How can you design a workshop that is both engaging and practical for participants?

Know your audience and their needs. I don't mean, 'I'm Raj from Accra' - I mean here is a group of low-paid, inexperienced teachers who need to know how to survive and flourish - or a group of executives who need to explore a new perspective. Prior discussion with the audience, their immediate leads, their students, and the principal - all helps more than a survey if you listen. That's not always practical. So, at a minimum - you need to do your homework on the institution, use your imagination - and ensure your workshop is open-ended enough to allow you to fit it to the audience as their nature emerges. Apart from knowing your audience and understanding what's at the heart of their needs, you need to tailor workshops as they unfold.

This is the most crucial step. What is the workshop for? It is essential your workshop is customizable to the audience's needs, not sure out of the box training. I also find it is essential to consider the follow through of workshops - what is the audience gaining out of the workshop, and how can you effectively measure and track their progress?

Creating an engaging and practical workshop involves hands-on activities, real-world examples and interactive discussions to ensure participants can immediately apply what they learn with their students. Practicality is also key for effective skill transfer and long-term retention.

Designing a workshop that is engaging and practical for participants involves careful planning, a focus on participants' needs, and interactive elements to enhance learning and retention. Define Clear Objectives. Start by clearly defining the workshop's learning objectives. What should participants be able to do or understand by the end of the workshop? Know your participants' background, experience, and expectations. Tailor the workshop to their needs and prior knowledge. Choose content that is timely, relevant, and aligned with the objectives. Avoid overwhelming participants with excessive information. Use visual aids like charts, diagrams, and slides to make complex concepts more accessible.

Setting SMART goals is the first step. Developing suitable situation based activities aligned to the goals is the 2nd step. Getting the audience to engage in the activities and arrive at solutions within the set time frame - 3rd step. Consolidate findings from the audience and propose the next steps in collaboration with audience is the final step . The 4 steps listed above when completed successfully will pave the way for developing a futuristic innovative design thinking workshop aligned to the curriculum standards.

Identify, with the participants, what the vision and mission of their organisation is. Sinek's 'Why'. Bring up the subject of the workshop. Link the subject (e.g. teamwork) with the vision and/or mission through identifying (with the participants if possible) the objectives for today. Have them identify their roles in helping the community realise the vision/mission. Have them identify how they will have to approach the subject in order to meet the objectives and help realise the vision. With them identifying as much as possible, it avoids you having to guess at clarity. With them relating to the vision/mission, they find their personal way to align the meeting of objectives with their work and vision/mission realisation.

'The only use for standing in front to talk to a group of silent people is to give them something to think about and time to think about it.' The rest of the time you're helping to channel ideas, recording, coaching, listening, or waiting for them to work out their next steps. Oh yes, and challenging - setting differentiated challenges to the enthusiastic, the disaffected, the shy, the overbearing, the sages and the lost. My biggest challenges here have been a group who wouldn't talk - so they wrote (and did so wonderfully) and a group of old Soviets who had seen it all before - so I asked them where and why they didn't do it now! So, they engaged with bringing it back - and it worked even if an old Soviet educator got the credit for it!

It's not enough to just engage participants during the workshop; we need to ensure that what they learn can be applied in their professional development journey. The abstract knowledge gained in a workshop becomes truly valuable when it can be put into practice. Offering ongoing support, mentoring, and resources for participants as they implement what they've learned is crucial. This way, we can guide them through the challenges they might encounter and help them achieve their professional development goals effectively.

A clear challenge they can relate to and meet, space to figure it out, the facility to support each other, and the reassurance that where they are going in the right direction - all lead to engagement for the next step and so on. It's not about you, it's about them. It's not about the subject, it's about what's useful to them. It's not about telling them things, it's about liberating their power to take those next steps and to be able to identify and take the steps after that - after you've gone. That's what's engaging on the best level. If you can't do it at that level, then entertain and smile a lot. Of course, you could do both!

Use the 'Golden Process' (Thorn, R. 2020) 1. What's the nature of the issue? How does it relate to our vision/mission? 2. What are we currently doing to address this? 3. What simple changes could we make to improve how we address this? What can we each easily do (what can I easily do in my role) to address this further? 4. What could we do that might take longer or be more difficult? What's my role in seeing that though? 5. What seems impossible? How can we collaborate to deal with that? People need a starting point - they need to leave your workshop with their minds whirring around organising how they are going to practically take the next steps they have come up with in the workshop and knowing that it fits in with the big picture.

Develop an involving environment to keep your audience immersed and engaged in your content that you unveil in your workshop. It can be through story telling, sharing real time life experiences, and listening to your audience perspectives over putting some interesting questions to them that well relate to your workshop goals and objectives.

One needs to keep in mind that workshops are designed mostly for adults, who mostly feel like they know everything therefore while designing workshops, the element of differentiation is as important as it is in a classroom. With differentiated content, one can capture the interest of all the participants and ensure maximized engagement. Also ensuring that a workshop is exactly that - a place where “work” is taking place, it is not a talk shop which unfortunately seems in many cases and that leads to bored and disinterested participants. Make sure there is something hands on or functional to give your participants a chance to exhibit their learning and experience it