Debriefing

From my reading of So What Do They Really Know? by Cris Tovani, I have been doing some thinking about debriefing. At the end of her chapter outlining her workshop model, Tovani cautions:

Make sure you don't skimp on time to debrief.  This crucial component of the workshop model provides an opportunity for students to reflect on their learning.  Regular opportunities to debrief not only hold students accountable for the way they use their work time, but also give teachers a second chance to assess what students need next.  Allowing students to collect their thoughts at the end of the period and share new learning makes others in the class smarter. The debriefing also gives the teacher insight into students' patterns of understanding and confusion.

Though debriefing is hardly a new component to lesson design, it it often overlooked as it occurs at the end of the lesson.  However, it is an important part of the lesson design for several reasons:

• it encourages metacognition
• it allows students to share their learning with others
• it encourages transfer and interaction with overarching ideas and patterns
• it is a type of formative assessment
• it guides upcoming learning experiences

From my own experience, debriefing can take a variety of forms:

• exit slips
• small group share out
• journaling
• whole class discussion

Tovani emphasizes the importance of monitoring students as they engage in the lesson and recording data to share with the class during debriefing.  These recordings could be notes about content or group process.  The problem with this, as even Tovani points out, is that the teacher can not sit at his/her desk and grade while students are working. Though Tovani does not mention in this chapter how she works around this, I am assuming (based my initial perusal of the table of contents) that she will touch on this topic in greater detail later in the book