Make a habit of formative, forward-looking reflection.
When we debrief, we capture our initial reactions to an event, as well as your attendees’ reactions. Reflection gives us the chance to analyze those reactions further and to draw lessons from them about how to iterate our facilitation for next time.
Reflection should be a cyclical learning process. After each class, session, or workshop, you should schedule time to revisit what happened and how you and your participants felt at the time. Reflection lets you look for trends across events, as well, so you get an increasingly accurate and precise view of what works, and what doesn’t work, in your practice.
Over time, you’ll discover your “greatest hits,” as well as the shortcuts, dead ends, and traps you set for yourself. You’ll become better at meeting your learners’ needs because of the time you spend analyzing your work deeply through reflection. If your debrief captures the effects of your work, reflection give you the time to look for and address their causes.
To formalize your reflection practice, you should
- Schedule a time to meet with your team to review your debrief and look for patterns of learning across events you’ve facilitated together.
- Assign “homework” ahead of that meeting: everyone should review the debrief notes and post-survey results before your reflection meeting.
- Share framing questions for the meeting ahead of time.
- Set up a shared document for note-taking during the meeting.
You might use questions like these or create your own:
- Which activities seemed most engaging. Why did they work so well?
- Which activities seemed close to working? How could they be improved?
- What seemed most clear to our learners? How did we make it so clear?
- What seemed most confusing to our learners? How did we confuse them?
- Which activities didn’t work? Should we test them again? Drop them? Why?
- What should we do differently next time? Why?
- What should be our next step?
Answers to questions like those will help you understand your successes and failures in meeting learners’ needs. As you gain experience and refine your practice, achievements, mistakes, and surprises will become more and more evident allowing you to build on what works more often than you have to recover from what doesn’t.
Be sure to document and iterate on your process each time you reflect after an event. Reflection is another part of your practice you can record, review, and revise to make sure it positively impacts your work.
While we typically reflect after an event, it’s not meant to be a final, summative assessment of our work. Instead, reflection is the beginning of our planning process for the next event. It’s formative and ongoing. When we approach facilitation as a process of designing for trust, any step - even the “last” one, like reflection - can be the starting point for improvement.
Avoid using reflection to grade yourself or your learners. Stay focused on your work and what you need to do to serve your audience better. Learn from your successes and failures - you will always have both.
Reflection shows you how to approach your next event. Document what you’ve learned and use it to iterate
- How you document your work.
- How you get feedback from learners.
- How you work with your team.
- How you design for trust.
- How you show you care.
- How you make your events and activities more inviting.
- How you clarify and enact your beliefs about teaching and learning.
- How you teach and learn with different audiences.
- How you assess and learn from your work.
- How you ascribe success and failure to your big and small-loop decision making.
During reflection, you might discover that you consistently decide to press on with confusing activities in the moment. You might discover that learners nearly always want more time with this activity or that. You might discover that activities borrowed from another team outperform the ones you design.
In every case, there’s an immediate change you can make to improve your facilitation practice. Punt on a confusing activity, try a back-up activity next time, and document what happens. Cut a less engaging activity to give learners more time with an engaging one next time and see how they react in the post-survey. Compare your design principles and pedagogy to those of another group’s and adopt the features that make their lessons more successful than yours.
Learning how to improve your work is essential to meeting your audience’s needs. Reflection lets you improve yourself in service to others. Remember that each event is part of a cycle of improvement. Each one is a waypoint on your journey to become a better facilitator. Reflection connects them with one another in a progression of learning as service to others. Structure your team’s reflection as an intentional, formative way to kick-off planning for your next event.
Use this template to structure your next reflection meeting. Edit the questions to reflect the specifics of your last event and concerns of your team. Draw on your notes from your debrief of the event and the results of your post-survey to ask after particular activities and changes that need to be made.
Set up a shared document, copy and paste these questions into it, and take notes during your meeting. Identify what you need to change while planning your next event. Finally, list the next steps you’ll take to make that change happen.