How to create and run an Engage session

An Engage session is the flexible, catch-all session type: engagement checks, questions, comments, polls, reflections and checks for understanding, all in one live timeline.

When to use it: For a lesson where you want more than one kind of check-in, and you want everything from that lesson in one place.

Engage sessions work the same way wherever you run Signal — in your browser, in Microsoft Teams, or in Canvas. The only step that differs by platform is how students join, covered under “Running the session”.

Setting up

1. Name the session, and check your display name. Your display name is what students see, so make sure it is what you want them to call you.
2. Describe the session in the AI generation box. This is where you give an overview of the lesson you intend to teach, up to 1,500 characters. The more detail and context you give, the better the check-in points Signal generates. A structure that works well: year group, subject, lesson length, overall topic, learning intention, and the subtopics you plan to cover.
3. Choose how many check-in points to generate. You can add more later, either before the session starts or while it is running.
4. Choose which check-in types to include. Turning some off narrows what Signal generates, which is useful when you only want, say, engagement checks and quiz questions.
5. Choose whether to start now or prepare for later. Preparing for later lets you build a session days or weeks in advance. You can add a date and time, but you do not have to.

Tip: Generation occasionally fails on the first attempt. Trying again usually works.

Session settings

• Groups work like folders, for organising sessions by class or cohort.
• Guest participants lets students join without a Signal account by entering their name.
• Shuffle quiz and poll answer options gives each student a different answer order.
• Require explanations asks students to say why they answered as they did.
• Suggested responses offers students wording to help them explain their engagement.
• Reactions, comments and questions control whether students can add these freely during the session, and whether they can reply in threads.

The six check-in types

Several of these sound similar, so it is worth being clear on what each one does.

• Quiz question. A multiple choice hinge question with one or more correct answers. The incorrect answers are diagnostic: each one is written to reveal a specific misconception. This is the type that checks understanding.
• Question. An open prompt that students type a response to. It is not a check for understanding — it is useful for things like asking students what they want to focus on next.
• Comment. Something you post that students can respond to. Functionally close to a question.
• Engagement check. Asks students how engaged they are, with six options along a continuum. Students select a level and can explain why. The wording of the levels may vary by region.
• Reflection. A prompt students reflect against. The types available are open reflection, “what, so what, now what”, the Gibbs cycle, and 3-2-1.
• Poll. Works like a quiz question, but with no correct answer.

Tip: An engagement check tells you how students feel about the lesson. A quiz question tells you whether they have understood it. They answer different questions, so use both rather than treating one as a proxy for the other.

Running the session

Click start when you are ready. Share the join link with your students — or, if they are in Microsoft Teams or Canvas with linked accounts, the session may appear for them automatically once you start it.

Release check-ins in whatever order suits the lesson. A common pattern is an engagement check at the start, a quiz question after teaching each subtopic, and a reflection as an exit ticket at the end.

Responses arrive live.

• For engagement checks, you see the spread across the continuum plus each student’s explanation. Signal can summarise those explanations for you, so you do not have to read every comment individually.
• For quiz questions, you see who answered correctly, the recommendation on the Barton scale, the fastest and median answer times, and flags for potential guesses and for students who have left the view. You can reveal the answer and explanation to students, or keep them hidden.

Tip: If shuffling is on, the letter a student names will not match the letter on your side, because the order is different for each of them. Worth knowing before it causes confusion in class.

You can also create a new check-in mid-session at any time, without having prepared it in advance.

After the session

Ending the session produces the overall insights: participant numbers, engagement levels, the average position on the engagement spectrum, and individual student views.

The full timeline can be exported to PDF.

Two other things worth knowing:

• Presenter view displays check-ins on the board without showing individual student responses.
• Any check-in can be previewed as a participant, so you can see exactly what students will see before you release it.

For a session that focuses only on checking for understanding, see how to create and run a Live Quiz session.