How can we ensure that at the end of a workshop people fully appreciate the value of what they have experienced?
This matters a lot if we want participants to appreciate the progress that they are making, and it strengthens the prospects for sustainable change.
It may also build the case for further work for you, whether with the same people or via recommendations.
It’s easy enough to put up a slide covering the main points of the content, and that in itself may be a worthwhile review technique.
But a slide alone cannot reveal the nature of people’s experiences. As facilitators, we can do more to help people to make connections for themselves between the contents and processes of the event, and the meaning that these have for them. A key question here, for example, is ‘What will you now do differently?’
One simple debrief activity is to offer your participants ‘Footsteps’, in which you (or they) make an outline shape of a foot on a sheet of paper – one or two per person. They then write their first action steps or learning points, perhaps one for each toe. More pointedly, you could ask them to choose steps that will enable them to take the learning from the training session to the workplace. It’s their choice and their responsibility. And to further increase the prospects of sustainable change, see if they can find ways to hold themselves or each other to account, too.
