The 4 Steps to Making Great a fun and interactive Workshop

Dear Reader,

Here is a general guide that can help anyone who wants to upgrade their workshops to be more interesting and fun.

At the projects I have personally led, I found out that facilitation almost always trumps teaching. Therefore these 4 steps are highly focused on collaboration. If your workshop is just you talking to people, its not a workshop, it's a lecture.

Let’s get started!

1. People must be engaged.

Nobody loves lectures, nobody loves presentations, nobody loves sitting and listening. If you want people to love what you’re presenting, every single small point of your facilitation must engage and include the people attending your event.

This sounds like a big task with a lot of responsibility, but actually, it can be quite liberating and remove some responsibility. Here’s an example:

My favorite quote from one of the nominees of the “Danish Teacher Awards” is:

I hate going to classes. Its boring and I have nothing to do. I plan everything to happen in class beforehand and I let the students do their own learning through my facilitation. I never get to play the games I make for them, and I’m only used for answering specific-knowledge questions the students have.

Leading a good workshop means removing yourself from it (almost) completely!

If you can facilitate an environment, game, or project where attendees do the learning themselves through your methods and facilitation you have succeeded.

You can do this, by using points 2 and point 4.

2. People must themselves realize the need for the workshop.

This sounds rudimentary, but it is the first most important step in rendering your project a success.

Facilitators often think that just informing people about the objectives and goals of the project is enough to engage them. However, people react better if they feel the goals of the project. This can only be done by letting participants discover the need and the importance of the workshop by themselves.

I once did a short workshop for the previous coliving space “Collective Dilijan”. The workshop was on something as boring as linguistics.

My goal of the workshop was to show (not teach) people how easily we can be tricked by language in general. To show this, I used Garden Path Sentences (sentences that initially doesn’t seem to make sense, but are completely grammatically correct) My structure of the workshop was this:

1. I prepared a PowerPoint presentation full of Garden Path Sentences and asked each participant, one after one, to come read one sentence out loud and sit down afterward. Of course, when they tried reading “The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.” out loud, they were stunned by how wrong it sounded and felt.
2. After everyone had read a sentence out loud each, I asked them: “what just happened?”. They immediately started theorizing about my trying to make them sound stupid in front of each other. Eventually, they understood that some of the sentences made sense; e.g. “The old man the boat” (the old people go onboard the boat).
3. I stopped the discussion and explained Garden Path Sentences and some basic information about their linguistic features and emphasized how language can trick. I concluded, that we sometimes have to be careful with what we say because it can be misunderstood.

If I had opened the workshop and said: “Garden Path Sentences are sentences which…” — nobody would have really cared. However, when they felt the problems that needed explaining first-hand they found it surprisingly interesting (beyond my belief).

I used the trick of making them question my introduction exercise which is a very effective technique.

3. Use metaphors

People say that metaphors “level the playing field between academics and non-academics”. This is true, however, metaphors can do so much more.

You can draw on general knowledge and wisdom which people can understand to explain and make people learn a complicated concept quickly. For example, the difficult concept of superpositions in quantum mechanics can be explained (and quickly understood) with a cat in a box.

With “understood” I mean that people get the concept of it.

Using metaphors saves time, energy, and frustration. Using them enables people to get somewhere and learn something about a complicated topic quickly and “skip” to the meat of the workshop.

It must be added: that people must remember not to do workshops on just “Quantum Mechanics”. A workshop on a topic must also include what we can use it for in our daily lives. Workshops are there to put tools in people's hands and to develop their lives in a positive direction. Workshops are there to solve certain problems. The problems? Let your participants find out themselves by using step 2.

If you want people to hear you explain something complicated and nothing more, call it a lecture.

4. Gamify it

If there are points, objectives, missions, and a general gamified environment people will participate actively.

Make it into a magic simulation! When participants arrive, announce:

There has been declared war on Bryinjuelf our mighty and beloved king! Only through reason and proving our own existence logically we can summon the mages of slægtstinden to get the upper hand in the war!

What an epic introduction to your workshop on the philosophy of Rene Descartes. (Rene Descartes proved his own existence logically but didn’t do a very good job) We can make a game out of understanding his philosophy and for every point logically counterclaimed, a new mage would arrive and increase the chances of victory.

You have an excellent opportunity to make introduce superpowers, unexpected game elements, class-abilities, etc. to the game to make it more interesting.

You can even completely infuriate the ancient school of thought and never even mention Rene Descarte’s name until the end of the workshop! People have understood what he’s saying, why does his name matter?

I hate the term “to think outside the box”. I like “think inside the game” waaaay better. If you “think inside the game” you create your own little universe of necessity and truth. This means that all those things you normally think are necessary to include (like a PowerPoint slide, the name of your workshop, or even mentioning what your workshop is about) becomes questionable! By thinking inside the game, you can facilitate things your own way (a new way — hopefully).

Thank you for reading!