Sailboat Retrospective for Reflection – OneHE

Activity

Community building activities, Reflective activities

Sailboat Retrospective for Reflection

Maha Bali

Use this reflective activity to bring students together to talk about their experiences at the end of a project.

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ACTIVITY PURPOSE

To reflect in the middle or end of a group activity, project, experience, etc.

USEFUL FOR

It is useful for teams undergoing a similar experience individually or the same experience together, to reflect on what is working, and what is not, and to anticipate future obstacles, in order to work better in the future individually and/or as a group.

PREPARATION

Very little. Prepare your slides with the Sailboat visual. You can do a web search for copyright-free images or use www.canva.com, which has a collection of free-to-use images. Then figure out how many you need and how you will divide your students into groups to work on them. Share the slide links with your students.

INSTRUCTIONS

Explain the sailboat metaphor and four elements/questions which are:

1. Wind – what helps you move forward?;
2. Sun – what makes you feel good?;
3. Anchor – what holds you back?;
4. Reefs – what potential risks may you face in future?.

The activity can be done in two broad ways.

Option 1: Invite students to reflect on an experience or project they worked on, and list all they can think of under elements 1,2,3, and 4. If they are reflecting on a group project, each team can take one slide and answer all 4 questions together so they can discuss what has been working and what hasn’t.

Option 2: If they are reflecting on a similar experience but in which people may have experienced it differently, then you can have different spaces for people to answer each question – for example answering question 1, before moving to a second space to answer question 2, etc.,. In this way, people can see what the group before them has said for the different questions, and the new group can +1 or add new thoughts.

Bring the groups together and spend some time towards the end reflecting as a collective on all the answers.

DURATION

Depends on the group size and the similarities or differences, perhaps a total of 30-40 minutes.

ADAPTATIONS AND EXAMPLES

Can be done in person or online with breakout rooms. Can be done individually and asynchronously. Remember to use alternative text and not be overly dependent on the visual.

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

You can use any of the following: slide deck, Miro, Mural board or Jamboard.

USEFUL RESOURCES

Inspired by this Agile/Scrum/Design Thinking approach [Online].
Sailboat Retrospective by Johanna Torstensson [Miro, online].

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ABOUT

Educator prep: None
Student prep: None
Synchronous, Asynchronous
Shared online space
Duration: 30+ mins

This activity is one of a series of activities from Equity Unbound, focused on equitable online community building.

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