Sharing Best Practices and Lessons Learned

You are, and the collections are weaker for leaving them out. A list of things that worked, with no account of what they were compared against or what was abandoned, tells a reader almost nothing about whether it would work for them.

What makes a practice account usable is boring detail: what the situation was, what was tried, what happened, what you would change. The last two are the ones that get edited out when a document has to double as a report to a funder, and they are the two a practitioner in another country actually needs.

A specific habit that helps: write the account before you know whether it worked. A note written at the time says what you expected and why, and comparing that with the outcome is where the lesson is. A note written afterwards reconstructs a story in which the outcome was always likely.

The funder report is exactly the pressure. Nobody wants to write that a strand did not deliver.

Then separate the two documents. A report accounts for what was delivered against what was promised. A practice account explains what a colleague should do differently. Trying to make one document do both is what produces the collections you have been reading.

It is worth being direct about one thing this project learned the hard way and put in writing: a strand of work can be delivered exactly as promised and still not do anything, and if nobody says so, the next partnership repeats it. Publishing that is more useful than another list of tools.

If you want somewhere to put the honest version, EPALE carries practitioner accounts from across Europe and does not require them to be success stories.