Become a better speaker through peer feedback

Yoan Thirion
3 min readJul 23, 2019

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We often organize internal events like Brown bag lunches at Agile Partner and at one point we asked ourselves how could we give feedback not only on the content but also on the presentation skills of the speaker ?

We have created a new brown bag format to answer this question.

Usually, in a brown bag there is only 1 role : the speaker. We wanted to have different roles assigned in the group during this kind of event to :

  • Favor active listening
  • Learn how to give feedback
  • Help the speakers to improve

Jedi’s brown bag

The format is like below :

  • Talk — 15’
  • Questions/Answers — 5’
  • Feebacks — 10’
  • Reports from : Darth Vader, C3PO, Chewbacca
  • Collective debrief

With this format we have a collective debrief not only on the content of the talk but also on the speaker performance as well.

The roles

Find below the different roles we use. On each card you can find :

  • The name of the character
  • Its role
  • A short description of the role
  • The list of tasks to do during the brown bag
  • The purpose of the role for the person that will play this role

How to ?

At the beginning of the brown bag, each attendee can choose his/her role or you can assign roles randomly. The only one that is known in advance is the speaker role of course.

You can have several persons playing the same role, the debrief will be more insightful.

The prerequisite to use this tool is to already have a safe and learning environment.

You can download our brown bag Jedi’s resources here.

If you want to know more about learning organization and brown bags you can read this article :

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