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

by Rob Fitzpatrick & Devin Hunt

Need to run a workshop? Your attendees are trusting you with their time and attention. What are you giving them in return?

Most workshops don't work. They fail to deliver real results and they fail to keep the audience energetic and engaged. They're stressful to run and painful to attend.

Designing and running a brilliant workshop is easier than you think. It's not about flashy showmanship or natural charisma. Instead, it's about following a set of clear, simple rules for structuring and arranging the day.

Discover and use key design principles such as:

• Naturally refresh and maintain the audience's attention and energy by alternating the "teaching format" (e.g. lecture, small group discussion, hands-on practice) every 20 minutes and making strategic use of good breaks

• Dramatically improve your educational impact by choosing an exercise which is properly matched to the type of knowledge/skill/wisdom currently being taught

• Save dozens of hours by beginning your design process with a simple "skeleton" of Learning Outcomes and timings rather than jumping straight into slides and materials

• Finish on time, every time, by intentionally designing flexible "schedule springs" into your session, allowing you to seamlessly adjust to delays and bad luck, and to ensure that everyone learns what they came for without running late

The first half of the book covers everything you'll need to know about designing and refining the session itself. With a good design in hand, teaching a brilliant workshop goes from arduous to nearly automatic.

The second half of the book shifts from ahead-of-time design to day-of facilitation.

Learn the essential facilitation needed to solve unexpected problems and run a smooth, stress-free workshop:

• Reliable tools and tactics for crowd control, recovering attention, and shifting between tasks (without feeling like you're fighting against your audience)

• Clear guidance for picking the best room setup, and also improving a "bad" room to make the most of it

• Spotting and problem-solving the six major types of "difficult" attentees who are being either accidentally or intentionally disruptive (including the most common issue of bringing a hostile expert onto your side)

• Checklists and reminders of what to bring, what to do, and when to do it, in order to ensure that nothing gets forgotten, overlooked, or lost

At no point in the book you are asked to "put on a big smile" or "project confidence". That's fluffy BS which doesn't work. Instead, it will give you clear, concrete tools for managing a crowd and seamlessly guiding everyone to an effective outcome.