Debriefing sessions: Sharing recent learning among colleagues

Have you watched a webinar or attended an online conference in the past few months? I have, and so have many of my colleagues at McGill’s Teaching and Learning Services (TLS). The pandemic-induced shift to largely remote teaching, learning, and working has informed how we access information. Indeed, in some cases, it has greatly increased the information we have access to, as opportunities for learning that may have previously been out of reach geographically or financially can now be accessed online. With a finite number of hours in the day, it is not possible to engage with all the content we might wish to. But what if we could share our own learning and also learn from our colleagues’ engagement with webinars, online conferences, and readings? This five-minute video describes a “debriefing sessions” strategy for knowledge sharing that colleagues at TLS have been using. You might like to try it with your colleagues, whether you work at a teaching and learning centre, in a Faculty, or in another unit or context. This brief strategy aims to provide an opportunity for solidifying and sharing recent learning among colleagues, while building community, making connections, and permitting reflection.

What you share with colleagues in a debriefing session will depend on what you see as the key ideas from a given learning experience. Tools such as a conference notebook (Strage, 2017) can be helpful for focusing one’s learning at a conference and reflecting on the experience, prior to sharing that learning with others.

How do you and your colleagues share recent learning?