ICONS User Manual: Structure of an ICONS Simulation

Debriefing

The debriefing phase is of critical importance to the overall exercise. During the heat of the exercise, it is often easy to lose sight of the overall process in which the students are participating. During this final stage, faculty and students have an opportunity to reflect on their experience and try to abstract from it useful pieces of information. It is at this point that the student should come to realize that it was not the information about a specific country which he or she gained during the exercise, although that was probably considerable, but rather the insight into the process itself that was the most important thing to take away from the experience. Three aspects of the debriefing phase are dealt with here: evaluation, group discussion, and the final paper.

While a formal, written evaluation of the experience is not absolutely critical, we have found that some form of evaluation helps to tie things together, to focus upon the successes of the experience, as well as to point out areas in which changes and improvements must be made. In combination with a pretest, such an evaluation can also serve the purpose of demonstrating areas in which students’ perspectives on their own country as well as the rest of the world have changed as a result of this experience. (Contact ICONS for a sample evaluation form.)

We have also found that group discussion is effective in highlighting key issues. During the course of such sessions, the faculty facilitator might try to focus the discussion on certain key issues or processes and to draw students out on their experiences more generally. In a debriefing, the facilitator will help the students to evaluate what they have learned through participation and relate these experiences to the "real world". The Appendix contains a suggested list of debriefing questions that we have used successfully at the University of Maryland.

Finally, we recommend that students be asked to write brief papers as a way of concluding the exercise. To facilitate various types of analytic exercises, the entire simulation community database is opened to all country-teams, so that they can read each other’s mail, and generally sleuth around in the system. They can do systematic retrieval of messages by keywords or subject. Thus, they may want to write a paper on the different ways they approached issues, the characteristics of crisis decision making, and the like. In addition, the students can also be asked at this point to apply some of the principles of foreign policy and international politics that were the subject of early lectures to the actual processes they observed in the simulation: how did the principles and simulation experience differ, was the simulation perhaps too simplistic or inaccurate, or are some of the theories and principles in need of modification?