Workshop Wonderland.

• Author: Jesness, Jerry
• Position: Teachers' in-service training

Who's teaching the teachers?

Leaf through the National Education Association's most recent batch of resolutions (available at www.nea.org/resolutions/99/), and you'll find declaration D-14, which states that "continuous professional development is required for teachers and administrators to achieve and maintain the highest standards." It's hard to argue with the sentiment--except that in schools the usual means of encouraging professional development is the teacher workshop. And anyone who thinks education can be substantially improved with workshops probably hasn't ever attended one.

Not all such sessions--"teachers' in-service training" is the preferred jargon--are a waste of time. It makes sense to pursue advanced study in the field you teach, and we teachers ought to stay abreast of such topics as new laws affecting schools. But most other workshops are misguided, or foolish, or actually dangerous, should the ideas they present fall into the hands of teachers or administrators naive or ignorant enough to take them seriously.

Not long ago, for instance, I went to a workshop titled "Multisensory Grammar." There we learned that students will learn grammar more easily if, before launching into such difficult concepts as "nouns" and "verbs," we first teach them to identify the different parts of speech as blue, red, yellow, green, and orange words. Some lucky teachers were called to the front of the class and asked to place translucent chips on an overhead projector while the rest of us wrote sentences that followed their code. As I recall, "The cat ate the mouse" was a red-blue-orange-red-blue sentence.

At another workshop, we broke up into small groups, each of which got to read Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee" its own way. Our group did it as a rap. Our neighbors did it as a melodrama. Another group sang it as a round, to the tune of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." None of us conveyed the sense of a widower grieving for his young, dead wife, but we managed to kill more than an hour, and, the consultant assured us, we had fun as we learned.

A very popular workshop topic is standardized tests. There's a consultant from the Dallas, Texas, area who travels around the Lone Star State giving a presentation called "Book and Brain for the TAAS." (TAAS is the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, the Holy Grail of elementary and secondary education in my state. A high pass rate means your school is "successful.") This consultant claims to have studied...