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

Instead, your job is to provide your audience with a small, curated set of sharp, useful takeaways which meaningfully improve their lives. A workshop designer is a curator and deciding what’s out is as important as deciding what is in.

had started to design a workshop that did the teaching for me instead of relying on my personal performance alone.

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

the three crucial foundations of every good workshop: Audience Profile — Who it’s for Schedule Chunks — When they get their coffee breaks Learning Outcomes — What they’ll take away Or even more simply: who/when/what.

is “knowledge/skill/wisdom” (K/S/W), where knowledge is taught by lecture, skill by “try it now”, and wisdom (or judgement or decision-making or evaluation or whatever you want to call it) is taught by scenario challenges.

you’ll be taking responsibility for their energy and attention by designing the session in a way which continually renews and refreshes them. By

A slide’s title is its most valuable real estate and should therefore contain the most important part of the message. Here’s the text from a slide which has fallen for this trap:

We’ve already discussed the educational benefits of this (earlier

force you outside of your teaching comfort zone. Each of us has a “comfort