Currently reading Noah (2025) “Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education”
As you saw in my recent post on the first draft of my “teaching consultations menu”, I found a really awesome book on “Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education” by Noah (2025). Before I show you how I applied the book to a course I am currently planning, here are some more general thoughts on the book itself.
The book is focussed on formal group learning, specifically workshops and seminars (in contrast, for example, to individual learning in MOOCs, or informal peer learning).
One thing that I really appreciate about the book is its own focus on community building — walking the talk. For example, a suggested hashtag #TheWorkshopWheel to be used with social media posts related to the book to organise online discussions. Or (great idea!) a “facilitators’ lounge“, which are basically pages on her website that aren’t listed in the menu (and hence only accessible for people who have the link, which you get in the book) with an open comment function for people to share ideas and take-aways or ask questions. Love the idea! (And once I was on her website for the facilitator’s lounge, I also found a bingo card that helps building a network on social media by suggesting different types of accounts to search for and follow, I thought that was really great, too!)
In the spirit of community building, I also really enjoyed seeing all the shout-outs to other people’s work, especially since I recognised many of the names (like Echo Rivera’s youtube on “More than PowerPoint“, or the podcast list, more of half of which I already followed before reading the book (including the Tea for Teaching podcast, which is consistently one of my favourite podcasts, and where I first heard about this book and then bought it right away!), and the rest of which I follow now since it is clearly a list that resonates with me. Another shout-out in the book is to Karen Costa, whose work I have loved for a while, who is highlighted for being very clear about her scope of practice (I wrote about that earlier, too) and states that we can’t be everything to everyone, and therefore has set her boundaries to only 1 facilitation per week, and only online. That sounds like it would be a good boundary for me, too! She is also quoted with her philosophy of “Take what you need and leave the rest“, which is a really great approach to working in professional development. And, sidenote, her latest book arrived today, and I cannot wait to read it!
Another thing that I really liked was the “workshop toolkit“, an online collection of all the templates that are presented in the book. This really reduces the thresholds to applying the tools if you don’t have to first recreate the templates yourself!
Oh, and then it is really strongly grounded in literature, which I almost didn’t mention because that is obviously exactly the way it is supposed to be, but it’s not always the case and I really appreciate it very much!
Plus then there is all the actual content on designing and facilitating workshops, which I will pick up on in a future post.
So in a nutshell: This book is great for new facilitators who want to make sure they think about all relevant facets of facilitation, as well as for already experienced facilitators, who want to make sure they don’t fall into a slump, but get fresh perspectives. Love it! Totally recommend reading it!
Noah, T. (2025). Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education. Taylor & Francis.