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

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).

In a “try it now”, you tell everyone what they need to do. In a scenario challenge, you ask them to figure out what they ought to do. The former builds skill; the latter, judgement.

Q&A’s most gratuitous abuse is as a way to pretend that a long, dreary lecture is actually a fun, “interactive” discussion. This is extremely

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

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

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. Small group and pair discussions

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

The unspoken contract of a workshop is this: the audience grants you temporary control of their attention (and actions) in the belief that you will transmute it into something new and valuable. If you violate this contract by asking too much before returning sufficient value, then they grow suspicious of your authority, their goodwill evaporates, a

Every piece of lecture should be paired with an exercise which attacks the same topic from a more interactive direction.