Workshop Way of Learning

Workshops for educators have been an integral part of professional development and inservice education. The workshop format is loosely interpreted as an opportunity or a requirement for schoolteachers or leaders to develop new knowledge, skill, or disposition designed to enhance curriculum. The idea of workshop, as a way of learning, was refined by Earl C. Kelley in the 1940s and elaborated in his book, The Workshop Way of Learning.

Kelley's workshop ideas were influenced by the educational theory of John Dewey and by practices initiated by Ralph W. Tyler in the Eight Year Study of the 1930s and early 1940s. Origins also bear some resemblance to statewide curriculum reform efforts led by Hollis Caswell in Virginia and in Florida, spanning from the 1920s to the 1940s, and to the work of L. Thomas Hopkins in Colorado, California, and New York in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the 1960s and 1970s in Maine and other states, as well as in postWorld War II Germany.

Origins in the Eight Year Study are particularly significant. Teachers from experimental secondary schools across the United States seeking to develop progressive education practices were given summer opportunities to refresh their efforts at several different colleges and universities, such as Sarah Lawrence. Some of these efforts consisted of making curricular and instructional materials that they took back to their schools to implement in subsequent years. The most experimental schools, those that practiced more radical interpretations of Dewey's philosophy, however, used the workshop opportunity not primarily to make materials, but to develop themselves. Instead of asking what was worthwhile for their students, they asked what was worthwhile for themselves. Thus, they pursued a kind of curriculum of teacher renewal that engaged them in increased self-understanding and consideration of what kinds of contributions they could make to society through their lives as educators. Rather than taking a product back to apply to students in their classrooms, they took a workshop method of asking: What is worthwhile? By sharing this orientation to learning with students, the educational experience took on new dimensions of meaning.

Kelley developed such an approach during the 1940s at Wayne State University in Detroit. The Workshop Way of Learning explicates and illustrates the approach. Beginning with a statement of principles and purposes, Kelley situates the workshop in a practical interpretation of Deweyan theory that includes appreciation of individual worth, the primacy of personal interests and concerns as a starting place for workshop learning, the central place of human relations and cooperation, and the assumption that the best learning begets more learning. Teacher participants in Kelley's workshops were encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning, to evaluate and revise it on a continuous basis. A central assumption was that the participants would take that learning back to their classrooms as primarily a method that could be used with students and secondarily in the form of materials that could facilitate such a method or way of learning. Throughout the book, Kelley presents the following: procedures for getting workshops started, the development of interest groups among participants, applicable resources, examples of application in general sessions, strategies for reducing barriers among participants, modes of evaluation, illustrations of outcomes, discussion of unsolved problems, examples of a brief workshop, and concluding discussion of dilemmas and possibilities for future applications.

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