Make the debrief a routine part of your facilitation practice.
The debrief is your first chance to capture your thoughts after an event and in response to audience feedback from a post-event survey. Be sure to schedule time to meet with your team as immediately as you can after an event. You may need to clean-up or re-arrange furniture first, but debrief before your facilitation team disbands for the day or heads off to enjoy a meal together.
In the agenda you share with your team, schedule time for a debrief right after each event and make it a common expectation that everyone on the team will attend and contribute to it. It doesn’t need to be more than 20-30 minutes of documenting your perspectives on the day and reactions to audience feedback. It’s important to listen to one another, celebrate successes, and identify clear areas of focus and improvement for the future.
The debrief is the kick-off for planning what comes next.
While the debrief is meant to be somewhat subjective and impressionistic, you should structure it to use your team’s time wisely. You want to tap into the enthusiasm and excitement people feel right after a class, session, or workshop without going too long or wandering too far off topic.
If you are too open-ended in your debrief practice, it will be more exhausting than uplifting at the end of a demanding day of facilitation.
Consider a debrief agenda like this and prepare a shared document for note-taking on it:
- Sparkling moments (5 minutes) - What “aha!” moments did you see learners experience today?
- Plusses (5 minutes) - What went well today? You can include recognitions of your colleagues work here.
- Deltas (5 minutes) - What didn’t go well today? This is an opportunity for self- and group-accountability, not one for blame.
- Review audience feedback (5 minutes) - Ask your teammates to skim the results of your post-event survey and to make note of what makes sense and what seems like a surprise. Do this silently and independently, like an initial brainstorm.
- Share your thoughts (5 minutes) - Voice your reactions to the post-event survey results.
- Next steps (5 minutes) - When is your next meeting? What do you need to discuss there? What should you reflect on further before planning your next event?
Whether or not you use those specific steps, be sure to invite and record your colleagues thoughts about
- What worked.
- What didn’t work.
- What your audience shared.
- What should happen next.
After your debrief, try to head out and celebrate your event with your team. The camaraderie you develop with your team will show through during the events you facilitate together and help participants join in your enthusiasm for teaching and learning in community.
Make sure to protect time to debrief after your next event. Take some time now to
- Schedule the debrief.
- Create a shared document - like a Google Doc or Etherpad - for note-taking.
- Share a link to your post-event survey (and its results) so colleagues can make edits or suggest questions to add ahead of the event.