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

If you’re running the Post-up at the end of a session, after you’ve already taught the core material, then the prompt would be more like:

In fact, nothing will maintain your audience’s energy as effectively as just inserting an ample break (i.e. 15 minutes

Scenario: You have a breakthrough technology with many wonderful applications. The technology is proven and works, but there are so many possible markets, customers, and applications that you really aren’t sure where to start. (At this point, I give each group a paper handout with full details about the technology and its possible applications).

Learning Outcomes are important. They’re the specific bits of knowledge, skill, or insight that your audience takes away. They’re the difference between what someone knows (and can do) when they arrive compared to what they know (and can do) when they leave.

Instead, you need to instruct your participants—explicitly and specifically—what they’re supposed to be talking about. And just saying it out loud isn’t enough, because they’ll inevitably forget and go off track. You need to write it somewhere visible (usually a slide) and leave it there for the duration of the exercise. Prompts don’t need to be co

Lectures (for delivering “book knowledge” and extracting takeaways from exercises) Small group and pair discussions (for wrestling with ambiguous options and personal implications) “Try it now” practice (for building hands-on skills) Scenario challenges (for building wisdom, evaluation, judgement, and decision-making) Question & answer (for cat

The first is that instead of expecting the audience to pay attention,

“What would you do if ______?”. This small group task would then be followed by class-wide discussion.

Often, during a lecture segment, you’ll use a bit of creative storytelling, metaphor, or examples. These narrative stepping-stones are excellent candidates for some