ABSTRACT
HOW CAN YOU DEVELOP YOUR SKILLS AS A SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHER?
After ten years of high school teaching, I had enough of what was euphemistically called “staff development.” Periodically, we would be required to sit in the library or auditorium, sometimes as a social studies department, and sometimes as a full faculty, where we were harangued about the latest fail-safe directive from the central administration or miracle solution to the problems of urban education being promulgated by edu-businesses, university consultants, or politicians. To maintain my sanity, I sat in the back of the room and tried to unobtrusively do paperwork. At one point, Barry Brody, my department chairperson at Franklin K. Lane High School, made a suggestion that ultimately changed my career path. I had been doing a number of interesting projects in my classes and he suggested that I
could make presentations about them to the social studies department at staff development workshops. Because of my own dread about being lectured to, I made the workshops as interactive and hands-on as possible, and they were generally well received.
