My Personal Diary of Debriefing Experiences

This chapter has intentionally been included in this pocket book with blank pages for you to record key personal learning events as a debriefer, whether they are linked to model or exemplary debriefings in which you or your co-debriefer amazingly disentangled interesting learning gaps, closed a performance gap, or allowed for a difficult situation to develop through minimalistic environment orientation, misleading scenario briefing, or inadequate management of the learners’ input in the debriefing. These are learning experiences that you may eventually forget over time and are really worth writing down, so you may remind yourself in the future and share these valuable experiences with others you may eventually mentor to become the next generation of debriefers. We advise you not to write any names or clear identifiers in this diary as the learning diary should be more about the actual events rather than the individuals involved. The first section of this chapter is for this pocket book’s owner to describe who they are as a professional and as a debriefer, hence providing a context for their debriefing practice and maybe identify gaps. The second and third sections are the platform for a personal reflective plus/delta analysis of their debriefing practice encompassing all key phases for which they need to develop mastery to become a proficient and effective debriefer. In the fourth section, the book’s owner is encouraged to seek and document feedback from peer debriefers, mentors, and learners and reflect upon that valuable information to refine their debriefing practice, while Sect. 4.5 is the place to describe and reflect on key debriefer learning episodes. Finally the last two sections are, respectively, to write down newly identified and valuable debriefing references and resources but also provide cognitive aids that can help guide the briefing and debriefing phases of a simulation session.