Last week, I did some hands on workshops in new format — 2 hours! Normally, the shortest hands on session I’ll do is 3 hours, and I prefer 6 hours, especially for beginner podcasting sessions. But I thought I’d give this a try.
Well, I pretty much knew that with only 2 hours, I really couldn’t talk much or give any background — I’d need to do a very quick run-through of the software we’d be using and then turn folks loose to create.
I was pleasantly surprised that this format worked great! Everyone in the session jumped right in and created amazing projects. It was really a great experience.
One thing that made this work is that nearly everyone in the workshops had been in one of my earlier one-hour presentations (not hands on). This provided them the background that they needed, whet their appetites, and left them chomping at the bit to jump in and do it.
Lessons learned:
- As a facilitator, I don’t need to talk so much.
- People can jump in and create with minimal instruction and make amazing things in a pretty short timeframe.
- This is a great format for differentiating instruction in professional development workshops. It lets you work individually with those who want more instruction and lets others get busy on their own.
- Perhaps an optimal conference format is 45 or 60 min. presentation sessions in the morning, followed up by 2 or 3 hour hands-on sessions in the afternoon.