A professional development experience that challenged my thinking and helped to improve my practice would be developmental workshops. Workshops are good for exposing people to new ideas, techniques and colleagues. By bringing together diverse groups of people who would normally not meet each other, workshops instantiate the notion of the strength of weak ties. Weak ties are mechanisms through which we learn novel information. Since we tend to form a strong bond with similar peers teachers who teach in the same school, we often know and share the same information. Workshops introduce teachers to new peers with whom they would not normally interact.