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

Another big improvement is to stop using your phone as a clock and timer. We’ve already covered this in the previous section.

Workshop design task (10-20 minutes): Flip through your slide deck and search for slide titles which don’t say anything. What’s the point you’re really trying to make with that slide? If possible, promote that to be the title. If that makes the rest of the slide feel “empty”, then perhaps you can try deleting everything else and putting the title f

When it comes to intros, short is good.

finish the educational section of the workshop, wrap things up, and then continue with optional Lab Time for the participants who choose to continue working largely on their own, with a bit of help available if they need it. I sometimes use this structure in full-day workshops, where the hours up until lunch are tightly structured and educational,

Let’s review where we’re up to:

Before getting into the details of each, here are two overarching principles: The Teaching Format should “match” whatever you’re currently teaching The Teaching Format should switch at least every 20 minutes

For each S(kill) and W(isdom), try to come up with the broad strokes of either a “try it now” or scenario challenge, respectively. Without one of these hands-on exercises, you’ll be “teaching yoga with a lecture” and will have a very hard time getting these lessons to stick. (If you’re unable to find a suitable exercise, there are a few extra speci

And a two-hour workshop will usually be a single chunk, plus some optional padding:

To make better use of the natural hierarchy of a slide’s title and contents, the first bullet