A terse warning to all teachers who have habitualised a check in with students at the start of the day.
Disclaimer: One of our five circle types is a Check-In Circle. I’m not against asking how kids are travelling at any particular moment.
The warning is that any student who tells you every day that they are “happy” is either lying to you out of a fear of displeasing you or has a rather warped definition of happiness.
As countless studies have concluded, happiness in the days of most well-adjusted humans is quite fleeting and occasional. Even as I write this blog, I’m a little hungry, a fraction work-stressed and somewhat distracted by the left sock I’m wearing that won’t stay up.
I’m not smiling. I’m not celebrating. I’m not at all happy. I’m a bit… as the kids these days say… “Meh”. And that’s perfectly fine and human. We’re all meh quite a lot as we get about our daily existences. Meh seems to be quite a natural state of human emotional equilibrium.
Using checking in to identify and overhelp anyone who isn’t happy on any given day can create an unproductive dynamic at school in a few ways:
- It creates an impression in young people that there’s something wrong or broken about them if they aren’t happy. They too need to know that meh is perfectly fine and thoroughly expected.
- It alerts schools to dive like secret service agents upon any student who’s not feeling ‘happy’ as though we need to save them from their negative emotions. It’s perfectly expectable that, after a morning car fight with Mum or Dad, a sad or angry student a can get on with a successful day of learning.
- Kids learn that the way to manufacture adult rescue, care and attention is to conjure negativity and misery in the check-in circle.
The purpose of a good check-in circle is the present. It’s a quick social and emotional dipstick that informs the teacher and allows them a chance to make a couple of tweaks to optimise classroom learning, progress and achievement.
It should be over quickly and responded to marginally in almost all cases.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. My article on the Restorative Future of Student Engagement was published by the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia (AHISA) in their Independence Journal this month. I hope it will challenge some of the beliefs we have about improving student behaviour and get us all thinking about some better approaches.
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