How many times have you sat in a team meeting where you are evaluating an area of the group’s work, and you walk away thinking ‘we just didn’t properly get to grips with that’, or where you question ‘did that actually help us move forward?’.
It can be frustrating when you outlay time, say 30 minutes (multiplied by the number of people in the room) to discuss and improve something, and it doesn’t work very well.
But improve, we must! Systems, events, lessons, feedback, assemblies. Our duty is to keep making improvements across the school so that the children get the very best, and so that we do meaningful, efficient work that helps staff both fulfil their remit and grow as practitioners.
It’s tempting to think that big flashy initiatives will drive our school forward, but over time, school improvement comes from all its teams regularly evaluating what they do, making small improvements, and continually checking in so that things are effective and efficient. These team debriefs are regular, focused, and always nudge something in the right direction; small gains, bit by bit. That’s a real superpower over time.
And to succeed as a team, we need to pool our expertise, ideas, and experiences. The problem is, these meetings or group situations can be quite messy and unsatisfying when not done well.
But fear not, there is a huge body of research on how to conduct effective team debriefs.
Let’s start with what often goes wrong in team debriefs:
- Not enough preparation – they are announced last minute, or during a meeting, which means that not only do team members not have time to properly think about it, but there is a limited breadth of evidence or data to consider
- Not enough intent – well, why are we doing this debrief? Is it to solve a problem, change what we do completely, tweak something? What are we hoping to achieve by the end of this discussion, and what’s next in this improvement timeline? Debriefs often go off on tangents or have no expected outcome.
- Lack of active participation – dysfunctional debriefs are often lead by one person, who does a lot of the talking and tries (wittingly or not) to steer things in a certain direction. The rest of the group often goes along for the ride, with the participation ratio being low.
- Debriefs are linked to an outcome – many debriefs respond to an outcome, or the end of something. But why? We can evaluate processes at any point. Waiting till an outcome means that we have an emotive connection to the thing we are debriefing about (and possibly therefore less open to objective discussion), and means we might have missed opportunities along the way to improve.
- Culture and climate – if your team has low levels or trust or psychological safety, then no matter how great your debrief structures are, you won’t have the level of honesty, discussion, and debate required to make the improvements you desire.
So how can we avoid these pitfalls?
Essentially, by doing the opposite of those things. But that’s an over simplification.
Tannenbaum and Cerasoli’s research found that regular, optimally facilitated team debriefs could improve team effectiveness by 20-25%. They recommended four key factors being implemented for success: active participation and self-learning by team members in the debriefs; multiple information sources to ensure all evidence is thoroughly examined; a specific focus for each session, rather than a generic ‘how do we improve the whole thing’ approach; a developmental intent, without blame or punitive overtones. They also recommend a structured approach which uses a similar format each time. I wrote about Team Debriefs a few years ago and included other research and structures used by different sectors, including the military.
Most interesting of all is that these effective debriefs were only 18 minutes long on average; they don’t need to take up an entire meeting and are perfectly placed to be integrated within existing meetings.
Ultimately, we want our teams to improve how they do things, and learn together as a group. A focused team debrief achieves both. It isn’t fancy or flashy, but it will add a lot of value to your team’s work, and, in turn, team members’ perception of the team.
“Debriefs help team members learn over time.
Chunk by chunk.
Eventually these small lessons will turn into a complete solution. This can’t happen in a one-time reflection event that happens at the end of the project.”
How to facilitate effective debriefs:
Intent and purpose in advance – we want our team involved, and to be involved, we need to feel communicated with and included. Make it clear what the focus of the debrief is, why we are doing it now, and what we hope to achieve form the debrief. Then ask what you want people to consider or do in advance. This means that the team will arrive with ideas and discussion points and you don’t lose time to initial thoughts and reactions.
Schedule over time and don’t leave till the end of the year: during a school year, lots can crop up unexpectedly that we have to attend to as a group. But we should still be strategic and map things out. We know our team priorities for the year and we know which things we are trying to improve.
The example below details a reading initiative that we have launched in September. For our team, this is one of the biggest bits of work we are doing this year, and we want to get it right. So from the outset we are going to schedule in debriefs as part of our team meetings for the autumn term. To ensure that we make gains in these debriefs, we have decided a focus for each one. We can do some general discussion of other parts of the initiative, too, but generally we want to keep our debriefs focused.
| Date (within team meetings) | Focus of debrief on reading initiative |
| September 25th | Clarify misconceptions; review basic processes for consistency |
| October 17th: | How are we using data from the reading project? |
| November 22nd: | How can we increase student participation? |
| December 14th | End of term evaluation |
Alternatively, when things do pop up, just give your team notice before the meeting. On Tuesday we are going to evaluate how we are making our pastoral referrals. Please bring along two things that are going well and two things that you think we could improve so that we can tighten up our referral process from an administrative point of view, but also so that the children are referred to the right service at the right time.
Create a familiar format and process: because our brains like to predict things, it’s useful for them to understand how things are done. If we create a set structure to our debriefs, which are well known to the team, we can then focus everyone’s minds on the content of the debrief, rather than having them expend mental energy on what’s going on during a debrief or how it will work.
This can begin like the above example, where you consistently ask for similar things before a debrief, e.g. what’s going well, what could we improve, what other comments would you make?
During the debrief, create a similar structure about how you pose the challenge, how you ensure participation from across the group to hear and discuss all views, and how you move through your options before committing to something.
Is everyone involved? It’s no use having a debrief which is largely lead, or contributed to, by just a few members of the group – usually the confident or experienced members. We need everyone’s views, because everyone in our team uses our systems! Think about how you can evoke genuinely open discussion among all team members. This might be as simple as doing something like Think-Pair-Share so that everyone has the chance to speak in small groups before we widen it to the whole team. Whatever method you choose, it’s important that the debrief, and therefore the follow up changes or plans, are representative of everybody.
Follow ups – what did we learn, what are we actioning? Are the wheels turning? Vibrant, productive team discussions are only worth doing if things move on. Members won’t continually voice ideas if it doesn’t lead to change. So, keep narrating what you covered, how it’s going to influence improvements, and then how it actually has helped.Celebrate the gains you make as a team and keep communicating with staff about what you have noticed since making these changes as a group.
Track changes and gains – earlier on I mentioned that debriefs often cover everyday systems and habits that we can improve. It’s important that, if we discuss and evaluate an area of our work and then put ideas forward for change, that we note down a few things: the challenges / issues we voiced; potential solutions; the chosen solution or tweak, followed by how this went in reality. Keep a log of how you’ve shaped things together or made changes, as it’ll be important to understand what has shifted over time; not everything will work.
Ultimately, if you want debriefs to be productive, they have to be deliberate. Not flippant. Not crammed into the end of a meeting. Not out of the blue. And they need to have a foundation layer of trust and psychological safety; discussion, debate and compromising have to be part of the team’s norms.
And then we get to work with lots and lots of debriefs to review big ticket items, but more often, all the day-to-day routines and systems of the team.
Keep it focused, keep it productive, and keep moving forward.
I am very passionate about effective meetings and debriefs, so please get in touch if you want to chat it through
Thank you
Sam
Sam Crome 