Date: Friday, December 12, 2025
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hi! I’m Sheila B. Robinson, Ed.D., of Custom Professional Learning, LLC. I help coaches, consultants, and business owners create their own rave-worthy workshops and courses, and I teach my own workshops and courses on a variety of topics. And yes, I’m also an evaluator.
Conferences are great for inspiration and terrible for retaining what we’ve learned. We leave energized, full of fresh ideas… and weeks later, we find that much of it has evaporated. That’s not a character flaw; it’s just how memory works. If we want conference learning to actually stick and show up in our work, we need to build in a couple of specific strategies, namely, retrieval practice and spacing. These are two of the most powerful learning strategies we have that can turn “wow, that was interesting” on-site at the conference into genuine expertise and upskilling at the office.
Let’s start with retrieval practice, something I talk about constantly because it works (and yes, there’s a century of research backing this). Retrieval practice is the act of pulling information out of your brain rather than rereading your notes or slides. In the literature, it’s known as “the testing effect.” In life, it’s the “use it or lose it” principle. When we actively recall what we learn without looking at any material for help, we strengthen our memory connections and make future retrieval easier. The more we retrieve what we’ve learned, the more durable and long-lasting our learning becomes.
Spacing (aka “distributed practice”) is retrieval’s best friend. It means spreading your “studying” or retrieval practice over time instead of doing one big review session. Small, repeated check-ins with your conference content will outperform any marathon rereading session.
And here’s one more related tool that’s also wildly effective: the Feynman Technique. If you can explain an idea simply and clearly enough, without jargon or memorized definitions, so that a 12-year-old would understand it, that demonstrates real understanding for you. Teaching others is a powerful way to learn.
Yes, you can turnkey what you learned to your colleagues. But, don’t share presenters’ slides, handouts, templates, or other materials unless you have explicit permission to copy and distribute them. Honor the presenter’s intellectual property. Use your own words, your own examples, and your own perspective to teach others what you’ve learned.
Bonus! It’s a much better way to cement your own learning!
Getting the most out of a conference isn’t complicated. It just requires doing the work to retain what you’ve learned.
Take a few moments to do some retrieval practice for each conference session that’s important to you, and space out your sessions over a few days and weeks. Ask yourself (and for best results write down the answers!):
If you treat conferences not as “events” but as the first step in a learning journey, you’ll actually benefit from them instead of just collecting cute lanyards and swag.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.