Such activities can be a playful way for students to start class, a ritual through which they establish community, and an assessment tool that helps teachers know how well students are faring. Community and wellness have always been important, but they’ve become a higher priority than ever during the third year of pandemic teaching. How can we make check-ins a greater source of community and wellness for our students?

7 WAYS TO IMPROVE CHECK-INS

1. Ask for multiple emotions instead of just one. We’re capable of feeling many different emotions—sometimes simultaneously or in rapid succession. Students might feel angry about something their sibling did, excited about that afternoon’s basketball game, and worried about tomorrow’s math test. They might even feel multiple emotions about the same thing, such as feeling happy and scared to attend school in person. But asking students for just one emotion means they’ll disregard or silence everything else they might be feeling. Instead, we can ask questions that elicit multiple emotions.

2. Vary the tone. Some check-in questions can be playful, such as “Do school subjects have colours?” or the internet-famous “If a tomato is a fruit, is ketchup a smoothie?” Other prompts can be serious, such as questions about students’ homes, responsibilities, identities, and beliefs.

3. Make it culturally responsive. When designing check-in questions, take care not to explicitly or implicitly recenter historically dominant sociocultural groups—white, cisgender, heterosexual, Christian, affluent, able-bodied, and neurotypical folks. Use prompts that apply to all students and that don’t assume knowledge of or participation in a dominant culture.

4. Involve students in creating check-in prompts. Once students are familiar with check-in structures and the sorts of prompts you use, invite them to create their own. You’ll need to vet student-created prompts first, but most students will take the responsibility seriously and offer prompts that reflect their diverse personalities, histories, and interests.

5. Build emotion-noticing into academic routines. Check-ins at the beginning of class honour experiences that students bring into the room before we ask them to think about something else. Some teachers also do a check-out, asking students to share insights, questions, or feelings about that day’s work. These rituals orient students within the class period, but if students only share their emotions before and after academic learning, they might get the message that their feelings exist outside the main business of school—the academics—and matter less.

6. Connect emotions to values and values to actions. When students share their emotions, they need time to stay inside those emotions instead of then folding them up into a neat package that they set aside during class. They also need opportunities to discover the values their emotions point toward as well as opportunities to choose actions consistent with those values. Classrooms are ideal spaces for students to discover their values and to bring those values to their learning, work, and relationships.

7. Use a pedagogy of belonging. If check-ins are the only opportunities for students to share their emotions, values, stories, observations, and dreams, they have no reason to go especially deep. If students are going to open up about themselves, those conversations need to be part of a larger culture in which students feel seen, heard, respected, and supported. Protocols ensuring that every student makes meaningful contributions and that all contributions are listened to and appreciated help create a safe and affirming environment where students can open up about the content—and themselves.

By Sara Hayne

Source: Edutopia