Practica: 12 Tips for the public scribe

As part of your teaching or training, note-taking for working groups is often done on flipcharts or whiteboards – and even blackboards. You or someone you will appoint becomes the public scribe for a working group. Here are a few tips from my own experience. Readers are invited to respond with best practices that they have created or discovered and add to this list.

1. If you are not the scribe, you may ask for volunteers or specifically ask or appoint someone to perform this task. In multicultural and multilingual groups, the appointee should be someone capable of clearly understanding and working with the diversity of accents and levels of language ability found in the group.Be careful to distribute this task in a gender sensitive way. It may be particularly annoying for scribes to be only women, or the only woman in a group of men. (Unconscious bias as to who is a secretary…?)
2. Be as ecological as you can, prefer an erasable whiteboard to using flip chart paper wherever possible. A whiteboard often gives you more space to work with than a paper flipchart.
3. Today it is easy for you or for group members to photograph the results of note-taking with a smartphone to preserve them or work with them. In some cases, if you are well-connected, you can electronically distribute pages as needed to participants smartphones or other devices, etc., in real time.
4. Some venues may provide electronic boards or other systems for notetaking and interactive participation. These are still rare in most places, but if you are lucky enough to have or afford one, make sure you have learned how to use it effectively before your program starts, and, when you must ask others to work on the system, that you can clearly and quickly explain to them how it functions.
5. When writing, use print letters rather than cursive, making it much easier for most to read, realizing that penmanship styles differ from person to person and culture to culture.
6. At the outset check the size of your writing with the most distant persons in the group to make sure that it is large enough to be legible for all.
7. When summarizing and recording points that individuals in the group make, use the same words that the speakers use wherever you can, and check with the speakers to make sure they are satisfied with the way you summarize statements when you need to shorten them.
8. Highlight new comments that others in a group may make about previous notes in the course of discussion, using a different color marker, underlining, etc. In a small group it may be feasible and useful to use a different color for each person's remarks.
9. When several groups are working on their own notes and they are being scribed, we often send groups to look at each other's work. In such cases, the reviewing groups may be invited to add ideas or comments to the work of the original group. If this is expected, make sure that the reviewing groups somehow signal their contributions by preceding them with the group name, initials, or number to distinguish them from those of the group that created the original work. This will help in further discussion and clarification.
10. Don't forget to record what you need and/or clean up at the end of the session or program. Make it clear that those who clean the room should leave the material untouched if there is a next-day session that needs it. In any case, record it, as those instructions may not be noticed or followed by cleaning staff.
11. As a matter of security, flipchart or whiteboard notes should not be left behind, particularly if the material under discussion is sensitive or confidential. There have been disastrous and costly consequences to individuals and organizations when these have fallen into the wrong hands.
12. Don't forget to thank those who perform the scribe role for you or for your groups. This is a special effort and deserves recognition.