Welcome. This resource hub was built on a single premise... An educational workshop is the best format for taking your expertise and transferring it to an audience that wants the same skill. Everything here is about building that kind of workshop well.
Everything you find here is written for coaches, consultants, and experts running client-based services where education is a central part of what you do. It is not for corporate L&D departments or similar training sessions. In-person or virtual, your workshop might be a single introductory session, a two-day intensive, a cohort that works through a program over several weeks, or an ongoing weekly session people keep coming back to. Those all represent workshops at different scales, but the same principles apply to every one of them.
Whatever the size, the default format has traditionally been a lecture model. Someone at the front explains, the slides move along, and the audience listens and takes notes. That covers a lot of material, but it does little to transfer a skill. If your sessions have run that way, that is not a failure on your part. It is the format that has dominated for a very long time.
If you already use workbooks, breakout sessions, or other activity-based approaches, you are ahead of pure lecture. That is a real improvement, but what usually gets missed is the learning science underneath those pieces. That science is the difference between an audience still receiving mostly knowledge and an audience developing a skill that leads to a desired outcome.
This hub is built to close that gap. It lays out the learning science, then carries it into every part of a workshop: how you plan and design it, how you build the activities and materials, how you deliver the session, and how you evaluate whether your audience can actually use the skill afterward. Each series takes on one part of that work, and together they give you a way to improve any workshop you run, whatever its size.
How to use this hub
Start with Foundations and read the four series in order.
Foundations
Most workshops are built to deliver knowledge and understanding, and participants are left holding the execution on their own, which is where the result your offer promises falls apart. How you teach, coach, or run a session either hits the sweet spot of how people learn or it misses that mark. The real question is whether what you do in the room serves how people learn best. Foundations covers the eight principles that answer that question, so the skill gets built in the room instead of left for later. When those principles shape your workshop, clients leave able to do the thing, not just understand it, and people who get the result come back for more.
The Roadmap
Plan, design, develop, deliver, and evaluate are the five phases our Roadmap follows. The phases themselves are not where the value is. It is in what you do inside each phase and the exact order you do it in. Skip one step and the workshop never becomes what it could be, the result your offer promises never fully lands, and the clients who would have come back for more, and paid for it, don't. The Roadmap walks you through every step in order, so each decision sets up the next one and the finished workshop delivers what you promised.
Active Learning
A session can be full of activity and still leave participants unsure how to use the skill on their own. That happens when an activity doesn't actually develop the skill, or when each activity moves on to the next topic instead of building on the one before it toward that skill. Active Learning shows you how to build the whole session around the work participants do, using methods such as problem-based, case-based, and simulation-based learning. Shortcut this and you pay for it in results your clients never quite reach, along with the renewals and referrals that come with those results. With the right method underneath, every minute of practice builds toward the exact result your offer promises.
The Activity Library
You may have a few go-to workshop activities that get used whenever it’s time for participants to take action. But an activity picked because it is familiar can work against what that moment in the session needs, and a mismatched activity is time your clients paid for that did not move them forward. The Activity Library gives you 31 activities, each with when to use it and how to run it in person or online. Pick each one by the principle it serves, and every block of your session moves participants a step closer to doing the skill on their own.
The methods and activities only work when you choose them from the Foundations principles, and that science is what sets this hub apart. Once you know how a workshop should run, keep the hub open and come back to whichever page helps with the problem in front of you.
Find the Gaps in Your Workshops
This hub is free and public. It covers the learning science behind Workshop Doctor and every framework, method, and activity we actually use. We hope that it brings you value.
Workshop Doctor also offers a platform and service that makes running workshops easier and faster, and makes sure you’re doing everything taught in this hub properly. To get started, we encourage you to take advantage of our FREE Workshop Health Check. It’s six open-ended questions and takes less than 10 minutes to complete. Upon completion, you’ll receive a personalized feedback report with 3–5 flags and actions for how to make immediate improvements. Then, if you want direct help, options will be presented.