Starting a workshop

I've been approached by a few people from a meetup group and asked if I would consider an educational workshop. These are very novice DSLR shooters and want more instruction on basics and the controls of their specific cameras. The meetup groups don't offer much instruction, basically just people taking pictures,etc.

I agreed to do this and will start with one person on a one on one session. I am trying to organize the session and was thinking of doing a presentation / lecture first, and then some shooting in the field to reinforce the topics that were presented. Any comments on how best to organize this session?

I teach a local hunter safety course and we do our organization the exact same way you said. If you only have a few short hours then make sure you seperate your time. Sometimes rather than lecture then shoot, you could do some hands on lecturing to move them in the right direction quicker. Being that you're starting one on one show is always better than tell. So make the entire session a Lecture/hands on experience. After you've done your first one you can start a routine/breakdown of what you feel would be most beneficial then create a lesson plan from that. Just how I teach my classes here.

Every workshop I've been on was shoot first, share and discuss photos later.

@OP - For basics it probably makes sense to sit them down and go through a couple of hours of the theory. You'd need to get that out of the way to be able to then move on to the reality of shooting in the wild. If not you are going to get the same basic set of questions no matter what topic you are in .. will still get those but you can reduce the number of incidents.

I learn by doing so if I would've wanted to shoot first and talk later.

When I said shoot first I meant with the instructer by the students side helping them.

Yea that's the way to do it with a very small amount of students. So you can give them instant feedback on what they're doing. However if you end up with a class of say 15-20 things start to get a little bit more difficult. But as Bob said with one on one the way to do it is have them shoot with you along side them to give them the instant feedback that students need.d