Workshop Wonderland

Who's teaching the teachers?

Jerry Jesness from the August/September 2000 issue

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My all-time favorite workshop was held at the South Dakota Indian Educators convention in 1980. There I learned that American Indians, like Asians, were right-brained people, while those of European stock were left-brained. Right-brained people, we learned, most easily learn to read ideograms, while left-brainers were better at reading phonetic script. The consultant stopped short of suggesting that we teach our Lakota students Chinese, but he wanted us to understand that we were forcing our students to read an alphabet that was not natural to them, so we should at least feel a bit guilty.

As mathematician Wayne Bishop has written, workshops are the mechanisms that spread educational viruses. Granted, they're weak viruses, but they're acting on a weak system. One gullible teacher can infect a classroom; one principal can infect a school; one curriculum director can infect an entire school system. Surely there are better roads to "continuous professional development" than this one.

K