“Sharing out” is a crucial part of Action Learning but it can create significant  anxiety in students. As a response, the TEA team created this worksheet in their own classes for students to use when the time comes to present their research, their project, or their initiative. 

TEA also uses this worksheet when working with faculty. Faculty consult it to give them guidance for what kind of workshop or activity to create when we work with them in a TEA Learning Institute setting.  

What type of workshop will best showcase your topic?

Below the list of workshop examples are questions that you want to answer while creating your workshop over the next two weeks. Remember that we want to create an environment at this conference where we focus on the potential and knowledge that the attendants come with and not their deficits.

As always during this whole process, we would like you to capture your work in any way possible. Filming your process would be great not only because it is a great reflection tool but also because we can create something really powerful from it in the future. Please be sure that someone in your group takes detailed notes.

Workshop Models

There are two main types of workshops: Interactive and non‐interactive. While we want to make most of our workshops interactive because people are usually more engaged when we do, there may be some presentations that are mainly non‐interactive or some that are a mixture of both types. The following categories are not to limit what you can do. They are here to show you some possibilities and you can change their form to fit your ideas in anyway that you feel works.

Interactive:

• Incubating/Think Tank Session: In sessions like these, there is something that the facilitator would like the group to focus on. It can be a question, quote, issue, or practice, etc. The group breaks into small groups and begins to explore the focus they have been given. The small groups often share back to the larger group and by the end, each person has been able to work with the contant. These sessions often birth new ideas, new ways of thinking about things, and sometimes a shared understanding of something amongst those groups.  

• Focusing Partnership: A session like this asks people to get in pairs, sometimes trios. These partners are asked to be vulnerable to each other and share with one another what the facilitator asks them to. In these workshops, the facilitator (you) might choose to have people remain partners for the length of your workshop. You might also choose to have them constantly switch partners. These types of workshops focus on people exposing themselves to one another, being more vulnerable and willing to share. 

• Stimulating Workshops: These workshops often offer a taste of something powerful such as a video, theater piece, news report, etc, and the entire group would react to what they just saw. In this situation, the students are constantly going back and forth from experiences and learning. The facilitator usually starts out by offering a bit of stimuli that is big and then smaller each time. The practice takes the crowd from a wild response to a more refined insight about what they are experiencing. 

• Skill Building Workshop: The facilitator chooses a particular skill they think is necessary for their audience to have. They present the importance of that skill and create an activity that will allow the audience to engage in a hands-on experience. This type of workshop focuses on people coming out with an experience they can replicate when they need to. 

Non-interactive--Remember, they don’t have to be non-interactive:

• Journaling Session: Similar to the “Stimulating Workshops”, these offer an experience or stimuli and then the crowd is asked to reflect not out loud but by writing. This is often a good thing to do if you present a question that is too sensitive to respond in a large group. It is also a great way to give people time to reflect in any of the interactive type workshops.

• Briefing Presentation: A presentation like this is often used to present a new idea or practice. There can be some participation from the group but they are usually a more structured presentation with the goal of giving an overview of something particular. These presentations are best if followed by some sort of interactive break-out session where people can ask questions and brainstorm how to use what has been presented to them.


• Demonstration: This is when the facilitator(s) have created a presentation on the topic they want to focus on. Unlike the above “Briefing Presentation,” the Demonstration is where the facilitator acts out their focus. For example, a demonstration might involve a skit and it would definitely involve large amounts of interaction between the facilitator and the students but not necessarily between the students. 

• Expert Lecture: This is when a guest speaker comes and shares their knowledge on a particular subject. This type of presentation can be followed by something interactive. Students might be asked to do some journaling about the experience etc.