How Do Adult Learning Principles Influence Workshop Design?

Adult Learning Principles Should Change Your Workshop Design

Years ago, I thought designing professional development mostly meant deciding what I wanted to teach and figuring out the best way to teach it. I'd think about the content, build an agenda, choose activities, and make sure I had enough material to fill the time.

I think about workshop design very differently now.

Today, when I'm planning professional learning, I spend much more time thinking about what participants will be doing. Where will they connect new ideas to something they already know? When will they have a chance to talk through something complicated? What will they practice? Where do they have choices? When will they reflect?

Those questions come from what we know about adult learning.

Adults bring knowledge, experiences, beliefs, emotions, and expertise into every learning space. They want to understand why something matters and how it connects to their work. They need opportunities to make meaning of new ideas, and when they're developing skills, they need opportunities to practice and receive feedback.

Those principles change the questions we must ask when we design a workshop.

Adult learning theory can sound, well, theoretical. I'm much more interested in what it means when I'm sitting down with a blank agenda and three hours to work with a group of people.

In The PD Book, I explore several things adult learners need, including relevance, agency and choice, connections to prior learning, psychological safety, practice, and feedback.

Each of those principles should influence what happens in a workshop.

If adults need relevance, I need to help participants understand why we're doing this.

If adults bring experience and knowledge, I need to create opportunities for them to use it.

If adults need agency, I should look for meaningful places to offer choice.

If learning requires meaning-making, participants need time to think rather than simply listen.

And if I want someone to develop a new skill, they need an opportunity to try it.

Here's what those principles can look like in practice.

Principle 1: Adults Need to Know Why the Learning Matters

Imagine arriving at a workshop, sitting down, and seeing this agenda:

• Welcome
• Framework Overview
• Small-Group Activity
• Practice
• Reflection

You know what you're going to do, but you still don't know why you're doing it.

Before participants need to understand the agenda, they need to understand the purpose. What problem are we trying to solve? What might become possible if we get better at this? How does this learning connect to the work participants actually do?

This is one reason I don't begin workshop design by asking, What content do I need to cover? I begin by asking what I hope participants will be able to do differently because of our time together.

That outcome gives the learning a reason to exist.

If I'm facilitating a workshop on feedback, for example, I could start by explaining the feedback framework I'm going to teach. But I might instead invite participants to think about feedback they received that actually changed something for them. What made it useful? What made it possible to hear?

Now we have something to investigate together, and participants have a reason to care about the ideas that follow.

Relevance isn't something you add to the workshop after you design it. It should shape the design from the beginning.

Principle 2: Adults Bring Experience Into the Room

Adults don't arrive as blank slates waiting for us to fill them with information. They arrive with years of experiences, ideas about what works and what doesn't, assumptions, questions, successes, frustrations, and expertise.

Strong workshop design makes use of that.

Let's say I'm teaching a group of coaches how to respond when a client becomes defensive. I could begin by explaining everything I know about defensiveness, but everyone in the room has already experienced it. They've seen it in other people, and they've probably felt it themselves.

So I might begin by asking participants to recall a moment when someone became defensive during a conversation. What did they notice? What did they do next? What happened as a result?

Now, when I introduce a new idea or framework, participants have something to connect it to. They can compare it with what they already believe, notice where it confirms their experience, and identify where it challenges their thinking.

This is an important shift in the facilitator's role. My job isn't to do all of the intellectual work and then present my conclusions. My job is to design experiences that allow participants to do some of that intellectual work themselves.

Principle 3: Adults Need Meaningful Agency and Choice

Adults generally don't like being controlled, but often professional development offers very little agency.

Everyone reads the same example, discusses the same question with the person sitting beside them, practices in exactly the same way, and completes the same reflection at the same time. Sometimes there's a good reason for that structure, but often we default to it because it makes the workshop easier to manage.

Agency doesn't mean turning every decision over to participants. It means looking for places where meaningful choice can support the learning.

If participants are practicing a coaching conversation, perhaps they can choose which scenario they want to work with. If they're reflecting on a concept, perhaps they can write privately before deciding whether they want to share. If they're applying a framework, perhaps they can choose a real challenge from their own work.

The choices need to be meaningful. Asking participants whether they want a blue or green sticky note doesn't create agency.

