Gather feedback from trusted readers ahead of running your activities.
Before running your activities at an event, you should gather feedback on them from trusted readers and critical friends.
In addition to sharing your work with teammates, you should identify a manageable number of outside readers. If you need help finding outside readers, ask for help. You might
- Go to someone with whom you’ve worked before to ask whether or not recent changes have improved an activity.
- Go to a colleague with a strong facilitation network for suggestions of whom to ask for help.
- Go to a like-jobbed facilitator at another organization that has experience with work like yours.
- Go to any community members you’ve already recruited into a network of quality assurance (QA) testers on your facilitation work.
Ideally, your “readers” will be able to run your activities with a small test audience to let you know how they go. However, some people might only be able to read and offer comments on the plans you’ve written. Regardless, you can strengthen the usefulness of their feedback by asking specific questions about your work when you share it.
As a facilitator interested in improving your craft, you should avoid asking for general feedback like, “This is great,” or, “This could work.” You need to ask specific questions to get the kind of specific, actionable feedback that will help you improve your activities before you deliver them during a class, session, or workshop.
Whenever possible, try to get feeback from colleagues who can test your work - from people who can do the activity itself on their own or with a group. Furthermore, remember to shape that feedback by listing very specific questions as part of your ask for help.
For example, you might ask for testing and feedback like this:
Hello, [COLLEAGUE]!
I am very excited to be a part of our upcoming web literacy workshop at Library X. I’m developing several activities for the workshop, and I could use your help to test an activity about the structure of webpages. Would you try this activity with your learners and answer some questions about it for me?Here’s the link: [LINK]
Here are the questions:
- Does the offline activity connect to the idea of using nested tags to build a webpage? If not, > what’s missing?
- Does the online activity seem like it would be fun for an audience of teenagers who have never built a webpage before? How would you improve it?
- Which pieces of explanation seem unclear or confusing?
Please let me know if you can help. The deadline for feedback is the end of next week. I really appreciate your insights!
All the best,
[YOU]
If you have more time or a wider audience of testers available to you, work with your team or someone who does communications in your organization to develop a protocol you can use every time you have something to test. Come up with some boilerplate email templates you can send whenever you have new facilitation work to try out with your community. By approaching QA and testing in a routine and disciplined way, you give yourself the chance to build a community around testing your prototypes. So long as you act on the feedback you receive and your community knows that you’re listening and learning from it, you’ll also build trust and dependability into your testing cycle.
Building up a community of testers will also let you go to different people with different asks so you're not asking everyone to test everything all the time. Be mindful of what you've asked of whom, and of how frequently you make your asks. Strive to make colleagues feel valued and involved without burning them out by asking for constant contributions.
After testing, it’s time to iterate.
Iteration is the last opportunity you have to improve your work before running your activities in real-time at your event. You can run multiple loops of testing and iterating beforehand as time allows, but iterating at the planning stage closes the big design loop of facilitation and launches you into all of the small loops and decisions waiting for your in the moment of teaching and learning.
Take your test audiences’ feedback seriously and do all that you can to improve your activities before delivering them yourself. You may need to revise an activity significantly to answer the feedback you get or even cut an activity entirely if it just doesn’t work.
Not every activity you invent will be a hit. Focus your energy and expertise on revising and refining the pieces that your test audience thinks are most likely to succeed with your audience.
The feedback you’ve asked for is a gift, not an argument. It strengthens you; it doesn’t weaken you. Let go of as much defensiveness as you can and look for the truths that will help you do a better job as a facilitator.
Even though you iterate your activities before your event, some of them might still fail in different ways during your event. That’s okay. The point of iterating is to give your learners the best chance they have to learn from the activities and facilitation you design. No activity will ever be perfect, but big loop iteration before a session (and after, as we’ll explore later) helps position you and your learners for shared success.
Try to budget enough time into your big design and planning loop to make sure you can test and revise each prototype at least once. It’s okay to try out a new activity with your audience of learners, but you shouldn’t go into an event cold, so to speak, without any idea of how an activity might go beforehand. Your audience is trusting you to design something likely to work for them.
Go back to your prototypes from our last section of the facilitation curriculum. Pick one that you’d like to test and iterate. Identify 3-5 potential testers for your work. Make a copy of this boilerplate template and then customize it to ask your testers for help. Be sure to
- Share a link to the material you want tested.
- Ask specific questions that will help you iterate and improve the work.
- Provide a clear deadline for giving feedback.
If you have time, test as many prototypes as you can using the same process, but don’t overload people with your asks for help. Try to ask different respondents to test different activities.
After you get your feedback, move on to iteration.
Review the feedback and identify the actionable steps you can take to improve your work. Revise each prototype you test to incorporate that feedback and cut any activities that aren’t likely to reach your learners.
You may need to prototype another activity to replace something you cut, or you may need to create another resource or step to improve an activity you keep.
Keep working on your prototypes until you think each stands a good chance of success with your audience and then prepare to run them at your event, assembling any handouts and materials that your activities and learners need.