‘Sex and Dating’ – Encouraging Feedback With Poll Everywhere
The following is a guest post by Cam Brennan. Cam is the Youth Pastor at Fellowship Bible Church in Kansas and author of the blog aNewGravity.
Sunday night, the 26th of February, we had our first ever Q&A panel on ‘Sex and Dating’ for the students in the youth group at our church, Fellowship Bible Church. The panel consisted of 8 adults, ranging in age from 23-49, some married and some not. These 8 adults are part of the team of sponsors that help run our youth group every week of the year.
In order to encourage the participation of our students in the Q&A session we used Poll Everywhere to create an anonymous poll, allowing the students to text their questions in. This accomplished a few things for us:
- Upheld the anonymity we knew would encourage our students to ask deeper, more personal questions,
- Encouraged the students to really pay attention to what the sponsors were saying because they were directly answering the student’s questions,
- Allowed sponsors to focus on the question itself and not who asked the question,
- Allowed students to directly participate via their phones, which was great because students always love ‘cool’ ways to do things,
- Allowed me to moderate the questions and weed out any questions that were either glaringly inappropriate or off topic (of which we received just a few).
Our students asked questions ranging from advice on when to break up to wondering what to do if you’ve already had sex. We had questions about making out and boundaries along with questions about marriage and if it is boring. You can find a majority of the questions that were asked here, along with the answers given.
We had nearly 30 students participate Sunday night and based on the questions they asked it is clear that being sexually active is not only a temptation for them but is something they are feeling the pressure of.
Going into the night I had no idea what to expect. I was unsure if the students would participate and I was unsure, if they did participate, what sorts of questions they would ask. There was a lot up in the air as we started, but by the end of the night I was more than pleased with how it went. Using Poll Everywhere was a great way to encourage our students to ask the questions they really wanted to ask, without having to raise their hand and ask it in front of everyone else. I’m convinced that had we done it ‘the old fashioned way’ the night would have been a flop. We had a great time and we will definitely do more nights like this in the future.
