The Magic of a Great Debriefing poster by Trainers Toolbox

The key to impactful learning lies in well facilitated debriefing – so Trainers Toolbox team decided to support you in making debriefings even better 🙂

Debriefing is definitely one of the most important parts of any training session or any learning experience.
If done right, debriefing is where the learning really happens – where conclusions are done and where participants form their experience into valuable lessons and learning. 
But it is also one of the most difficult parts to structure and facilitate, because it requires the trainer to be skilled at navigating the discussion without getting stuck in loops, but also the flexibility to deal with any strong emotion, unpredictable groups dynamics (being it too active or too quiet), unusual conclusions and learnings, or concern from participants. 
It requires the ability to build a strong trust within the environment, ask the right questions in the right moment and to balance allowing participants to draw their own learnings while still sticking with the learning outcomes for the session and keeping the discussion on track. 

In this “Training Activities Debriefing” visual we tried to present the most important aspects of debriefing to keep in mind, using active reviewing model by Roger Greenaway, through what we like to call the “4F model”. 
The important thing to add is that the review process should be done in an active way – the active reviewing cycle is intended to move people away from all-talk reviews.

A good review is far more than a recap of what has already been learned – so in the findings phase it is important not to stick just to the potentially rigid “What did you learn?” question, but use the review phase to bring out learning during the review itself, and even create new learnings within the debriefing activity.

According to Roger Greenway, there is an important aditional aspect to keep in mind: “Since creating this model, I soon found that people were using it in a routine way, which was a long way from the spirit of the model which was to encourage an active and creative approach. To emphasise this I introduced the joker at the heart of the model representing “Freedom”. This is intended to encourage trainers to be more responsive and to introduce more variety and life into their reviews.”

So, dear trainers, check out the active reviewing model, see how to use it within your debriefing (preferably in an active and creative way – let’s not forget that joker :)), or, in case you are using it already, take a moment to reflect how you can use it in even more creative and flexible ways and play with this basic framework and enrich it with your own experience and tools. 

Wish you a bunch of successful debriefings in your future trainings 🙂