During a normal school year (all in-person) I interpret non-verbals and try to check-in with students frequently. I stand by my classroom door and give eye contact to students as they walked in and ask how they were doing. Sometimes students stop and tell me about their adventures or something that happened over the weekend. One of my goals was to have students talk more than me. The same check-ins would happen as students leave the room to head out to their next class. I believe these small moments overtime helped students connect to the classroom. Soon, students would share with one another about their lives and the classroom community builds from the ground up. A feeling of familiarity develops and students are more willing to take mathematical risks in the classroom. This organic process is more challenging when some students in your class are remote and others are in-person.
This year my school has been switching back and forth between remote and elearning. Tomorrow marks the third time this year that everyone will be remote. As or right now it looks like everyone will be remote until January, but that could change. My check-ins have had to take a different form this year. I call them “meet and greets” but they have the same premise. Every class starts with a meet and greet question or activity. It takes around 5-10 minutes and most days if feels like it is worth every minute. Here are a couple options for digital check-ins.
1.) 100 Prompts. I tend to get the questions from this shared spreadsheet.
Some of the questions are real gems, while others do not quite fit yet. This year I have used questions from this sheet around 50% of the time.
2.) Images. My students tend to get a kick out of these images as they are dramatic and some are related to pop culture. Students tells me what number they are and why.
I have found students open up and I see them laughing a bit as we progress through this meet and greet. So far my class has completed a cat, squirrel and baby Yoda. Twitter seems like the place to find these images by typing “on a scale how are you feeling” in the search bar.
3.) Desmos. Desmos has an amazing array of starter screens. My kids enjoy the robot and create a pumpkin activity. I think they could have spent more than 10 minutes creating their own pumpkin.
I tell the students ahead of time that this will be shared with the class and I turn on the anonymize filter if one or more students want the info to be kept private. I have not had a chance to use the data collection decks but they look promising. I am planing on using the Silly Warm Ups at some point next week. I am anticipating some amazing responses for the giraffe slide.
4.) Zoom. This is probably used the least, but using the Zoom private chat function has its benefits. There are times where I ask students to tell me how they are doing and to send me a private message in the chat. This has worked well for issues that happen in the moment. For example, a student told me that a family pet passed away. That awareness changed how I interacted with that particular student and was helpful when I followed up with them later. Just make sure students (and the teacher!) uses the private chat and not public.
Educational Aspirations 