Number of Trivia per Year
1039 trivia questions total have been generated since 2018.
A Reflective Practice and Team-Building Tradition With Global Applications
Since 2018, Stanford EdTech has practiced a weekly reflection we call Inspiration Trivia. On Thursday, our designated trivia host sends out a call to the team asking for trivia questions.Team members submit questions through an online form, highlighting their accomplishments for the week, something they learned, or recognizing a team partner for their contributions. On Friday we have a 30-minute meeting, led by our trivia host, where team members participate remotely in the friendly, fun and lighthearted competition. Each question contributor shares the inspiration behind their question and why it’s significant to them or to our team’s work.
Teams or learning communities of any size can struggle with connection, especially in these days of remote work. Reflective practice is an effective skill-building method in higher education, in leadership and educator professional development. EdTech uses Inspiration Trivia to celebrate achievements, to practice presenting work, to share new skills, and to inspire team members to engage beyond their immediate work. Submitting questions prompts each team member to reflect on learning or accomplishments, the light competition encourages team members to keep up-to-date on Slack for higher scores, and coming together as a team in reviewing the reflections builds cross-team connections.
EdTech began our Inspiration Trivia tradition in 2018, inspired by the mobile game HQ. 17 team members have collectively contributed a total of 1026 trivia questions (on average ~150/year and 60/team member), mapped to 110 different projects. We ask team members to identify which EdTech strategic objective their question relates to. Over time we can use this data to examine if our organizational objectives are being met, or if the nature of the work we do has shifted. Any team could use this approach to gauge alignment between work/learning and objectives.
Though Stanford EdTech has used Podio, Slack, PollEverywhere and Zoom for our weekly team reflective practice, the same format can be implemented with any set of cloud-based survey (Qualtrics, Google Forms, SurveyMonkey), audience response (Kahoot, Mentimeter) and virtual meeting (WebEx, Teams, Google Meet) tools.
More importantly, making a habit of structured reflective practice can have positive impacts in any group environment. Classrooms, faculty committees, journal clubs, research labs, executive leadership teams, student groups - reflective practice is a form of continuous quality improvement that can be applied in any of these settings to learn, grow, and strengthen relationships.
Single-choice questions (defined as questions where one can select a single correct answer from a list of distractors) support the goals of our EdTech Trivia, which are to:
Reflect on our week
Share information
Compete
We follow limited learning design guidelines to make our questions more seamless and competitive. Unlike typical learning design, it is not our goal to test participants' actual knowledge—therefore we let some of the guidelines slide.
Question text
Answer/distractor text
There are other learning design guidelines that are optional if we want a particular question to be difficult to guess
1039 trivia questions total have been generated since 2018.