The Workshop Survival Guide: How to design and teach educational workshops that work every time
von Rob Fitzpatrick
During your workshop: If you’re going to start late, tell people Intros should be short; the value is in your content, not you Stop standing behind the podium (use a clicker and stand at the front of the stage) Stop glancing at your phone (use a watch or classroom timer) Finish group formation before assigning a task; manually fix uneven groups and stranded individuals During an exercise, walk the room to listen in on students working When asking a student to share, have them stand and speak toward the crowd You can control a crowd by going individual To silence a distracted crowd, just start talking (in circles) or ask a student volunteer to share (borrowing goodwill) Nobody in the audience wants to be hostile or disengaged, so there’s usually a good reason which you can discover (and resolve) if you search for it Protect your breaks by hiding out of sight Finishing on time is extremely valuable, and often worth cutting content to achieve Most “bad luck” can be solved via either better preparation or by bringing along a co-teacher, expert guest, or helper When bad luck strikes anyway, shrug it off and find a way to continue teaching The morning of: Put a physical copy of your Workshop Skeleton in your pocket (including Learning Outcomes, section timings, and key exercises) Upon arrival: Visually confirm the room setup (and make any emergency improvements) Test the projector, clicker, wifi, power, and any other required equipment Close any extraneous computer programs (especially those with unpredictable notifications like chat, email, and file-synching) Mute your phone and, if using it as an exercise timer, change the settings so you won’t have to keep unlocking it to check the time Confirm that coffee and/or food will be available when expected
The “trick” is to write down a list of powerful stories from your own life and experiences which are relevant to your field: unusual case studies, humorous anecdotes, adventurous struggles, personal blunders and triumphs, etc. And then, when someone asks you a question, you simply riffle through this mental file, extract the most relevant entry, and deploy it in all its glory.
Workshop Design Task (5-10 minutes): Do a quick sanity check on the Skeleton. Does it seem plausible to teach those ideas in those amounts of time? If your content doesn’t seem to fit at all, try adjusting either the Learning Outcomes or schedule chunks. Or try reordering to see how that might affect the flow. If it’s still too crowded, you probably need to cut something.
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, and you lose them.
In fact, nothing will maintain your audience’s energy as effectively as just inserting an ample break (i.e. 15 minutes for coffee, 60 minutes for lunch) after every 60-90 minutes of content. Sounds simple, and it is. But you’d be shocked at how often facilitators scrimp on their breaks in order to bludgeon the audience with Just One More Thing.
Workshop Design Task: For each of your Learning Outcomes or key ideas, try to come up with at least one good discussion prompt. You don’t necessarily need to use all of them, but it’s useful practice to force yourself to identify the ambiguous, personal side of what you’re teaching, even for topics which don’t seem to be an obvious fit.
"During your workshop: If you’re going to start late, tell people Intros should be short; the value is in your content, not you Stop standing behind the podium (use a clicker and stand at the front of the stage) Stop glancing at your phone (use a watch or classroom timer) Finish group formation before assigning a task; manually fix uneven groups and stranded individuals During an exercise, walk the room to listen in on students working When asking a student to share, have them stand and speak toward the crowd You can control a crowd by going individual To silence a distracted crowd, just start talking (in circles) or ask a student volunteer to share (borrowing goodwill) Nobody in the audience wants to be hostile or disengaged, so there’s usually a good reason which you can discover (and resolve) if you search for it Protect your breaks by hiding out of sight Finishing on time is extremely valuable, and often worth cutting content to achieve Most “bad luck” can be solved via either better preparation or by bringing along a co-teacher, expert guest, or helper When bad luck strikes anyway, shrug it off and find a way to continue teaching"
"The morning of: Put a physical copy of your Workshop Skeleton in your pocket (including Learning Outcomes, section timings, and key exercises) Upon arrival: Visually confirm the room setup (and make any emergency improvements) Test the projector, clicker, wifi, power, and any other required equipment Close any extraneous computer programs (especially those with unpredictable notifications like chat, email, and file-synching) Mute your phone and, if using it as an exercise timer, change the settings so you won’t have to keep unlocking it to check the time Confirm that coffee and/or food will be available when expected"
"The size of your audience determines your tone as well as the technique you’ll use to get their attention. At a 20‑person dinner party, you can just say “Hey everyone” and you’re pretty much done. If someone is still having a private conversation, it’s easy to single them out and bring them back into the group. But not so much at a 50‑person wedding reception. This is why getting everyone’s attention by banging a spoon against your glass seems acceptable at a wedding, but a little strange at a smaller gathering. You need to use a tone and technique appropriate to the size of the group."
"Lessons learned: For hostile crowds, acknowledge their top concern then skip ahead to delivering value For oblivious individuals with irrelevant or overly specific questions, sideline them and then chat 1-on-1 with them later For disengaged individuals, figure out if they’re a spectator or are marginalized, and then either ignore them or wingman them For hostile experts, put them on a pedestal and include them as an authority in your teaching For implacable and highly disruptive individuals, talk to them 1-on-1, give them a full refund, and ask them to leave"
"Acknowledge: “You guys are obviously miles ahead of me in your lives/careers/businesses and have a ton of stuff going on that I wouldn’t even know where to start with…” Reframe: “...So I’m not here to try to solve all your problems or to tell you what to do.” Scope down to an area where you can add clear value: “But I’ve been obsessing over the question of X, and I’m hoping that if you’ll let me share the theory/skills/thinking/examples/etc., that you’ll be able to find a couple useful tools to bring back to your own worlds.”"
"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 front and center. While you’re at it, also consider deleting any “filler” images and stock photography which distract without informing."
"The five essential Teaching Formats are: 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 catching major objections/confusion and adding some flexibility into your schedule)"
- →Workshop Design Task: For each of your Learning Outcomes or key ideas, try to come up with at least one good discussion prompt. You don’t necessarily need to use all of them, but it’s useful practice to force yourself to identify the ambiguous, personal side of what you’re teaching, even for topics which don’t seem to be an obvious fit.
- →Workshop Design Task (2-20 minutes): If you’ve got a workshop coming up, do you know what your room setup will be? If not, who can you call or email to find out? Even better, can you visit it or see a couple pictures? If it has problems, try changing either the room, your facilitation, or the design of the workshop itself.
- →So, next time you’re tempted to schedule 20 minutes of Q&A, try something different by spending the first few minutes of it on a quick Post-Up. (You can also use a Post-Up at the very end of a session to collect testimonials and feedback as a quicker—but less informative—alternative to a paper feedback form.)
- →The other special quality of a workshop is that you’re able to coordinate what you’re teaching with how you teach it. Or in other words, you have the opportunity to escape the constraints of the lecture and start picking the styles of teaching and types of exercises best suited to the topic at hand.
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