This document outlines the key elements of effective debriefing.

This blog includes important tips, frameworks, and activities to create opportunities for meaningful debriefings.

This article offer a list of 18 icebreaker activities from Professor Wendy Smooth and The Ohio State University with the goal of "building connections and starting conversations" (The Ohio State University).

This article emphasizes the importance of classroom routines in supporting student well-being.

This activity can be used in team-building workshops for the dual purpose of introductions and reflection. This facilitation tool is easily adaptable to different contexts, e.g., the activity can be used to facilitate discussion about participants’ progress in class research projects.

For this activity, participants will learn how to build rapport, make introductions, create connections, review names, and become more comfortable with each other.

This activity presents a method to encourage participants to study up on each other’s names, and gives them an excuse to ask and clarify about their names when given a few minutes at the start of the game to check in with each other and review names together.

This blog post suggests that icebreakers are often uncomfortable or awkward. As an alternative to the traditional icebreaker, Stanchfield  recommends beginning with rapport building and reflective dialogue with a partner or small group sharing activities and starting with simple, non-threatening — but relevant, context setting– questions or an object/picture/quote to use as a talking point. This allows participants an opportunity to warm up by interacting with just one or two others at a time before sharing with the larger group.

In this community-building activity, participants study each other’s names and remind each other about the correct pronunciations of their names. 

In this community-building activity geared toward workplace professionals, participants identify the competing values at their organization and propose strategies for achieving balance between them. 

In this community-building activity geared toward workplace professionals, participants analyze the cultural behaviors of others in their organization and identify positive cultural behaviors that they aspire to. 

In this community-building activity geared toward workplace professionals, participants envision a mascot for their organization as a way to construct some aspirational cultural values. 

In this community-building activity geared toward workplace professionals, participants use a MadLibs style worksheet to characterize what makes their organizational culture unique. 

In this community-building activity geared toward workplace professionals, participants analyze another organization's culture and identify the elements that they would like to either emulate or avoid within their own organization. 

In this community-building activity geared toward workplace professionals, participants characterize the stated values of their organization and attempt to analyze the organizational culture and values from an outsider's perspective. 

In this activity, participants build rapport and reflect on their interactions with others through a variety of handshakes. 

In groups, participants draw representations of what they learned during an activity. 

During this discussion activity, participants pass around a ball of yarn, twine, or string every time a person speaks. By the end of the activity, there will a web to physically demonstrate the connections made throughout the conversation. 

In this activity, participants highlight both the similarities they share and the differences between them. 

This activity challenges participants to reflect on themselves and their culture while learning more about each other. Participants are provided with a handout, and they write their name, a culture with which they identify, a key message that they heard from someone influential, and their role/profession on a piece of paper that will then become a name tag. Then, they share what they wrote with other participants.

This activity enables participants to understand the differences between individualist and collectivist cultures and identify which cultural behaviors align with this cultural value dimension.

In this activity, participants practice fostering openness as part of a team, develop comfort with ambiguity, implement a process-driven rather than product-driven collaboration, and engage in active listening as part of one-on-one communication. 

Much like the well-known concept of speed dating, participants will move around the room asking each other questions to get to know each other. 

Through this activity, participants develop greater awareness of others' backgrounds and learn to describe their own background in an inclusive manner.

In this activity, participants experience and discuss feelings of inclusion and exclusion and practice watching and assessing the behavior of others. 

Participants use this activity to develop goal-setting skills, resolve conflict or establish group norms, and reflect using metaphor and figurative language.

Personal Identity Wheel challenges participants to reflect on their identities beyond social groups and get to know others in the group. They brainstorm words that describe their personal interests, skills, hobbies, etc. and then compare them with others.

Social Identity Wheel challenges participants to reflect on their identities in relation to social groups and get to know others in the group. They consider identities such as race, gender, and sexual orientation and contemplate how those identities manifest themselves in different environments and impact others’ perceptions.

Spectrum Activity challenges participants to reflect on their identities and how they are perceived in different contexts. They consider identities such as race, gender, and sexual orientation and contemplate how those identities may be privileged in different environments and therefore affect their interactions with others.

These three tools can be used in conjunction with each other. 

For this activity, participants generate and share ideas for solving a specific problem or exploring a topic. 

In this activity, participants practice negotiating a win-win solution while learning how to manage conflict and competition. 

In this activity, participants reflect on goal-setting, create group norm agreements, learn to resolve conflict in effective ways, and appreciate the individual strengths and positive attributes of others. 

In this activity, participants assess how a person's personal appearance and culture influence our assumptions or biases. 

This activity can be used as a discussion starter between two participants, where they use their cultural value maps to identify the similarities and differences between their cultures. 

The facilitator will perform a mathematical card trick and then encourage participants to dig beneath the surface of the trick through asking questions. Then, participants will connect their curiosity about the card trick to intercultural curiosity. 

This activity challenges participants to interrogate stereotypes and recognize how individuals are unique. Each participant will be given a lemon and asked to closely examine it and note its unique characteristics. Then, their lemon will be mixed up with all the others and they will be asked to pick it out from the group based on their previous observations. Finally, they will reflect on how this activity relates to stereotypes.

This activity enables participants to share information about themselves, learn about others in the group, and actively move around the room and engage with others. It's a classic icebreaker that is easily revised with a specific group in mind. 

University of Michigan LSA Inclusive Teaching Initiative offers a variety of icebreakers that can be used to build community in a classroom setting.

In this activity, participants write short poems where each line begins with “I Am,” which will allow them to describe what’s most important to the formation of their identities.

In this activity, participants write short poems where each line begins with “I am from,” which allows them to describe their heritage using the details and memories most important to them. Through their poems, they can reflect on their own cultural heritage and connect with each other. 

This activity challenges participants to recognize and analyze their reactions to a variety of cultural values. Participants will move to various locations around the room based on their opinions about value statements read by the facilitator.

This activity challenges participants to build empathy and a sense of team identity by listening and sharing. They will ask and answer some questions that help them better understand each other as both individuals and cultural beings

Participants first write a short poem about where they're from and then share either with the entire group or with a partner or small group. 

This activity challenges participants to expand their curiosity about unfamiliar cultural experiences. Using a deck of picture cards, they will compare their familiar and unfamiliar experiences with others in the group to gain insights about cultural difference.

During this activity, participants will be asked to draw a floor plan of a house based on their own experiences and understandings of how houses are typically arranged. They will then compare their floor plans and discuss the differences between them. The goal is to help participants understand cultural differences in the organization of space.

In this activity, participants discover similarities between one another, discuss how we perceive difference, and analyze how we form groups and how our perceptions play into group-formation.

These questions enable participants to increase their level of curiosity about others and develop active listening skills. 

This assortment of buttons serve as conversation starters and help participants employ different roles and perspectives in a group. 

After passing around an apple and dropping it while saying something mean about it, participants will then pass around a different apple and everyone in the group will compliment the person holding it. 

In this activity, participants identify the similarities and differences across the group, as well as what makes each individual unique. 

This Thiagi activity enables participants to understand the benefits of forming diverse groups rather than flocking to individuals who are similar to them. 

This icebreaker activity helps participants become more comfortable with taking risks and sharing about themselves. 

For this activity, the facilitator writes icebreaker questions on a beach ball. Participants throw the ball to each other and answer the question under their right thumb. 

This Thiagi activity can be used as an icebreaker to learn more about the common personal experiences they share. 

In this activity, participants mingle with others in the room and find a partner who is different from them in at least six ways (beyond physical appearance). 

In this activity, participants pair up and ask each other 25 questions that develop deeper connections through the sharing of life experiences and intellectual/emotional positions.