Around lunch today, we got together with a few of the workshop teachers on top of Table Mountain. Sharing notes and ideas helps to make the workshops’ content and style better, so that’s why we joined forces beforehand.
Building blocks
So how do we develop workshops? We first start by defining what we want the audience to learn. In my case, it’s “being able to add some custom code without breaking a website.” The next step is to list all different building blocks to get there.
Of course, not all of those building blocks are new knowledge. For example, we’re expecting that people taking the advanced track already know PHP and have a good understanding of development. So we bundle all the blocks that we expect will be prior knowledge and define those as the starting situation.
Logical steps
Next, we get to the steps of our workshop: we order the different building blocks that are left in a logical sequence. In order to build a WordPress plugin, you first need to know about hooks and filters.
Once we’ve defined a logical order, we finally ask ourselves: what could the audience do themselves? We have the tendency to want to explain everything, but it’s often better to let the audience try things themselves. So, how can we shut up as much as possible as teachers?
At the end of our workshops, we hope that you’ve learnt something new. Not just a bit of knowledge, but hopefully also some new skills.
Interested to see the result of this get-together?