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  • For Your Head: Best Practice - Classroom Workshop

    From Best Practice: Today's Standards for Teaching & Learning in America's Schools, Steven Zemelman, Harvey Daniels, and Arthur Hyde

    Classroom workshops...

    • harken to the crafts-place of old where products were made, all while the master craftman coached apprentices.
    • recognize that students need less telling, and more showing and doing.
    • provide a deep immersion experience for students, which is key to mastery.
    • are decentralized and hands-on.
    • place students at the center and contribute to student autonomy and responsibility.
    • are a long, regularly scheduled, recurrent chunk of time in a class during which the main activity is to DO a subject.
    • meet regularly - maybe once a week, maybe every day.
    • involve student choice when done in their truest form - books for reading, projects for investigating, topics for writing, etc.
    • require purposeful training so that students understand and are able to follow a set of norms for exercising the choices available.
    • include student roles such as collaborating with classmates, keeping their own records, and engaging in self-assessment.
    • include teacher roles such as modeling similar work processes, conferring with students one-on-one, and offering well-timed, compact mini-lessons.
    • help students develop agency and self-direction as they come to understand that workshop time must be filled with related work, and so they must decide what comes next when they finish a particular task.
    • involve a lot of time for students to work independently, although teachers may structure opportunities for collaboration and sharing, thus providing a balance of social & solitary activities.

    Conferencing during Classroom Workshops...

    • are an important feature of the workshop.
    • are aided by the structures & systems created for the workshops, and are why training students on the norms is so important.
    • allow teachers to sit with a student and work on just what he or she needs, a strategy we know to be more effective than most whole-class instruction.
    • can be a short "process conference".
    • can include questions like, "What are you working on?", "How is it going?", or "What do you plan to do next?"
    • requires the teacher to listen and help the student talk.
    • teaches a habit of mind: reflecting on your work, reviewing your progress, identifying problems or challenges, setting goals, and making plans for action steps.
    • provide an out-loud conversation about where-I-am-and-where-I-want-to-go that students will learn to internalize and use on their own.

  • For Your Hands: Sample Schedule for Classroom Workshop

    From Best Practice: Today's Standards for Teaching & Learning in America's Schools, Steven Zemelman, Harvey Daniels, and Arthur Hyde

    Building a culture of effective classroom workshops takes time, intention, and patience. Once established, however, students become active, responsible, self-motivating, and self-evaluating learners, while the teacher drops the talking-head role in favor of more powerful functions as model, coach and collaborator. What follows is an example of how a teacher might sequence a class period for the workshop.

    5 minutes - Status of Class Conference: Each student announces in a few words what he / she will work on this session.

    10 minutes - Mini-Lesson: The teacher offers a short and practical lesson on a tool, skill, procedure, or piece of information potentially useful to everyone.

    20-30 minutes - Work Time & Conferences: Students work according to their plan. Depending on the rules and norms, this may include reading or writing, talking or working with other students, doing research, conducting interviews, using manipulatives or other relevant equipment. The teacher's roles during this time are several. For the first few minutes, the teacher may experiment, read, or write her/himself, to model her/his own doing of the subject. Then the teacher will probably manage a bit, skimming through the room to solve simple problems and make sure everyone is working productively. 

    Then the teacher shifts to the main workshop activity: conducting one-on-one or small-group conferences with students about their work, either following a preset schedule or based on student sign-ups for that day. The teacher's role in these conferences are to be a sounding board, facilitator, and coach - rarely a critic or instructor.

    10 minutes - Sharing: In many workshop sessions, teachers save the last few minutes for students to discuss what they have done that day. They may read a piece of their work aloud, provide a summary of a text, apply a concept to a real-world setting, demonstrate a result they achieved, share survey information, etc.

  • For Your Heart: Classroom Workshop & Conferencing

    One example of how this might work in a high school classroom.