I think that all of us in education can admit that we’ve been through a couple of tough years lately. Lack of funding, sub shortages, more pressure to increase test scores, uncertainty about the future – it all adds up to higher stress levels for teachers and administrators.
As your staff and team members get ready to return to the boiling pot, it’s important to check in regularly and see how they are really doing. A full-team question at the start of each meeting can be a great way to accomplish that. Here are a few good ways for them to vent and share and become better able to surmount the year’s challenges.
Setting Up Your Check-Ins for Success
To ensure that a check-in allows for optimum results, follow these guidelines:
- Set a positive tone. Kick things off with lighthearted questions, making the meeting a friendly space for team talks and camaraderie. If a staff member heads in a more negative direction to vent, that’s okay. But always start with a positive assumption.
- Be inclusive. The check-in should be one that is applicable to all team members. If you know, for example, that one of your staff doesn’t celebrate a particular holiday, don’t do a check-in on that topic. Craft your questions to embrace diverse perspectives and backgrounds so everyone feels part of the chat.
- Keep it casual. This isn’t an interview. Set a laid-back vibe by keeping questions informal, encouraging team members to share without feeling pressured. If they don’t want to share, that’s okay.
- Respect everyone’s privacy. Keep it light, stay away from super personal stuff, and respect everyone’s boundaries; nobody wants awkward vibes during check-ins.
- Encourage honesty.One they feel comfortable sharing with each other, encourage them to tell it like it is! Build trust by getting your team to spill the beans on what’s really going on, even if it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
- Allow opt outs. Let folks skip a question if they don’t feel like sharing that day. No pressure or judgment is allowed.
- Celebrate achievements. Wrap up your check-ins with a little victory dance. Shout out the wins, big or small, and keep the positive energy flowing into the rest of the meeting.
Check-In Ideas
A good way to start with check-ins is the basic “how are you feeling” kind. But you can make these more fun by using a scale and some pictures. There are tons of these available on the web. Check out the ones below:
Show the image and ask people to share with a partner which one they are most feeling like right now and why.
Once people are comfortable sharing how they’re feeling, you can move on to a more powerful check-in. My favorite one is by Daresay. They have a set of random questions that you can scroll through until you find one you like. Or you can sort them by the “mood” you want to create: caring, daring, laid back, or work focused. If it’s early in the year and everyone doesn’t know everyone else, start with the laid-back ones.
Other laid-back questions include:
- What is your go-to comfort food? (This can lead to the sharing of recipes and a possible plan for a pot-luck lunch.)
- What animal did you wake up as this morning?
- Which emoji best describes your mood right now?
- Would you like to be famous? In what way?
Show them the question and allow for about 30 seconds for quiet thinking time. Then ask them to pair up with someone else and share their answers. Make sure you allow enough time for both people to share fully. Then regroup and ask if anyone wants to share. If some do, that’s great. If no one does, that’s also fine.
Over time and as more serious issues come up at school, you need to use more serious check-in questions. This may mean that their responses need to be private. A word cloud generator can be a good tool for this. I recommend something like Slido (although Mentimeter and Poll Everywhere are also good). Slido is an online platform that facilitates interaction during presentations, meetings, and events. As the host, you can gather feedback, ask questions, and conduct polls. And it integrates with tools like PowerPoint and Google Slides, as well as communication platforms like Zoom. The Basic plan is free and includes up to 100 participants and three polls per Slido.
Wrapping Up
Whatever kind of prompt you want to use, a regular check-in at a staff or department meeting is important. As a leader, it provides incredible feedback about where everyone is and can even be viewed as a type of formative assessment before you move on with the agenda. Using the resources mentioned above, you may even be able to brighten the day for your hard-working educators and give them an opportunity to smile.
