Students are complex individuals with unique personalities, circumstances, and experiences that they bring into the classroom. It’s not easy to keep tabs on how students are doing; there’s rarely time to invite them to think about their own emotional state or reflect on how a particular lesson went. But all this meta-stuff they are dealing with impacts their learning, so here are some reasons to check-in:
- By regularly asking students how they are, we show that we care about them as people first. This helps create a trusting, caring learning environment.
- By asking students to reflect on their mood, we help them become more aware of their own emotional state and strengthen their emotional intelligence.
- By asking about how a lesson went for them, we help them reflect on the learning process. We also show them their input is important to us.
- By having this extra layer of information, we can see how emotions are affecting a lesson and learn when we might need to alter course.
To help teachers make personal check-ins an easy part of every class, we’ve built a new add-on, Classroom Climate.
How It Works
When students join a Pear Deck session, they are prompted to reflect on their mood with a simple poll.
The teacher can instantly get a read on the mood of the whole class by looking at the dashboard. This extra layer of information can help a teacher understand why a lesson might be struggling and adapt to students’ current readiness to learn.
At the end of class, when a Session is ended, the students are prompted with a simple thumbs up/down poll to reflect on how the lesson went.
Teachers can then see a full report for each class period and see correlations between student mood and feelings of success.
If the teacher sees a lot of thumbs up on a Deck, regardless of student mood, that can be an indication that particular lesson is a great success to be emulated in other Decks. If the teacher sees that even students in a good mood going in didn’t think the lesson went well, then maybe there is something to adjust before using it again.
For students, inputting feedback every day gives them an awareness of themselves as learners, and an opportunity to be an active agent in their own learning. For teachers, it’s an opportunity to check-in with students every day and show them they are valued as people first.
Check in with your Students every day by activating Classroom Climate.
