From their campus looking over the Hudson River, educators from Bard College headed to the windy city where eager teachers from the Chicagoland area awaited on January 26th for a humanities workshop titled “Writers as Readers” hosted by Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking (IWT).

Bard’s IWT hit the road in Winter of 2018. Its first stop? Francis Parker. “Not every school in this area has the resources to send teachers to upstate New York to participate in their amazing workshops,” Vice Principal Ruth Jurgensen said, “so to be able to host here, well we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to partner with them.”

The day was filled with analyzing texts and reflecting of writing of the teachers’–now students–own work. Upper School English teacher Mike Mahany said, “Essentially the philosophy is that you can learn to read better and more deeply and more critically by writing and vice versa.”

Founded in 1982 by Bard College president Leon Botstein, the IWT brings together both college and secondary level teachers to learn from each other and explore how writing fosters and re-shapes thinking. According to its mission, “The Institute aims to create a place where teachers and faculty renew themselves intellectually, imagine new teaching ideas, and envision classrooms in which writing becomes a catalyst for learning in all subjects.”

Regular registration for the Parker hosted IWT workshop began at a fee of $575, but in an effort to “to support teacher collaboration on revising writing curricula,” a discount of 10% is offered to teams of three teachers or more coming from the same school. Those who signed up for the full day before January 5th, 2018 got an early bird discount, dropping the cost to $450 at the group price.

One aspect of the IWT workshops that Upper School English teacher Stacey Gibson noted in particular was its emphasis on teachers practicing rigorous writing activities. For Gibson these writing activities engender humility toward the craft of teaching. “There have been countless times when a person, whether aware of it or not, approaches a subject as if they hold a certain dominance over it,” Gibson said. “This approach can lead to the student being unable to learn from the teacher, and vice versa.” While teachers hold expertise, she said, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are experts.

Gibson will be attending “Pain, Voice, and Form in Claudia Rankine’s ‘Citizen’ and ‘The Pain Scale’ by Eula Biss.” She said, “I’m interested in abstract violence and the way people pass their pain onto others in institutions, especially schools.”

A number of Parker teachers have integrated skills and ideas they learned in their workshops into their classroom. The list of workshops at Parker include:

“Against Phoniness: Speaking Your Truth in J.D. Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and ‘Wild Hundreds’ by Nate Marshall,” “The Limits of Control: ‘Behave: The Biology of Humans at their Best and Worst’” by Robert M. Sapolsky and excerpts from the ‘Summa Theologica,’ by Saint Thomas Aquinas,” “The Places Below and at the End of Things: Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Ocean at the End of the Lane’ and Loren Eiseley’s ‘The Night Country,’” “In the Form of: ‘Images and Objects in Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ and ‘The Voyage of the Sable Venus’ by Robin Coste Lewis,” and “Pain, Voice, and Form in Claudia Rankine’s ‘Citizen’ and ‘The Pain Scale’ by Eula Biss.”

At an IWT Mahany previously attended another year at, he was asked to take a passage from Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” that said something regarding or in relation to race. Mahany found his passage, which was about Gatsby crossing on the bridge into New York City, and was asked to draw that image. “I’m a terrible artist,” Mahany said with a laugh. “But, of course, that didn’t really matter.”

He was then told to reflect on what he drew, and focus on the difference between the way he reflected on the passage and they way he drew it. “And it was really interesting because I realized as I drew it that I focused on a couple of things that I wasn’t aware of at first,” Mahany said. “So I did this in my class, and it was a really interesting experience to analyze the passage, draw the passage, and then reflect on the drawing.”

Though nothing is set in stone, Jurgensen notes that Parker would love to host IWT again. “IWT has provided for us the opportunity for a teacher or two to participate in any of the workshops running at no cost, and we benefit from having terrific workshops here in house,” Jurgensen said. “Teachers don’t have to travel to participate.”