Inspiration Trivia

A Reflective Practice and Team-Building Tradition With Global Applications

What is inspiration trivia?

Description

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.

The Why

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.

Impact

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.

Global Applications

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.

 

 

What's On This Page

How to implement on your team

  1. Obtain team buy in
    1. Use these presentation materials to introduce the idea of inspiration trivia to your team
      1. Achieve consensus about the value of this new practice
  2. Designate a host
    1. Have your host identify and protect time on team calendars 
      1. Stanford EdTech uses a 30-minute meeting on Friday mornings
  3. Build out your tool set
    1. Have your host select a tool each for: 
      1. Team communication
        1. To share the theme, rules, deadline
      2. Question gathering
        1. Think about what team data might be important to collect with each question submission
        2. Do you want to know about question type (professional development, project, personal, kudos)?
      3. Virtual meetings
      4. Audience response
    2. See the image below for some options for each of these tool types
  4. Time for trivia
    1. Have fun!

Tools

Question writing tips

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

  • Begins with the “Stem” description language, and
  • Ends with the actual “Lead-in” question to be answered
    • If a word is repeated at the top of multiple answer choices, can it be added to the Lead-in text instead? 
  • Both Stem and Lead-in are edited to remove unnecessary details that can be shared during the discussion time


Answer/distractor text

  • Share matching grammatical structure 
  • Share grammatical accuracy (and compatibility with the Lead-in)
  • Additional formatting considerations:
    • Homogeneous in content (all are the same category of answer choice)
    • If numerical,
      • Be consistent
        • E.g., If percentages, then all are percentages
      • Answers should be in numerical order (up or down)


There are other learning design guidelines that are optional if we want a particular question to be difficult to guess

  • Avoid “all of the above” and “none of the above”
    • Process of elimination makes answering these too easy
  • Avoid lead-in absolutes such as “always” or “never”
    • Process of elimination often makes answering these too easy
  • Answer/distractor choices should share approximate:
    • Answer length
    • Plausibility and attractiveness

Trivia by the numbers