The Workshop Survival Guide: How to design and teach educational workshops that work every time

“Try it now” is both incredibly powerful and tragically underused. The idea is simple. After introducing any concept which is even slightly skill-based, give the students a small task which allows them to immediately put it into practice in a safe, controlled environment, and under enough supportive restrictions that they can’t get too far off trac

Your facilitation needs to be right-sized. If you’re running a session for 10 people seated around a single table, you might want to take a seat yourself and to use a more conversational tone than you would when standing on stage with a microphone. On the other hand, if you have 1,000 attendees in a large event, it would be a fool’s errand to tell

This makes groups better for exposing folks to new perspectives, whereas pairs are better for tasks where you want attendees—all of them—to work through a problem or come up with an idea.

Instead of vaguely asking if anyone has “any questions?”, be more specific and encourage them to ask questions which are relevant to exactly what you just talked about (and include a helpful reminder about what those things are)

In his wonderful book, Anything You Want, Derek Sivers shares the following story of learning to sing from a great coach named Warren Senders: For each lesson, I’d bring in one song I was trying to improve. First, I’d sing it for him as written. Then he’d say, “OK—now do it up an octave.” “Uh... up an octave? But I can’t sing that high!” “I don’t c

This helps explain the mistakes of the live-sketching teacher. Although he started strong, the crowd’s goodwill eroded during the long delay between the big “a‑ha” moments at the very start and very end of his session.

My preferred solution is to begin by creating only the absolute minimum number of essential (or at least very high value) slides, and then cautiously expanding from there. These essential slides include: Summaries of your Learning Outcomes and supporting arguments Exercise prompts (instructions, rules, discussion topics, etc.) Resource lists (recom

Instead of doing one long Q&A at the end of your workshop, do a shorter Q&A after each Learning Outcome

Scenario: Here’s a menu marked up with the profit margins of each dish, the preparation time, and their popularity. The restaurant is losing money. Challenge 1: Evaluation: What’s the problem with the current menu? Identify the biggest issues in your groups, and then we’ll talk about it as a class. Challenge 2: Decision: Given the above, what would

But what’s the specific argument you’re making? What are you really trying to convince them of? What do they believe differently at the end of your session compared to when they first walked in?”