In the summer of 1983 Simon's Rock began offering a three-week writing workshop for high school students modeled after the innovative three-week Workshop in Language and Thinking required of all entering students at Bard College. We are now part of the

National Writing and Thinking Network

, the largest consortium of summer writing programs in the country. Each year 84 academically motivated students are chosen to participate in the Simon's Rock program. Former participants have gone on to such colleges as Amherst, Bard, Harvard, Haverford, Kenyon, Princeton, Simon's Rock, Smith, Williams, and Yale.

Unlike conventional workshops in expository and creative writing, Simon's Rock's focuses on using informal, playful, expressive writing as a way to strengthen skills of language and thinking. Out of these informal writing activities, using techniques of peer response, students develop more polished pieces, ranging from personal narratives to stories, poems, and exploratory essays.

The workshop sections are small (12 students). This allows for individual attention to each student and helps to foster the sense of belonging to a supportive learning community in which students can feel comfortable exploring new directions in their writing and thinking. Trusting one's own language and voice, learning to think for oneself and in collaboration with others— these are the qualities and skills that the workshop strives to develop.

Each weekday consists of three ninety-minute sessions organized as writing and discussion seminars. Workshop leaders write with their students, and there is frequent sharing of this informal writing, both in small groups and in the class as a whole. Discussions of assigned readings — mostly contemporary poems, stories, and essays — is informal and speculative. The emphasis isn't on arriving at a "correct answer" but on exploring various ideas about what a text is saying. The texts also frequently serve as starting points and models for students' own creative writing exercises. These daily activities are complemented by evening assignments in reading, revising, and journal writing.