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

Imagine you’re an investor interested in high-risk, high-returns tech businesses. I’m going to show you four businesses. In your groups, you’re going to rank them from most investable to least investable.

Workshop design task (5-10 minutes): Create a full workshop outline by expanding your Learning Outcomes into a cluster of supporting arguments or key ideas.

Go through your list of Learning Outcomes and try to sharpen them as much as possible. Ask yourself whether this a clear, meaningful takeaway for the people in the room, or just a description of a too-vague “topic”.

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

Seen above, a full day (eight hours) divides beautifully into four chunks of 90 minutes, plus two coffee breaks, an hour for lunch, and 15 minutes on either end for folks to arrive and mingle. One downside is that an early start can lead to a strangely early lunch (0900 start means lunch at 1230).

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

Now, although the discussion’s question should be clear and specific, its answer should be ambiguous and/or personal.

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,

The first thing everyone does, upon sitting down to create a workshop, is to open their presentation software and start making slides. This is a huge mistake and will ruin your workshop by trapping you in the details before you’ve figured out the fundamentals.