Our host teacher Tansuree Ghosh asked my Social Studies partner Kim and I to each conduct a Social Studies professional development workshop for social studies teachers here at Shri Shikshayatan School. Kim modeled the Paideia Seminar with the workshop participants. I chose to focus on Social Studies Inquiry with Primary Source documents and used the set of documents I had put together about colonial reactions to the Stamp Act. This was a tried and true lesson that I taught to my 9^th grade American Studies students and did as a quick professional development model for my colleagues at a faculty meeting last year.

Leading 20 Indian teachers through this lesson was really fun and engaging. Like my students, they were concerned that their responses to the prompts were correct and wanted to share their thinking with me. The follow up discussion focused on how to modify this activity in a variety of ways and how to assess student performance.

At the end of the workshop, teachers were talking amongst themselves and I heard some of the same comments I hear from US teachers, and have even said myself, at the end of PD sessions, “I don’t have time to do this, I already have so much to teach.”  “My class size is too large” “My classroom doesn’t have enough space for this”  “It takes too much time” and so forth. There are teaching challenges everywhere, there is never enough time, but we need to make the effort to try new things to benefit student learning.