ABSTRACT
Initiatives for personal social education in secondary schools have regularly come, enjoyed a season of popularity and disappeared. Often this is because of new curriculum pressures, or teachers lose sight of the reasons for doing it. The practical difficulties of setting up the room or organising the activities can erode commitment to the process. Circle Time requires a degree of classroom reorganisation, which can prove daunting in the stresses of school life. One way of ensuring that it continues to happen is to involve the pupils in the physical organisation of the room. If it is treated like a military exercise with numbers under the desks and a master plan on the wall, pupils will join in the work involved in order to get the Circle Time that they enjoy. You, the classroom practitioner may well feel that this five minutes at the beginning and end of each lesson is wasted time. We would encourage you to run a series of six or seven weeks, review how much time is redeemed by pupils being involved in the lesson, 'on task' and not disrupting, then decide whether it is worth the time investment.
