Poll Everywhere is a classroom response system that engages students on devices they already have: their phones. Educators create and embed live, interactive questions into their lectures, and students respond in real-time from the privacy of their phones. The results are immediate. Therefore, teaches can utilize Poll Everywhere to engages students in the learning process. Here we have an example by one teacher to utilize multiple-choice poll in Poll Everywhere to kickstart classroom debates.

Christopher Robertson helps his first-year law students at the University of Arizona understand the nuances of law with a technique called cascading persuasion. If too many students answer the question incorrectly, Robertson will not reveal the correct answer. Instead, he has each student turn to their neighbor and debate whose choice was correct. When the two reach a consensus, they find another pair of students and plead their case.

“Law students can easily go an entire semester passively attending class [only to] discover on the final exam that they have not grasped the concepts covered in class,” said Robertson. “I find that polling in class encourages active student participation and uncovers misunderstanding of how to apply the law.”

Eventually the entire class will agree on which answer is correct. Most of the time their consensus is correct, but on the rare occasion it’s not, Robertson says it’s an easy fix.