And also demands more testing to get right (see #5). In better situations, when the students are motivated and the exercises well designed, it can work well (but likely not as potent as time spent being coached in a small group directly by the expert).ĭesigning exercises for groups of people to work together is hard. In bad cases group work is a copout: the exercises aren’t interesting enough, or students struggle to work with annoying strangers who are too pushy or too passive. The common approach for large groups is to have people work in teams, as they at least get to be interactive with each other while the instructor is helping other students. Rule #2: The more students you have, the less of a workshop it isīetter workshop instructors make larger groups feel more interactive, but beyond 20 or 25 people the instructor is spread thin. Many workshops are born from lectures, which explains why those workshops are so boring. Instead of crafting a message for people to listen to, a good workshop is crafted to give students the opportunity for guided instruction in doing things. The skills involved in designing workshops are very different for this reason. A lecture has the spotlight on the speaker, but a workshop has the spotlight on each of the students. Many experts are bad at teaching workshops because they are used to lecturing.
If most of your “workshop” is people not actually making anything, you should perhaps call it a class, a lecture, or a mistake.
A writing workshop means students write things. A cooking workshop means students cook things. This means the center of attention should be on the students doing work, not on the expert talking about their expertise. The word workshop implies that work will be done in a shop like atmosphere. Rule #1: A 3 hour lecture is not a workshop Here’s my best advice on how run a workshop people will love. I watched many instructors run them and I know the common mistakes. They’re sold on so much promise, but that promise is often dashed as students discover their expert instructor is far from an expert at teaching them how to learn anything.įor years I was a workshop guy: I taught them, I studied them, I even hired people to do them for other companies.
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