Case study: Using Mentimeter to support an inclusive learning environment in a seminar-based module

Department of Psychology
Thomas Davies

Thomas Davies describes how he uses Mentimeter to help create a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere for learning in the Moral and Political Psychology module, a stage 3 seminar-based module with 40 students. The module covers a range of potentially sensitive and politically-charged topics. He uses Mentimeter to uncover areas of potential bias and provide a useful lead in to discussions about ‘rules of engagement’ in the classroom to ensure that discussions are balanced, mindful and respectful of alternate perspectives. By incorporating Mentimeter into seminar discussions, he feels that he is able to secure a higher level of engagement from a broader range of students and that this allows him to pull in a greater range of viewpoints and perspectives than would be possible otherwise.

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Using Mentimeter to support an inclusive learning environment in a seminar-based Psychology module (Panopto viewer) (9 mins 51 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Hi, everyone. My name's Thomas Davies. I'm an Associate Lecturer from the Psychology Department. Today I'm going to talk about how I use Mentimeter to support inclusive approaches to seminars. And you could also use this approach for smaller group classes like tutorials as well. What I'm going to do is provide an overview of how I've used Menti in my classes and how it's benefited my teaching and also the students' learning.

So the context of this brief video is going to be a course I developed last year called Moral and Political Psychology. This is a third year class, a seminar-based course with 40 students. These are the topics that I was covering: Intellectual humility and the philosophy of science, morality, dehumanisation, eating meat and vegetarianism, political differences and similarities between left and right wing views and also ideologies and extremism. So overall, there's quite a range of sensitive topics here, and Menti is really great for providing a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere for talking about sensitive topics, but it equally is useful for talking about more general and not sensitive topics to.

So this is what a typical third year lesson plan is for me. After I talk through this lesson plan I'm then going to then show you some of the slides and how I use them. So I usually start off the class with a roughly five minute menti warm up activity, and I have this menti warm up activity on the screen, when the students come in, they can log on and get started and I'll show you that on the next slide. I then have about 20 or 30 minutes of hopefully engaging content and then I provide an activity. So that activity is about 25 minutes and it has three key components. And I also discuss those three key components in the subsequent slides here too.

So first of all, I have a ten minute small group discussion on specific questions that I'll ask the students to talk about and then I have a five minute class discussion with all of the students about those questions. And then I have another menti activity for about 10 minutes where I ask the most students to speak up and to show their voice and perspective. And then I'll go through that content and 25 minutes of activity again with new content. And that then comprises the roughly two hour lesson. I also provide, add into my schedule, some time at the end after the class for an informal chat with students as well. And this also helps to provide an inclusive and welcoming atmosphere so students who want to speak to me but a bit too shy to do that in front of other people can stick around behind after class and have a chat with me one on one.

So this is an example of a warm up activity that I did. And this is something that I actually ask students on the very first class and the first activity. Okay. So I ask them about the politics and their ideologies. So as you can see here, this is just a very simple poll. I already pre-plan this and have all the questions and answers ready. And then you can see there that menti gives you the response rate. So I've got 36 students who have responded to this and because I've got a class of 40 students, it means I've got a 90% response rate. So from the very beginning of class, I know that the students are very much engaged and very switched on. So as you can see here, I've got a big skew in the distribution. And this is very typical of social psychology. And of psychology cohorts in general, very much left skew. I also ask students about their ideologies because we're going to talk about ideologies later in the class. So I want to make this relevant for them, get them engaged and get them switched on. You can see here that this is a word cloud, so students can just type in different words. And the more students who type up that word, for example, like feminism and environmentalism, then the larger that word becomes in the word cloud. So two different ways of using polls, different types of menti as warm ups.

What's also useful here is that I can actually use this and use this warm up activity specifically about political orientation to help make the class more inclusive and welcoming. So I myself am quite - very leftwing I would say - and most of my students are left wing. That can be a bit of a problem because that can alienate the more centre or more conservative students. And so I use this and I talk this through to students and say 'hey actually we've got a bit of a problem here'. We've got quite a skew in the classroom. And so we need to be really mindful when we're speaking and communicating about ideas that we're kind and respectful and polite to everyone's political perspectives. And so I remind students that political orientation is an equality, diversity and inclusion issue, and we need to really be mindful of that throughout the lesson.

