Teachers and Teaching: A Teacher Learns in the Context of a Social Studies Workshop

In this article, Ginny Seabrook describes a year of "teacher research" in which she changed the design of her seventh-grade Social Studies class to a workshop format. Her role as a teacher was necessarily altered by this less autocratic method of teaching, and she found that, as an educator, she could continue to learn about teaching through the inquiry and experiences of her students. The atmosphere of the class became more relaxed; students began to ask open-ended questions and did not expect Seabrook to know the answers. In this personal account, Seabrook tells the story of how she came to see that she and her students were actually engaged in a parallel journey in which she could learn from their teaching as much as they could learn from hers.