Creating Inspiring Workshops and Courses in Transdisciplinarity: A Guide - Manual / Resource - Page 24
How much time do you have for the training?
You are likely to be restricted by time and, as a result, will need to further refine the outcomes. For example, if your
audience is very new to the TD research approach, you may want to give an overview of TD but mainly focus on the
personal qualities of being a transdisciplinary researcher. Your outcome in this instance may be to enable participants
to decide for themselves if they want to embark on this research approach, work with societal actors, build trusting
relationships, and integrate multiple perspectives.
Alternatively, you may have a group of people who are ready to launch an initiative and will be working with you for a year
or more in a series of workshops. In such a context, you will have the opportunity to teach new or refine existing skills,
have participants apply them, and come back to refine and share what they learned. In this instance, your outcomes may
be far more ambitious (intermediate or advanced).
You will have opportunities throughout the workshop when it will be important to share the purpose by providing an
overview as you start each training day or when introducing an activity. You will want to be able to answer the following
question for yourself and the participants: Why is this important?
Purpose builds clarity. It is very likely that your participants will use and apply what you are training them to do. You
want them to know when, how, and why a certain activity is chosen. You may have attended workshops where you were
puzzled, confused, unsure how to integrate what you just experienced. Too many workshop trainers reuse activities
simply because they were fun when they learned them. You can prevent that by ensuring that you add purpose to your
instructions for any activity. If you can’t explain the connection to the learning, you will know that it doesn’t fit or that you
have not adequately integrated the training activities with the purpose of the training.
You also want to identify the outcomes. What will participants take away from the workshop? You may want to use
Bloom’s Taxonomy’s Action Verbs to define the outcomes, such as: create, evaluate, compare, apply, recall, describe,
distinguish, select, rather than just thinking verbs like learn, understand or explore.
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Basics of training design
Outcomes
