How can you use Wooclap to teach sensitive subjects?

Hi! 👋 Jennifer here, Wooclap’s Community Builder. Today I want to talk to you about teaching sensitive subjects using Wooclap. Here are a few takeaways that I hope to share with you:

• How anonymous participation can help you foster open discussions 
• The unique moderation capabilities of Wooclap that ensure a safe and respectful learning environment
• How to enhance engagement and comfort in both virtual and in-person settings

Have you ever been in front of a group of students, participants, or trainees and you had a touchy subject that you needed to talk about? Maybe you were trying to increase awareness around microaggressions, or you were training middle managers on psychological safety at work, or perhaps you were talking to college students about consent. In these kinds of spaces, it can be helpful to offer your audience the ability to answer questions anonymously, so that anything they’d be too embarrassed to ask aloud can be discussed to the benefit of everyone involved. 

I recently spoke with Dorian Solot of “Sex Discussed Here!” about how she and her team of sex educators use Wooclap to give training sessions to college students in the US. In Dorian’s work, the ability to approve or deny any audience responses before they make it up on to the Word Cloud is essential - when the world went online in the Spring of 2020, she and her team researched different polling platforms they could use to continue to give their trainings virtually before finally deciding to use Wooclap. “There's a single thing wooclap can do that none of the competitors can do that was the deciding factor for us, and that is that we can moderate everything,” said Dorian. The ability to simply delete an unsavory response after it was on the screen wasn’t enough for Dorian - she wanted to be able to prevent certain responses from going public so that a single student wouldn't have the power to derail a presentation with a silly or offensive answer.

Like many Wooclap users who discovered our tool at the height of the pandemic, Dorian and her team decided to keep using Wooclap even after their classes went back to an in-person format, because they could see the value added by the tool in both a virtual and an in-person context. “We use Wooclap in every presentation we do now. When we went back from virtual to in person we brought it with us, which sort of surprised us… We thought this was a temporary thing for our virtual presentations, but then we realized it's super valuable that it helps students feel more comfortable speaking and sharing so we get more participation that way which is great.” In her case, Wooclap replaced physical index cards they would pass around onto which students could write questions they wanted to ask but wouldn’t dare to say aloud. With Wooclap, she was able to preserve the safety of her training sessions and the anonymity of her participants.

When it comes to fostering engagement, Wooclap’s features allow you as an educator to toggle anonymity and moderation on your event questions, or not! This dexterity makes Wooclap an excellent resource in classes and trainings where your subject matter may lead you to want to foster discussion on topics that would otherwise go unnamed. By deciding to moderate the responses on your event, you’re ensuring your role as an educator who can create a safe space for learners to ask any question that comes to mind - and you’re allowing your students to be as curious as possible. 

Want to try this out yourself? 

To create a check-in question during your Wooclap event, start with the Word Cloud question type. Once you’ve entered the text of your choice for the question prompt, be sure to activate moderation on the question in the menu on the right, which will prevent results from being visible to all participants. Or use the Wooclap template below!