I cannot emphasize strongly enough the power of reflection. Structured reflection helps participants connect theory and information with their personal experience and make it actually usable. In fact, research in adult workplace learning shows that efforts are most effective when participants are able to self-regulate their learning (e.g. see Milligan, Colin; Littlejohn, Allison and Margaryan, Anoush (2014) Workplace learning in informal networks. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 1(6)), and reflection is a key component of that regulation.

What follows in this post is a cycle of reflection we use at Spark Decks and that I really recommend you consider trying out. These questions can be responded to in writing, in pair sharing, or even in small groups if participants feel comfortable with each other. We supply a reflection Notebook that participants use throughout the engagement (and after the engagement is over), so you may want to consider providing a notebook or journal pages to help participants keep track of their thoughts and learning along the way.

Our process has four “phases.” During each phase, we ask a different type of reflection question:

1. Questions that help participants identify the current situation/issue
2. Questions that help participants process how the information being shared relates to their situation
3. Questions that encourage participants to evaluate which information/learnings are be most beneficial to their situation
4. Questions that support participants to “learn by doing” after the engagement has ended

1. Begin by inviting reflection that helps participants identify issues they are facing or gaps in their knowledge or abilities. I generally ask these types of questions towards the beginning of the engagement, once I have clarified the exact topic we are covering, but you could even do this prior to the meeting/workshop!

Here are some questions you might ask:

• What is happening now (what, where, when, who, how much, how often)?
• What is happening to YOU?
• What is happening to others?
• What are the effects of this?
• What is missing in this situation? What do you need?
• What do you think is the underlying cause of the issue?
• What would you like to happen that is not happening now?
• What would you like not to happen that is happening now?
• What do you want to achieve long term?
• What would be a short-term milestone along the way?
• How will you know you’ve achieved your goal?
• Is your goal attainable? Why or why not?

2. Next, throughout the meeting or workshop, pause to allow time for participants to process what they have heard or done via open-ended questions. The purpose here is to help participants make decisions about potential efforts.

Here are some example questions:

• In what ways does this relate to your experience?
• What have you already done/tried related to this?
• What else do you think you could try? What is still missing?
• What would work about this option/strategy/suggestion?
• What might be hard about this option/strategy/suggestion?
• What have you seen work in similar circumstances or in the past?

3. Towards the end of the engagement, invite participants to reflect on the bigger picture of what they are taking away from the meeting/workshop and what next steps they plan to take or strategies they will try out. This is especially fun to do as a mingle-mingle activity, where participants get to chat with several different partners and really work out their ideas before sitting down to write them out on paper. I find that doing it this way also really gets everyone’s energy up about taking action, which is the ultimate goal.

Some questions to prompt this could include:

• Which options do you think will be most successful?
• Why do you think that/those options will work?
• What are you most excited about trying?
• Which options do you plan to try and when?
• Do these options address the underlying issues related to your needs? How?

4. Lastly, I work really hard to make sure that participants continue to learn and reflect after their time with me. That is where the true learning happens. As I mentioned above, we do this by providing everyone with a Notebook that has spaces for them to continually reflect.

Here are some post-engagement questions to encourage people to reflect on:

• What strategies did you try and why?
• What worked about the strategy?
• What didn’t work well about the strategy?
• How would you modify the strategy so that it would work better next time?
• What did you learn through trying out this strategy?

Even if you don’t end up following such a structured use of reflection questions, I encourage you to try out including a few open-ended questions throughout your next event that offer participants an opportunity to consider their own reactions and place within the content. I think you will find that participants get a whole lot more out of the session when given an opportunity to reflect!