What is Workshop Way®?

Workshop Way® is a System of Education

Like all San Diego parish schools, the prescribed content and curriculum of St. Martin of Tours follows California State Standards and our San Diego diocesan school district curriculum requirements. What is unique about St. Martin Academy is the system of learning created by Grace H. Pilon, SBS called Workshop Way®. Workshop Way® is a philosophy and method of teaching designed to meet the educational and developmental needs of all children. Through Workshop Way®, the required diocesan curriculum is organized and taught in a way that instills self-confidence, intelligence and a life-long love for learning in each student. St. Martin of Tours philosophy and goals are fully integrated with our instructional methods.

Workshop Way includes 4 major goals:

1. To satisfy the basic human intellectual needs:
• Inner order
• Intellectual safety
• Feelings of importance, of intelligence, and of power in management
• Ease in talking with peers and adults
• Willingness to admit what one does not know and then to ask for help
• Willingness to be involved in work by creative management leading to positive self-confidence
• Satisfaction in doing one's work without competition and without adult interference
• Willingness to be involved in group activities in order to be brave enough to live consciously
2. To sharpen sense powers:
• To see better
• To hear better
• To talk better
• To sense order and dignity in oneself and others
3. To develop basic abilities of learning:
• Opening up and/or maintaining learning capacity
• Concentrating on a task
• Being certain of what one knows and does not know
• Arranging one's order and sequence of movement towards finishing a task
• Listening intelligently
• Learning how to learn and how to think
• Making decisions for what to do and when or when not to do it
• Creating ways to handle negative consequences of decisions
• Thinking critically and with precision
• Evaluating own work
4. To grow in human skills:
• Initiative
• Responsibility
• Cooperative interaction
• Independence in work habits
• Ease in risking with intelligence
• Honesty
• Courage and foundational creativity
• Self-confidence

With Workshop Way students become successful learners because all students learn they can make mistakes and be wrong while learning, but that making mistakes does not diminish their intelligence. Students become self-aware and experience their own thought and growth.

Workshop Way works because teachers set up and maintain an environment that motivates students to full participation in both workshop and full-class learning sessions. Through this student-oriented environment, children can value themselves as important, intelligent and self-directed apart from their knowledge skills.

Teachers help fuse the feelings of importance, intelligence and self-direction with knowledge skills. This fusion encourages self-esteem, appreciation for the worth of others and a love for learning.

For more information about Workshop Way, please call the St. Martin of Tours Academy office at (619) 466-3241 or visit www.workshopway.org.