Hello! Yesterday I gave my first ever workshop, about frontend testing principles. Lasted 2 hours and 20+ people showed up. I learned a ton. Here are the things I'll do better next time:
Only write bullet points of stuff I want to talk about and improvise more. I had notes that didn't help me because they were paragraphs.
Prepare possible questions people might have since asking "anyone has any questions?" doesn't seem to work. I think most people don't have time to process the info + come up with questions. Thankfully I had 2 very engaged participants in the workshop that asked questions.
Ask participants by email a few days before the workshop how much experience do they have with the thing I'm going to teach. I did this too late, and I had to change stuff the day before the workshop.
Prepare real life examples and stories of real life situations where whatever I'm explaining is used / helps. People will not remember technical stuff but will remember stories. I'll try to make these stories funny if I can.
Any tips you'd like to share?
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Top comments (8)
Hello Jordi Enric ,
Thank you for your article. In my opinion, these are very useful tips that I can identify with as someone who has attended workshops.
I can give you a tip that I hope will help:
Take an anonymous quiz on each topic you've taught your students. Simply collect the answers in percent. If you do this often enough, you will have a database that you can use to identify where students are most likely to have problems so that you can adapt your teaching. In addition, such a quiz could be fun for your participants. Offer your participants to take the quiz with them so that they can train outside of your workshop.
Thanks! That’s a really good idea.
Add memes, all developers do conferences and workshops to be able to put memes in the content :)
Now being serious... (add memes!) try to pass an anonymous test at the end with the typical fields of what you like the most, what you like the least, etc. feedback is important.
Thanks for sharing Jordi. I've been doing small workshops in front of a couple of colleagues to train myself before presenting in larger audiences
Thank you! I consider it a learning experience for me more than a teaching experience.
These are really helpful! ❤️
Did you record your workshop? Is it available online?
It wasn’t but hopefully I’ll do more and record them. Thanks for the kind words 😁
Glad you found it helpful. You'll be nervous until you get going and then it'll be easy! Good luck!