The question I ask is: Where can participants make decisions about their learning without compromising the purpose of the experience?

That kind of choice tells adult learners that we trust them to have some ownership of their learning.

Principle 4: Adults Need to Make Meaning, Not Just Receive Information

This is probably the principle that has changed my workshop design the most.

It's very easy for a facilitator to do too much of the thinking.

We explain the idea, give an example, explain why the example matters, answer the question we just asked, and then move on to the next slide. Participants may be listening carefully, but they haven't necessarily had much opportunity to construct their own understanding.

When I design now, I regularly ask myself:

Who's doing most of the thinking here?

If the answer is me, I look for a way to shift some of that cognitive work to participants.

That might mean asking people to analyze an example before I explain what I notice in it. It could mean giving participants a few minutes to write before opening a discussion or asking small groups to compare two approaches and determine which one they think would be more effective.

This doesn't mean facilitators should never teach directly. Sometimes people need information, and a clear ten-minute explanation may be exactly what the learning requires.

The question is what happens next.

What will participants do with the information you just gave them?

Adults are more likely to learn when they have opportunities to reflect, discuss, practice, and connect new ideas to their own experience rather than simply receive information.

Principle 5: Adults Need to Feel Safe Enough to Learn

Learning asks us to take risks.

We might have to admit that we don't know something, reconsider a belief we've held for years, try a skill we're not yet good at, or let another person watch us practice and give us feedback.

Adults are far less likely to take those risks when they believe they'll be embarrassed, judged, dismissed, or punished for getting something wrong.

This means psychological safety isn't separate from workshop design. It influences whether the design will work.

Imagine I want participants to practice giving difficult feedback. I could introduce the skill and immediately pair people up for a role-play. But if participants barely know one another and I haven't established enough trust, I may be asking for a level of vulnerability the room isn't ready for.

I could design a progression instead. Participants might first analyze a sample conversation, then practice revising one line of feedback, then observe a demonstration, and finally practice a conversation themselves.

The skill is the same. The learning experience is different because I've considered what participants might need before they're ready to take the biggest risk.

Trust is built through dozens of decisions like this: how participants are welcomed, how disagreement is handled, whether mistakes are treated as part of learning, and whether people experience genuine respect from the facilitator and one another.

Principle 6: Adults Need Opportunities to Practice

Imagine attending a six-hour workshop on facilitation where the facilitator explains how to ask strong questions, respond to resistance, give clear directions, and navigate difficult moments.

You take great notes. You understand the ideas.

But you never practice facilitating anything.

How prepared would you feel to use those skills the next day?

Understanding something and being able to do it are different.

If the intended outcome of professional development involves a skill, participants need an opportunity to practice that skill.

This sounds obvious, but practice is often the first thing to get cut when an agenda gets crowded. We have so much content we want participants to know that we keep teaching until there are twenty minutes left and say, "We'll skip the practice so we can finish."

I'd rather teach less and give people time to use what they learned.

Practice doesn't guarantee mastery, especially in a single workshop. But it give participants a first experience with the skill while they still have support, and that makes it much more likely that they'll try it again after they leave.

Principle 7: Adults Need Feedback

Practice becomes even more powerful when participants receive useful feedback.

If I'm learning to facilitate a discussion, I may have very little awareness of how often I interrupt people, whether my directions are clear, or what happens to my body language when someone disagrees with me. Another person may notice something I can't yet see.

That means feedback should be part of the learning design, not something we tack onto the end if there's time.

When I include practice, I think about what participants should pay attention to and what kind of feedback would actually help. "Good job!" isn't particularly useful, and neither is a long list of everything someone could have done differently.

If participants are practicing one specific skill, focus the feedback there. Give observers something concrete to watch for, allow the person practicing to reflect first, and create an opportunity to try again when possible.

The goal is to make feedback part of learning rather than a judgment of performance.

What These Principles Look Like in a Workshop

Here's a simple example.

Imagine I have ninety minutes to help a group of managers give more useful feedback.

I could design the session this way:

• 10 minutes: Welcome and objectives
• 30 minutes: Presentation on a feedback framework
• 15 minutes: Examples
• 20 minutes: Group discussion
• 10 minutes: Questions
• 5 minutes: Closing

There's nothing inherently wrong with that agenda. Participants could learn useful information.

