About the Workshop Way® System
The Workshop Way System of Growth for Education® serves learners of all ages.
It is a system of education that leaves nothing to chance, and it is an approach to learning which provides equal opportunities for all students to learn how to learn, how to think, and how to manage their lives. It helps students develop decision-making capacities and critical thinking skills.
The goal of Workshop Way® is to create feelings of importance, intelligence, and power in every learner. We do that by providing educators with complete packaged lesson plans that include all materials needed. These lesson plans help educators implement elements, learning conditions, and life skills in their learning environment. Students complete each task independently, which allows them to complete tasks without help or direction.
Workshop Way® teaches students to love learning, and academic success will follow as a byproduct.
Whether it is a whole school, a single classroom, tutoring session, teaching English as a second language, or home schooling, Workshop Way® builds success by creating a physical, social, and mental environment that develops self-actualized persons who handle grade-level content and who achieve well.
The balance between achieving academic success and developing life skills can be tough to find, but Workshop Way® has developed a program that accomplishes the balance and works.
Workshop Way® was founded by Grace H. Pilon who was far ahead of her time in education theory. She designed a holistic system that addressed the needs of all students while helping them develop necessary lifelong skills.
She authored multiple books about her education ideas and she is still regarded as a leader in education thought.
- All students can LEARN if they get everything that is human inside of them.
- All human beings are individuals (subjectivity).
- Whole person growth begins to happen when people are allowed to find their own timing and way.
- Human beings are different (diversity) from each other and at different phases of growth.
- The learning process, now and into the future, requires student-orientated activities that ensure students live with organized thinking.
- All students need to handle grade-level knowledge.
- Teachers create a community (interdependence) based on respect and responsible living.
- Students need to be free from fear.
What is important is that students are willing to live in the classroom, willing to risk in order to learn because students are freed from the fear of making mistakes. To achieve this classroom culture, teachers use Teacher Artistry Cushioning Language, which are dialogues with the class on truths of the human condition. For example, “When human beings are learning, they make mistakes! It is O.K to make a mistake while we are learning.”