How to Use Attendance Questions for SEL in the Secondary Classroom

It can feel extremely overwhelming to take on the responsibility of your students’ social-emotional well-being as a teacher, and because this is so important for both the short and long-term health of the relationships building in your classroom, we need to take on this work without feeling burned with another “to-do” item on our lists.

While whole-class meetings and check-ins are extremely helpful, there’s something profound about small, daily, individual interactions with students. Daily sounds like A LOT of work, there’s something else that we do daily that can make this a daily class routine rather than an add on: taking attendance!

I’ll be the first to admit that before I started doing attendance questions, I was forgetting to take attendance. ALL. THE. TIME.

But once I put attendance together with the idea of an SEL check-in, I was much more motivated to do this chore. An SEL check-in give me the chance to roughly gauge the energy of the classroom and get a feel for how students are feeling before we jump blindly into our material for the day. There are two ways that I’ve enjoyed doing these attendance check ins and go back and forth between the formats all year long:

GOOGLE FORMS / THIS OR THAT

This option is extremely low maintenance and offers a streamlined use of technology: Google Forms! I created a Google Form for each day of the school year that asks the same few basic questions:

BASIC INFO:

-Today's Date

-Student name

-Class period

HOW YA DOIN?

-This or that? (a photo-based question)

-Here, feel free to leave me a note. How are you feeling? What's going on? What questions do you have about class? (open-ended)

-I'M NOT OKAY: I'm having a really difficult time...

This does not apply to me
I need to schedule a Zoom meeting with you
Can you please call?
I just need you to know today was rough. No need to talk about it, just wanted you to know.
Other...

And that’s it! I assigned these through Google Classroom so I always had a paper trail of my attendance records and I could also see at a glance (through the response charts on the Form) the emotional temperature of my class. I could also see if particular students were answering the same way across multiple days and potentially intervene or keep that student after class to chat. Students never had to explain their answers, but always had the option to share more info in the Form or send me an email. Here are a few examples of our “this or that” questions (my personal favorite!)

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BELL RINGER 4-SQUARE SEL CHECK-IN

Another way I was able to do some SEL check-in time with students was by asking them a similar type of question with visual responses. I call this the 4-Square SEL Check In. At the center of the square is my question: How are you today? Today is like…. Where are you today? What does my brain feel like? Which color are you today? Students respond by choosing the image that best (metaphorically) describes their mood or emotional state. I used them almost exclusively for attendance (they simply responded A, B, C, or D when I called their names, but they also worked great as:

bell ringer writing prompts
connections to characters in novels
embedded within a Google Form
ice-breakers for small group activities

Let’s have some fun. Teacher friends, let me check-in on YOU today. In the comments below, respond to the prompt: Where are you today? You may respond with only a letter, or, if you’d like, a little elaboration on how things are going in your year so far. We’re here to listen! Who knows…maybe you’ll connect with another teacher here!