But if my outcome is that managers will give more useful feedback, I'd design differently.

I might begin by asking participants to think about feedback that changed their own behavior and identify what made it useful. Then I could introduce a few ideas about effective feedback and ask participants to analyze examples using those ideas.

After that, they might watch a short demonstration, choose a real feedback conversation they need to have, draft what they want to say, and practice part of the conversation with a partner. Their partner could give feedback based on one or two specific criteria before they try it again.

We'd close by asking participants to identify where they'll use the skill next.

The second agenda may cover less content, but participants have connected it to their experience, practiced new skills, received feedback, and considered how they'll apply what they learned.

That's the difference adult learning principles can make in workshop design.

Adult Learning Theory Changes the Facilitator's Role

Learning more about how adults learn changed what I thought my job was as a facilitator.

I stopped seeing my primary responsibility as delivering information clearly enough that people would learn it. There are too many things I can't control for that to be my job.

I can't force someone to be curious. I can't make them reconsider a deeply held belief, take a risk, or use what they learned three weeks from now.

What I can do is create better conditions for those things to happen.

I can make the purpose clear, connect learning to what adults already know, give people meaningful choices, make space for thinking and discussion, attend to psychological safety, and provide opportunities to practice and receive feedback.

That's why understanding adult learning matters so much for workshop design. It moves our attention away from What am I going to teach? and toward a much more useful question:

What do participants need to experience in order to learn?

Key Takeaways

Adult learning principles should influence much more than the activities you choose. They should shape the entire learning experience.

Adults bring prior knowledge and experience into the room, so strong workshops help them connect new ideas to what they already know. Adults also need to understand why learning matters, have meaningful opportunities for agency and choice, and feel safe enough to take the risks that learning requires.

Most importantly, learning requires participants to do intellectual and practical work. Build time for reflection, discussion, application, practice, and feedback rather than relying primarily on presentation.

When you're designing a workshop, keep asking yourself two questions: Who is doing most of the thinking? and What are participants doing with what they're learning?

Questions I Hear Most Often

What are the most important adult learning principles for workshop design?

Adults need learning to feel relevant, connect to their existing knowledge and experience, and provide meaningful agency and choice. They also need opportunities to make meaning, practice new skills, receive feedback, and take learning risks in an environment with enough psychological safety.

How do you apply adult learning principles in a workshop?

Start by identifying what participants should be able to do differently as a result of the workshop. Then design opportunities for them to connect the learning to prior experience, think and discuss, make meaningful choices, practice skills, receive feedback, and apply what they've learned to their own context.

How much should a facilitator talk during a workshop?

There isn't a perfect percentage. Sometimes direct instruction is exactly what participants need. Instead of counting minutes, ask who is doing most of the thinking. If participants spend most of the workshop receiving your thinking rather than developing their own, look for opportunities to shift more of the cognitive work to them.

Why is choice important in adult learning?

Choice gives adult learners agency and allows them to connect learning to their own needs and contexts. Meaningful choices might include which example to analyze, what situation to practice with, how to reflect, or where to apply a new skill.

Why is practice important in professional development?

Understanding a skill and being able to use it are different. Practice allows participants to experiment with a new skill while support is available, reflect on what happened, receive feedback, and begin bridging the gap between knowing and doing.

Keep Learning

Want to go deeper? The PD Book: 7 Habits That Transform Professional Development explores adult learning and the other habits that help facilitators design professional development that leads to meaningful changes in practice.

Continue Reading

• What Makes Professional Development Effective?
• How to Facilitate Adult Learning That Leads to Lasting Change
• How to Design a Professional Development Workshop That Changes Practice

Explore Resources

Discover our collection of downloadable tools and podcasts to continue strengthening your workshop design and facilitation practice.

Learn With Us

Wherever you are in your facilitation journey, we'd love to support your continued growth.

• PD That Changes Practice: Learn how to design and facilitate professional learning that leads to changed practice.
• Art of Virtual Facilitation: Develop the skills to facilitate engaging, meaningful online learning experiences.
• The Facilitation Studio: Continue growing year-round through live practice, coaching, demonstrations, and a community of facilitators committed to refining their craft.

‍