CASE STUDIES
The World Café in practice.
These case studies show how I use the World Café with students to understand problems from their perspective, explore possible responses and turn conversation into practical change.
Each project begins with a question. What follows is what students told me, what I learned, what changed in my teaching and what happened next.
FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT
Formative assessment and feedback
I wanted to understand why students were not engaging fully with formative assessment.
Through the World Café, I discovered that the problem was not simply time or motivation: students were balancing the emotional cost of attempting the work against feedback that could feel distant, uncertain or uneven.
What I learned changed both the support I offered while students were completing formative work and the way feedback was designed and delivered.
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STUDENT ANXIETY
Understanding anxiety in legal education
I first noticed the issue while analysing conversations from the formative assessment World Café. Students spoke about anxiety far more often than I had expected – not only around assessment, but across their studies and wider university life.
Some worries became louder around assessment time while others were always there as a low-level hum throughout their degree. It became clear that anxiety was not just an assessment issue or a side issue, so I organised further World Café sessions to explore what was making students anxious and what we might do to support them better.
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WORK WITH ME
What could we do together?
If any of these case studies has made you think about a question you would like to explore with your own students or colleagues, I’d be very happy to talk about what a World Café might make possible.
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