When time is drawing to a close, facilitators know that it’s important to be thoughtful about how to wrap-up a session. There needs to be some type of connection back to the main points that have been discussed. Today I’m sharing thoughts on who and how you may want to conduct the wrap-up.
The who is not just you. Instead, share this responsibility with the participants. Your role is to create the framework for them and then to connect their dots to your dots. Let me explain. To create the framework, you may use the learning objectives that were listed at the beginning of the session. You’ll share the 1st learning objective and ask the participants what take-aways they have from that part of the session. Repeat that process for each learning objective.
This keeps a narrow focus for the participants and provides more structure to the review of the content. Narrowing the focus to each objective allows you to respond to what the participants are sharing and do so in the order in which you presented the content.
As the participants share a take-away, you have the opportunity to reinforce that point or to clarify. In the event that someone misunderstood a certain point, this is your opportunity to re-state it. You are still driving the conversation and main points that you want to reinforce while hearing from the participants what they perceived as main points. This approach allows you to keep the audience engaged all the way through to the closing comments. That’s all for now – it’s a wrap!