The Product-Oriented Workshop

Workshops are extremely popular learning settings. The combination of careful planning, few dis tractions, participation, concentrated effort, and perhaps the feeling of a special event, often results in very ef fective learning. One of the interesting features is that they appear to be becoming skill oriented. For example, they often are intended to teach participants how to design effective instruction, evaluate educational re search, or select educational materials. They also seem to emphasize underlying principles, to enable the skills to be as generalizable as possible. These are entirely laudable goals, as long as the workshop participants are likely to need such skills over a considerable period of time, and are able and willing to devote the necessary time to their acquisition. Teachers, curriculum planners, even students are likely to use them for many years. A very different set of training situations also exists, however, which might require a somewhat different ap proach. Examples of these situations are student mentors teaching a part of a university course, parents and com munity leaders making brief excursions into educational settings, volunteers for recreational programs, and in structors for crash training programs. In all these cases, and others, the people involved are not likely to require a large repertoire of teaching skills, nor need they be retained for a long time. In addition, it would not be surprising to find unique circumstances which do not readily lend themselves to generalized approaches. How can the workshop as a training medium1 be used for such purposes ? One possible answer is to direct the workshop toward the preparation of a useful product. Retaining the workshop format provides all the ad vantages of careful programming, participation, and concentration on limited goals. Changing the emphasis from skill-learning to production of a tool which can be used to promote skilled performance could make the amount of training small enough to be commensurate with the job, often a volunteer job. The trainer was faced with the task of preparing leaders and instructors for parts of a newly approved student run course at a local college.2 The course was to be divided into three week units, each led by dif ferent people over two semesters. The instructors were mostly students. They would not have the opportunity to each exercise a large repertoire of teaching skills, and equally important, there was no reason to attempt to have such skills retained over a long period of time. On the other hand, the students were anxious to gen erate their own solutions to teaching problems, and were not seeking to be simply told how to do it. An evening workshop was organized before the beginning of the year to produce an instructor's hand book. Teams of participants listed ideas under such head ings as ''Different Ways to Use a Guest Lecturer, Ac tivities for Small Groups, Individual Projects, and Using Films. The result was a crude but useful col lection of working ideas from which unit instructors could draw to provide methodological variety. During the evening in which the handbook was produced, the workshop leader and other course consultants circulated from group to group, offering suggestions and direc tions for elaboration. The ideas were typed, duplicated, and circulated the very next day to all workshop par ticipants. The handbook itself is not highly generalizable, both because it was produced by a very particular group to satisfy their rather unique needs, and because the process of creating it was very likely an important en couragement to use it. It is nevertheless impossible to tell with certainty whether the value of the workshop lay in the product or the process. Considering the ease with which the enterprise was carried out, it is almost not worth while trying to find out; a new handbook can be easily created with next year's course leaders. It was pointed out to the participants that the workshop itself could be regarded by them as an example of a lesson, as well as the source of a particular result. Interviews with the course organizers revealed that the handbook was indeed being used on an irregular basis by the course leaders.3 Since the handbook is a resource and not a syllabus, this is a satisfactory result. In another brief example of a product oriented work shop, teachers at an annual convention were to be shown that supposedly exotic media can be easily used by stu dents for a variety of purposes with no elaborate prepara tion.4 There were two groups of sixty participants, each with a one-hour time limit. After a brief description of how to paint directly on clear film, materials were handed out and everyone did it. Several resulting prod ucts were publicly screened within the hour. Teachers of a wide variety of subjects and age levels came away with many more ideas than the one they each worked on.