An after-action review, or AAR, is standard practice in emergency management: after an incident, the people who ran it ask what should have happened, what actually happened, and what to do differently. Ready2Respond borrowed the practice, and ran it in stages over about five weeks.
When | Who | Format |
Last day of camp | Students | Anonymous exit survey in the Student Activity Guide |
Week of camp | Educators and counselors | Debrief and written AAR forms |
After camp | ODF planning lead | Written memo of recommendations |
Three weeks after | Core leadership | Two-hour meeting; written answers to prompts, initialed; data from surveys and interviews presented first |
Three weeks after | Funder (PGE Foundation) | Conversation with the foundation’s staff |
Four weeks after | Site host (Knife River) | 23-minute debrief call, kept as a written after-action report: what worked, what didn’t, what next year |
Five weeks after | ODE tribal education liaison | Conversation |
Ongoing | Anyone | Shared log of people who offered to help next time |
The leadership prompts. The prompt sheet is worth copying whole. It runs in this order:
Overall experience: your reaction in one or two sentences.
Strengths and sustainment: what to repeat, and what leadership must not change.
Student experience: where students showed the most engagement; where they struggled, lacked support or tuned out; how far the camp met its learning and career-exposure goals.
Planning and communication: what worked; what was unclear, late or changed in a way that caused problems; whether roles and decision authority were clear.
Educator and counselor support: whether they had what they needed, and what preparation would have helped.
Operations and logistics: registration, parking, site flow, meals, lodging, bathrooms, showers, overnight coverage, supplies and transitions; and the bottlenecks that hurt most.
Safety, medical and supervision: PPE, heat, hydration, medical support, medications, supervision and emergency procedures; near misses and gaps.
Activities and learning: whether activities met the goals, and what to add, cut, shorten or change.
Disaster scenario and ICS: whether the scenario helped students understand the work, and whether the command structure organized the camp.
Future improvements: the three things to fix first, and which fixes need a leadership decision, money, an owner or an earlier start.
Final open comment.
What made it honest
Write first, talk second. Leaders answered in writing before the meeting, so the discussion started from individual judgments, not the loudest voice in the room.
Score things. A number out of five or ten forces a judgment that adjectives let people avoid.
Ask what not to change. One leader’s answer, keep the optional classroom schedule, is as useful as any fix.
Talk to partners separately. The host, the funder and the tribal education liaison each had their own conversation, and each raised things the leaders had not.
Document the debriefs. The team documented the host debrief in writing, which is why its details survive. No one can cut a meeting record into video, so book a separate on-camera interview for any partner you want on screen.
What partners said. The PGE Foundation conversation turned up what funders noticed: separate tracks for students rather than one focus, and the energy of the agencies, industry, volunteers and visitors. Asked about the students, the team described an energetic start, a mixed middle of the week and an energetic finish, and said one of the students’ favorite activities had been setting up the camp. Knife River’s staff said the camp had felt “perpetually six hours ahead,” that its own leadership had sent nothing but positive feedback, and that it wanted three things next time: build materials on site earlier, building moved to the asphalt, and the training center tagged in every post. They also suggested a convoy arrival, so students react to everything rolling off the trucks as they would in a real response.