Set yourself up for a successful debrief before an event begins.
Make sure to prepare a post-event survey for your audience ahead of your event. You’ll want to have this survey in-hand, so to speak, and to schedule time for participants to complete it before they leave your class, session, or workshop. While you’ll bring your own experiences and insights to the debrief process, it’s most important to know what you’re audience members think about your work. Did you meet their needs? Did they leave feeling like they learned something? Do they feel mostly confident or mostly frustrated?
In some cases, you audience’s feedback will match what you think; in other cases, you’ll be surprised. For example, you might want to cut a new activity that failed while your audience members report that they want to see it developed further because of its potential.
Whenever you can, try to align your post-event survey with any pre-event survey you send to your participants. You can repeat or slightly change many of the same questions to find out whether or not attendees think they grew or learned new concepts and skills as a result of your facilitation.
Here’s an example of a post-survey from a web literacy training run by Mozilla:
It’s not uncommon to see results “drop” in a post-survey if your class, session, or workshop helps learners get a more accurate view of their competencies than they had before. However, generally, repeating questions like these and then following up with questions about the training itself lets you see how participants feel about what - and how much - they learned. The questions in the last half of the post-event survey invite participants to rate the effectiveness of your facilitation to give you a more complete picture of their experiences throughout the day.
Following the model above, and working with Google Forms or another survey tool like Survey Monkey, create a post-event survey that will help you debrief and reflect after an event.
If you also sent out a pre-event survey, be sure to repeat and align some questions so you can get an idea of learners’ growth as a result of your class, session, or workshop.
Be sure to ask questions about the even and your facilitation, as well, to get a fuller picture of participants’ experiences, and invite them to make suggestions about how to improve your work for next time.
The big idea is to end with a dataset that helps you iterate and improve your facilitation in response to explicit feedback from your learners about how well you met their needs