Teaching is always fun and difficult at the same time. You meet great people and normally have a wide range of abilities and desires in a given group. Most artists (both instructor and student) have their own idea of what they think is good and important in a painting, but when attending a workshop try to paint like the instructor indicates even though it may be different from the way you paint. The idea is to understand the what and why of the principles they are using and maybe adapt the elements you like into your own paintings later. You should not expect to leave a workshop with your mastery suddenly doubled, but you should pick up ideas and techniques for things that will make you a better painter and, hopefully, simplify the process of understanding why instructors do things their way. Some of these might be as simple as arranging your palette a certain way to make highlighting and shading simpler. Maybe you will learn to use a new pigment or a special color mixture that you really liked. Maybe you will learn to make all of those initial color fields quickly during the block in. Hopefully, (my pet peeve) you will learn to leave white out of your mixes until is time has arrived.