Okay. So here is an example question of what I would give the students after they've done the warm up activity, then I'll give them some content. Then I'd get them to discuss questions in a group. I usually would put up between 3 to 5 questions. But just for simplicity, I've just got one here and I get students to - Basically, students are sitting in rows, I've got 40 students sitting in rows and I get them to turn around and just speak in groups of around 3 to 5. And they typically speak with the same people each time, so they get to know each other and to feel a bit comfortable talking to each other. There's no Menti at this stage here. And I think it's really important when we think about using menti and using technology is to be mindful of when not to use it and when it's not useful. For me, it's really important to provide time for the students to talk to each other in small groups, to learn to speak up and to practice communication, to practice listening, and to practice working in small groups. And it's a really important part of the classroom, I think.

So, you know, at this time in the classroom, it's really a... really a buzz, really a hive of activity. And then after about 10 minutes, I will ask students to come back to my attention. And then the class is quiet. And then I'll go through these questions and ask students you know 'hey, who wants to talk to me about what they thought about this first question', do you think eating meat is a moral issue? You know, what do you think about this? What perspective are you coming from? And so then this is an important part of inclusivity because this is inclusive for the really confident students. The confident students typically want a bit of back and forth with me. They want to have their voice heard in front of other people. They really enjoy that. They find that fun and I provide that in the classroom for them, but typically I'll only get around, say, ten students out of 40. So about 25% of students will be comfortable having a conversation with me in front of everyone. For the remainder 75% of the classroom, they would find that horrible. They would find that really stressful and anxiety producing. And so this is where menti comes in, because after I've had this discussion with the more confident students, I ask the same question but in a menti form. And this allows the more shy, more cautious and quiet students to have their say. As you can see here, again, I've got 19 responses on this. So in a class of 40 students, it's about a 50% response rate. So I'm getting much more say from a different demographic of the classroom. So I'm getting about 20 students here, plus the ten students who have already spoken up. So I'm getting about 75%, about 30 students who are communicating in the classroom. And I know that these 20 students are different from the ten confident students because the confident students typically don't like using menti as much. They find it not as engaging and they don't find it as enjoyable as just speaking to me. So this is really this shows how menti is really useful at creating an inclusive environment because it caters for the shyer, more anxious, more quiet students in the classroom.

So this is the same question I asked before - do you think eating meat is a moral issue? You can see got a variety of different answers. For the purpose of this video it doesn't matter exactly what the answers are. But what's important to note is that the students really like this sort of activity. They really like seeing what other students are writing. And when I'm putting this up and when the answers are coming in, the students are really switched on, engaged. And they really love quickly reading and seeing what their fellow classmates are saying. So what I do is when the students responses are coming in, I'll often read them out. And so, for example, I'll be like 'Ok so someone said eating meat is not immoral for me, but it is for vegis'. Okay, that's interesting. And then I'll say, okay, well, someone has actually said it is a moral issue because it involves taking a life. And so then I'm sort of going through this and having this dialogue and thinking through these questions in front of the classroom, on the fly. I haven't looked at these responses before, because I don't know what the students are going to say. And the students find this aspect of my teaching really engaging as well, because I can't prepare for it, because I don't know what they're going to say.

So the classroom is really quiet. The students are really respectful at this time. It's a really engaging part of the lesson. And what I do is I sort of read through the answers and provide a bit of a thematic analysis, an overview. So ok, 'overall, most people, some people have said this about the issue, but other people have said this', and I say, 'Oh, that's interesting. How does this relate to last week's class on moral foundations? How does this relate to other topics?' And then some students will maybe send in another menti response, some students will put their hand up. And so it can, this menti, can provide - it provokes some interesting class discussion. Okay. So overall, I got really positive and encouraging feedback from students about this. And this is just one example. The student said that they really like using menti to submit their ideas and opinions because I think it helps share a lot more ideas. And that's just really simply put. But that's true. Using menti does help a lot more students have their say in the classroom. So thank you for listening to this video.