Feedback for Trainers

 

-This article featured in RECOFTC E-news in December 2006-

 

In this month’s Tips for Trainers we take a look at some ideas for obtaining daily feedback from participants during your training. These tips have been summarized from RECOFTC’s training manual, 'The ART of Building Training Capacities in Community Forestry Development', which is now available on the RECOFTC website.

 

Daily feedback not only ensures that the objectives of training are being met, but also provides participants with an opportunity to experiment with different ways of gathering, analyzing and sharing feedback. Participants can practice monitoring in a safe environment.

 

What is daily feedback?

Ending each day with a short (anonymous) feedback activity provides trainers, facilitators and participants with the opportunity of assessing on how the training is progressing, according to everybody involved.

 

Why bother?

Although experienced and interactive trainers might be able to get a general idea of the atmosphere by observation the performance of the participants, overhearing conversations and asking questions during breaks, it does not provide feedback of all and does not provide the opportunity to share. A daily feedback exercise enables the trainers to get an impression of the feelings and reactions of all participants as well as their learning points and/or suggestions. It helps trainers to assess whether the training is going on as planned and whether the results are achieved as planned. Trainers and facilitators can then adjust the present and future training programs to the extent possible in responses to participant feedback. It also helps participants to feel that their opinions and suggestions are important and that they are being “heard’ by the facilitators and planners. Daily feedback strengthens training design and increases feelings of ownership.

 

What is a daily feedback team?

A daily feedback team is a group of 2 or 3 selected people taking care of the feedback of a specific day. It is a good idea to have a different team each day.

 

What should a daily feedback team do?

The team is responsible for:

  • Being alert all day of how people feel, what they think, how they react, etc.
  • Choosing and preparing the feedback method
  • Collecting the feedback
  • Analyzing and summarizing the feedback 
  • Sharing feedback with trainers before the training starts and discussing what actions should be taken 
  • Presenting the feedback the next day and suggesting changes on the basis of the feedback is appropriate. 
  • Selecting the members of the next feedback team.

 

How to collect the feedback?

There are many different ways of collecting the feedback, the degree of participation, interaction and level of detail. The choice will depend on the purpose, the group, the available time, etc. The daily feedback takes at least 10 minutes at the end and at the beginning of the day, but can easily go up to half an hour if you like to do the feedback orally or discuss how to adjust the training on the basis of the feedback.

Encourage the participants to be specific about the what and analytic about the why. At the start of the training the participants may be very unfamiliar with daily feedback, but as you go along and they gain more experience in reflecting on their learnings and feelings they will become more analytic. Therefore, start with the - more easy to respond to - feedback questions and gradually move to the more analytical questions.

 

How to analyze the feedback?

A simple way to do this is to count the number or responses related to particular aspects of the day then summarize the responses. The count, the numbers or responses, tells both the trainers and the participants which aspects were of greatest interest of the participants and the summary of the comments tells more about the reasons.

 

How to give the feedback back?

At the beginning of the next day present a summary of the responses and comments. Invite people to react on the outcome. If the outcome includes suggestions it is important to explain whether the trainers propose any changes on the basis of the feedback and why (not). Do not include particularly negative or embarrassing comments directed at particular persons (participants, resource persons, or trainers). If there are a number of comments about a particular person, you may wish to discuss the issue privately with the person involved.

 

Ideas for Daily Feedback

The following ideas can complement more informal approaches of feedback such as observations, and individual talks with participants or ‘overhearing’ conversations between participants. Just as good research design includes different methods to study and verify a situation, good training monitoring should include a variety of learning to determine daily progress and moods. These monitoring ideas rely less on the spoken word and more on creative expression. Many involve using some art form to enable individuals and groups to express their ideas and feelings.

 

Such approaches generate data, which is complex, subtle, expressive and revealing. Groups and individuals often struggle to answer a direct question and may simple say what the trainer wants to hear. The more indirect way of using creative expression to gain information usually results in richer, deeper, more honest and complete information.

 

1. Words remembered

  • Ask participants to write down words which, for example:
    best describe what you have learned or represent the training experience so far

These questions can be followed with questions like:

  • why did you choose these words? Or can you say more about the words chosen?

 

2. Using metaphors to capture feelings or learnings

Ask the participants to compare the training with a meal and write down the meal that best represents the training experience so far. And why this meal was chosen.

 

3. Using drawings

Ask the participants to draw their feelings about the day and ask them why they drew this picture.

 

4. Complete the sentence

Display (or photocopy for each participant) open-ended sentences directed at the training aspects that you want to be evaluated, for example:

  • I find the training effective because...
  • The training could be improves by....
  • The facilitators could be more effective if...

You can have the participants answer all the questions displayed or choose the ones they would like to react on.

We hope you have found these tips and examples useful. For more information please visit the RECOFTC website for the complete 'The ART of Building Training Capacities in Community Forestry Development'.

Please send in any your comments on this article and suggestions for future ‘Tips for Trainers’ topics to tina(at)recoftc.org.