise to the overall roar.” We will begin to experience the particular richness and variety of creative nonfiction in the short texts we read. Writers include Susan Sontag, Teju Cole, Natalia Ginzburg, Richard Rodriguez, Luc Sante, Zadie Smith, Terry Tempest Williams, and Rebecca Solnit, among others, and we will focus on how these writers operate within their subgenre. We will use their works as a springboard into our own creative nonfictions, keeping in mind how we might teach our students to do the same.

Hybrid Narratives and the Power of Voice will run in Eastern Time, 9am-1pm

New hybridized narratives of literary nonfiction—forms such as documentary poetry videos, multimedia storytelling, graphic memoir, and autofiction—are powerful mediums for exploring questions of justice, historiography, and identity. This workshop will delve into hybrid essays, poetry comics, podcast investigations, cultural reportage, and selections from nonfiction novels. Drawing on the work of writers such as William Hazlitt, Maggie Nelson, C. D. Wright, and Tyehimba Jess, the workshop will explore the narrative voices at the heart of hybrid nonfiction. Reading and writing collaboratively, we will examine and create work that marries reporting on the real world to personal connections. We will encounter what Rebecca Solnit has called the “vital power” of voice-having, including its crucial aspects of “audibility (people can hear you), credibility (people are willing to believe you), and consequence (your words have an effect).” This workshop will offer practices for creating hybrid narratives and explore the many ways that their structures communicate ideas and information while developing richness of character and plot.