Case study: Using Mentimeter to support participation in larger seminars

Department of Philosophy
David Worsley

David Worsley describes how he uses Mentimeter to tackle the issue of low participation in larger seminars. He encourages students to engage in peer discussions and submit their ideas, summaries, and questions anonymously. He then uses the collated responses to structure whole group discussion and address key issues. This has helped him to manage the challenges of increasing seminar sizes. Students have responded well to the approach and it has helped him to facilitate more productive and focused discussions.

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Transcript

I was given some second year teaching and the seminar class sizes were so large - between 20 and 30 students - that the usual ways I'd get participation in class just didn't work. And I think one of the things that I did with the students was just kind of sit down with them after the second seminar and say, look, this isn't working like I know, you know, it's not working. I'm having a conversation with 1 or 2 of you like, this needs to change. Here's what I propose to do. We'll give this a trial run the next week if you like it, we'll vote on it, we'll keep it, or revert back to what we we're doing previously. And, kind of, unanimously, pretty much in every seminar group I ran, there was the preference to kind of to go in this direction.

The Mentis that I've been running aren't particularly exciting either. What I've been trying to do at the start of my seminar groups is just do a quick recap of what we did in the lecture so that all the students are kind of on board with the key elements, as it were, what it is that we're going to be focusing on. And then I just ask the students to chat with the person they're sitting next to about what they found interesting about the week's material, what questions they still have after the lecture, after the reading that they've done, after maybe conversations they've had with peers before the seminar group.

Once they've had a couple of minutes to have those conversations, basically to throw those questions up on a Mentimeter, which just allows for that, so everyone can see what everyone else has written. These are anonymous. And what I then do is group the questions that have been received together, so that when I answer them, I'm not answering like five variations on a theme, which is what was kind of happening previously. And I can kind of open conversation up when I see that different questions that groups have kind of play off each other, as it were.

So that's what I've been doing. And it's been in an attempt to try and make hour long seminars with 30 students more productive for the students than anything else. So it's not been bells and whistles. It's not been anything particularly fancy. It's just given the pressures that I have with increasing seminar sizes and limited amounts of time, this was the best way of ensuring input from all students.

So the point of the exercise when you do something like think, pair, share, it's really simple. But when you get people talking in pairs, they're actually saying something rather than just sitting there. And I can't be omnipresent, right? So I don't have privileged access to all the conversations, although of course I wander round and kind of join, join as I can. But that gets the vocalising kind of out there. Now the point of think, pair, share is, as it were, once you've had a couple of faltering attempts to express yourself, you'll be a little bit more confident when you come to a whole group discussion to then kind of say what you've said previously.

And in a sense, what Mentimeter did was remove the opportunity for vocalising - One opportunity for Vocalising, but not take it away completely, but at least meant that, um, the whole seminar group could feel like they participated and I could kind of bring together strands, right? So in some sense, I see myself as sounding a little bit like a, a kind of like a conductor at an orchestra, right? My job isn't to talk at the students. It's to try and facilitate conversation. And what I want to do in order to facilitate conversation is know where people are at, you know, see where, you know, perhaps misunderstandings align with other misunderstandings and so forth, and then try and get students talking to each other, as it were.

And this just helps in that facilitating process. I can just take about a minute to look at the responses as they come through. Once they're all in, start sort of matching where I think themes are starting to emerge, and then we can kind of go at, in that direction.