10 am – 2:30 pm EST
Writing-Based Teaching Online
The New Kinds of Attention online workshop series offers short, accessible introductions to IWT writing-based teaching practices. It is designed for educators who are curious about IWT workshops or looking to expand their writing-based teaching toolkit, including those unable to attend IWT’s on-campus workshops at Bard. The workshops in this series provide an immersive, online introduction to IWT pedagogy and a taste of the experience of our popular July Weeklong Workshops.
In 2024, the series will be held on February 9, February 23, and March 8, from 10 am – 2:30 pm EST, including a 30-minute break. Scroll down for the full list of workshops!
Friday, February 9, 2024
Introduction to Writing and Thinking
This four-hour workshop introduces participants to IWT’s writing-based teaching practices, while providing 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. 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 gain more understanding of their students’ struggles to produce expressive and engaged writing. Teachers of all subjects who want to understand how shared writing practices can generate rich thinking and learning are invited to participate.
Introduction to Writing to Learn
This four-hour introductory workshop introduces participants to IWT’s foundational writing-based teaching practices, with a particular emphasis on their application to specific subject areas and disciplines. This workshop is multidisciplinary: it will draw on a variety of genres including historical sources and literary and scientific texts. While Writing and Thinking focuses on ways to support the writing process, Writing to Learn focuses on how writing can support learning across disciplines: the workshop models ways to facilitate first encounters with new texts and concepts, invite connections with prior knowledge, and provide opportunities for revising thinking as understanding deepens. We will explore how writing-to-learn practices can reshape how we teach and how collaborative learning practices and the act of listening can reinforce one another within the classroom.
This workshop is funded by a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program.
Writing with AI —Waitlist only. We have added new sections of this workshop on March 8; see below!
Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, has already disrupted teaching and learning—most visibly in the humanities, but also in computer science and the natural sciences. In this four-hour workshop, we will practice strategies to motivate and maintain students’ learning despite their access to a tool that could potentially complete their assignments. We will explore the power of generative AI by writing in collaboration with ChatGPT; we will consider how to revise assignments and teaching strategies to investigate the impact of machine writing tools; and we will work together to develop richer ways to motivate students to do their own thinking on the page.
Friday, February 23, 2024
Introduction to Thinking Historically through Writing
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. This four-hour workshop focuses on writing-to-read strategies for analyzing primary and secondary documents and images that can help students become more nuanced readers of history. Together, we explore how writing can enliven students’ curiosity about the past and help them appreciate different, and sometimes conflicting, interpretations of key moments in history. Most importantly, these practices 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.
Funded by a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program.
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.
Introduction to Reflective Writing
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; it is an opportunity to assess how our initial thoughts have evolved by exploring them in writing and by hearing the writing of our peers. Reflection also paves the way for us to approach the next learning experience with a better sense of how we make meaning; it sharpens critical thinking and normalizes struggle. This four-hour workshop will investigate the principles and practices of metacognitive writing and focus on how to make process writing integral to our teaching. We will interrogate our goals as educators, consider how reflective practices can foster agency and community in our classrooms, and explore what can happen when we make reflection central to our students’ learning.
Friday, March 8, 2024
Introduction to Writing to Learn in the STEM Disciplines
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, 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 or mistaken, and revise their thinking. Working together, participants write in response to playful and exploratory prompts that build classroom community and approach science for what it is: open-ended, experimental, and collaborative. In addition, we will explore how writing practices can deepen engagement and spark curiosity—an important first step in the process of solving a problem, reasoning through an explanation, or carrying out an experiment.
Cultivating Multimodal Literacies
How can we expand our pedagogy to include audio and hybrid texts in the classroom? This four-hour workshop adapts IWT writing and reading practices to support multimodal literacies by moving between writing and reading to listening and audio recording. We will use podcast tools to help students cultivate their own voices, think collaboratively, and discover something new in their own writing. Digital and multimodal literacies expand our understanding of “what counts” as literacy, and this workshop will explore how hybrid tools can deepen engagement and help students recognize and harness their own diverse literacies. Participants will gain new teaching strategies for using writing-based practices to bring a range of literacies into their classrooms.
Writing for Active Listening—Waitlist only.
Active listening is central to the work we do as teachers. In this workshop, we will focus on student-to-student active listening and how it builds toward meaningful discussions and equitable classroom cultures. Listening is a crucial component of healthy classroom dialogue, and yet students’ attention is often focused on how to speak and respond. We will use writing-rich practices to explore strategies that can help students value comprehension, understanding, and empathy-led inquiry. We will explore how writing practices can promote active listening, build students’ intellectual confidence and emotional trust in themselves and others, and foster more balanced class participation. This four-hour workshop is multidisciplinary, and teachers of all subjects are invited to participate. Together, we will read texts, write, and listen—deeply, purposively—to one another as we study ways to support our students’ learning.
Writing with AI—Waitlist only.
Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, has already disrupted teaching and learning—most visibly in the humanities, but also in computer science and the natural sciences. In this four-hour workshop, we will practice strategies to motivate and maintain students’ learning despite their access to a tool that could potentially complete their assignments. We will explore the power of generative AI by writing in collaboration with ChatGPT; we will consider how to revise assignments and teaching strategies to investigate the impact of machine writing tools; and we will work together to develop richer ways to motivate students to do their own thinking on the page.
Registration and Fees
-
Tuition
Fee: $375
Early-Bird Fee: $327.50
Register one month prior to the workshop date to qualify for Early-Bird rates; tuition must be paid in full prior to the workshop.
Cancellation policy. No refunds will be issued for cancellations made later than one week before the workshop. -
Credit and Scholarship OpportunitiesCTLE Credit
All Bard IWT workshops are Continuing Teacher and Leader Education approved in New York State. An NKOA workshop is 4 CTLE hours.
The Teresa Vilardi Scholarship
IWT welcomes scholarship applications from those studying to become teachers (i.e., those registered in Bard’s MAT Program or another accredited undergraduate or graduate program in education) and in-service teachers with limited professional development funds.
Hear it from our participants
“Just a huge thank you for a wonderfully generative session and for creating such a welcoming and productive virtual space.”
“My real goal was adding more tools to my in-class activity toolbox.... This workshop was the most useful tool I've found in 3 years.”