Freedom to Thrive: A Pathway to Intellectual Freedom

By Kathleen Gallagher

Timing, organization, and a special interactive dialogue will change a classroom into a happy and successful learning environment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647011567

Kathleen Gallagher

Kathleen Gallagher is a business reporter at the Milwaukee Jour­nal Sentinel, where she has worked since 1993. She was a member of the Journal Sentinel team that won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting on the Nic Volker story in 2011. She was also part of a team that won the 2006 Inland Press Association award for explanatory report­ing. She lives with her husband and two children in Wauwatosa, WI.

Book preview

PART ONE

Part One: What Is Workshop Way®?

The WORKSHOP WAY®—Revolutionary Education

A revolution in the approach, process, and environment for education. Unique teaching principles empower students throughout their lives.

This is the story of a revolution in the approach, process, and environment for education at a very special school. It was a school where intellectual safety was a constant component. There was never a need to transfer a child for special needs; neither was it necessary to insist a child be medicated for hyperactivity.

In 1966, Ann Marie McMahon was a fourth-grade teacher at St. David School in New Orleans, Louisiana. One of her students was a boy who was repeating the grade and still doing so poorly that he received special tutoring at New Orleans’ Xavier University. His teacher there was Grace Pilon. The boy’s school performance began to improve dramatically. Ann Marie went to Xavier to meet Grace Pilon and to learn from her. Bolstered by Anne Marie’s enthusiasm, we both began to attend Grace’s weekly lectures and to apply these new principles to Ann Marie’s fourth grade class for the remainder of the school year.

Putting the System into Action

During the next year, the more challenged students from third, fourth, and fifth grades were placed together in one classroom, and Ann Marie began teaching this new approach. It was discovered rather quickly that the program was not meant for a homogenous setting where all students were limited learners. The heterogeneous (diverse) abilities were essential to students’ times of helping one another and working successfully in groups.

In the next year, while charting the previous year’s test results of the school, conclusions indicated an increasing gap in student achievement as they advanced into higher grades. The sole exception was in Anne Marie’s now-heterogeneous class. When test results were shared with the entire staff, all became aware that a need for change was obvious. With everyone on board, teachers were instructed for two weeks before the school year began and continued in-service was given during the year. We anchored our instruction on a singular goal: develop and maintain intellectual safety in the teaching and learning processes.

WORKSHOP WAY® uses content as a means for our students’ human growth.

Remove Barriers to Learning

Everything that caused children to dislike school was removed. There was no adult-sponsored competitions, no public comparisons, and no display of the best work by the teacher. With the lone exception of a single vocabulary sheet, we assigned no homework until junior high. An environment of freedom from fear of public adult reprimand or negative comments was instituted along with freedom of conversation while working and freedom of position and location for independent work. There was frequent freedom of choice.

There were choices to work alone, with a partner, or with a small group. There was provision for different rates of learning and different speeds for work completion. Underlying all those freedoms was the ability to address and satisfy inborn left-brain or right-brain preferences. Students began to live in harmony with their deepest needs as human persons: self-esteem, acceptance, belonging, adequacy, and competence.

It was a hot day in the 1970s at the St. David School in New Orleans where I first saw the WORKSHOP WAY® program in action. With no classroom air-conditioning and crowded classrooms for grades one to eight, I observed busy students peacefully doing their tasks. When teachers began to teach phonics and math lessons, I saw the teachers expertly and proudly engaging students—with rhythm, speed, confidence, and high student involvement.

—Mary Anne Dalton, CSJ, PhD

The boy who met with Grace Pilon remained committed to education and public service. In a 1998 letter to Anne Marie McMahon, the young man shared the following sentiments:

I started to think of the impact that you and Sr. Grace had on me. I was thinking that, with the exception of my parents, no two people have had such a significant or positive influence on my development and on my course in life than you and Sr. Grace. Without you taking time out to stop and get me on track with the help of the Workshop Way, God only knows where I would be today.

After WORKSHOP WAY® was put into the school, there were no more physical fights among the students.

—Barbara King, Teacher

The school operated in this fashion for ten years until successive administrators gradually changed the structure to implement other ideas.

Hurricane Rita destroyed the school and its records in 2005. The decision to create this book is a reaction to that loss.

Forty-five years of experience has cemented the belief that behavior is in direct proportion to one’s level of consciousness. Consciousness is raised by awareness, and any new awareness can change behavior. Awareness is achieved by exposure to new thinking, much decision-making, and choice. In addition, such activities as specially constructed WORKSHOP WAY® Puzzles, the Think Alert Card and Yes-No Cards are but some of the techniques which provide for a frequent change of thought. This, in turn, stimulates the brain and opens learning capacity. Each of those activities will be explained fully later in this book.

I see WORKSHOP WAY® as offering what seems to be missing in traditional classrooms.

—Mary Anne Dalton, CSJ, PhD

Benefits Abound

The focus of the school day is shifted from rote-based assessment of what students learn about academic subjects to a more holistic one: how to empower students with a sense of their own value.

The educational methods described in this book provide remarkable benefits for children, teachers, and parents.

Benefits for Children: Self-Esteem and Realistic Confidence Grow

Students develop mature self-management and decision-making skills. They often dramatically improve their interpersonal relationships and their love of learning through freedom of conversation