GUIDELINES FOR CREATING AND IMPLEMENTING EFFECTIVE WORKSHOPS

Premise: The main difference between a workshop and other types of presentations (lectures,
symposia, etc) is that audience members expect to do something and often undertake several
different activities during the workshop session. Workshops are intentionally highly interactive and
usually focus on developing and/or refining specific skills or behaviors (teaching skills,
communication skills, procedural skills).

What follows is not an exhaustive review but rather a brief summary of effective strategies for
running workshops drawn from instructional design principles, literature on experiential learning and
our experiences in facilitating workshops. Many of you are probably familiar with these ideas and
this guide can serve as a reminder of components to include in creating effective workshops.

WORKSHOP PREPARATION:

 Clearly define your goals and objectives:

- What is the purpose of the workshop and what specific knowledge, attitude and skills do you
want participants to gain? Objectives can guide your choice of activities and provide a
framework for what you will cover in the workshop.

 Plan your time and activities carefully:

- All activities including formal presentation/lecture components should be assessed in relation
to how they contribute to achieving your objectives.
- Varying the types of activities during the workshop can keep people engaged and reinforce
reflection, change and development of different attitudes and skills.
- Estimating the time each activity will take in the planning stage, including time for moving in
and out of small groups, will help the session run smoothly.
- If you have more than one facilitator, clearly define what each person will do and when. It is
useful to appoint a timekeeper.
- Be prepared to be flexible: audience interest, discussion and responses to activities may
require you to condense, drop or adjust certain activities.

 Visit the workshop setting prior to the beginning of the workshop:

- Room layout: Ensure if possible that the room is set up to be conducive to an interactive
workshop. It is useful to have seating arranged so people can see each other rather than a
lecture-hall style. If you plan to break into smaller groups, make sure chairs can move and
there is enough room for groups to work without interfering with each other.
- Equipment: Check that audio-visual and other equipment that you need is available and
compatible with materials you are using. Check videos and other tools before workshop
participants arrive. Have back-up such as paper copies in case the audiovisual equipment
does not work.

WORKSHOP STRUCTURE:

 Setting the stage (no particular order)

- Introductions: Introduce workshop facilitators, topic, objectives and format, helping the
audience understand what the session will entail. Let them know your intention to run an
interactive session where participants can learn from each other. For some workshops the
agenda may be left flexible depending on the interests and goals of the audience.
- Get to know your audience: Use methods to discover who is in the room based on number of
people and the amount of time you have. Though it takes more time, you can have
members introduce themselves or identify what they hope to learn, emphasizing brevity. A
more time efficient method is to ask for a show of hands based on prompts about
themselves such as discipline/field, interests or experience.
 Workshop strategies (no particular order)
A wide variety of strategies can be used depending on your objectives. For any activity, make sure
instructions are clearly described including the role each participant will play within an activity.
Having a handout or PowerPoint slide with instructions can be useful especially if using complicated
activities, role plays or wanting people to discuss certain issues. Potential activities include:
- Reflection opportunities: Ask audience members to think of and/or write down ideas or
experiences relevant to the workshop topic (i.e. reflect on a difficult learning situation, or
challenging patient encounter). Eliciting audience members’ prior knowledge and
experience can facilitate learning and perceived relevance. Make sure to provide opportunity
for learners to share the outcomes of these ideas in pairs, small groups and/or large group
brainstorming or discussion.
- Trigger materials: Videotapes, demonstrations, cases etc can be presented to stimulate
small or large group discussion and problem solving. Asking people to write down their
reactions before sharing them can facilitate more widely spread discussion and reflection.
- Mini-lectures: More formal presentations in workshops can be useful for presenting
background, concepts and new information. They should be relatively brief to maintain the
interactivity and interest of the audience. Handouts can summarize this information.
Encourage questions and discussion.
- Generating frameworks/objectives: Following reflection, triggers, discussion and/or practice,
audience discussion can be facilitated to identify specific skills or synthesizing concepts into
useful frameworks that can then guide subsequent application activities and can apply to
their own professional practice.
- Application of concepts/skills: Giving audience members an opportunity to try and apply the
knowledge or skills you are addressing can greatly deepen their understanding and generate
questions and new ideas. Some strategies include:
o Role-plays: Participants enact written cases or cases generated from their experience
and provide feedback to one another on what they observe. This can occur in groups of
three or in larger groups taking a “fishbowl” approach where the role-play occurs in the
center of a circle of observers.
o Written application: Handouts provide a series of questions asking participants to
describe how they could apply ideas presented to a predetermined case or in situations
specific to each audience member (e.g. applying principles of curriculum change at their
institution)

 Facilitating discussion:
During workshops, facilitators often seek to generate discussion and brainstorming in response to
direct questions, reflections, triggers, mini-lectures and other activities. Strategies that can enhance
discussion include:
- Asking participants to discuss their response with another person first (think-pair-share)
- Breaking audience into small groups that report back to larger group after discussion
- Dividing room in half in terms of who responds
- Redirecting questions to the audience for discussion rather than answering directly
- Responding to answers and questions in an encouraging, non-judgmental, non-defensive
manner.
- Using respondents own words and checking accuracy when writing down ideas during
brainstorming

WORKSHOP CLOSURE

 Summarize and revisit objectives

- Leave some time to acknowledge what occurred during the workshop and reflect on whether
you accomplished what you set out to do. Encourage participants to reflect on what they
learned in the workshop either in writing, thinking and/or verbally. This can serve to
reinforce take-away points.
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 Feedback/Evaluation
- Ask the audience for feedback either verbally or on paper. This can help guide future
offerings of the workshop.