Jar of questions

The circle where nobody knows what to say

A check-in circle lives or dies on the question. Ask how everybody is and you get fine, fine, fine. Ask what somebody helped you with this week and the room has something to actually say. The classroom set is eighty questions of that second kind: specific enough to answer in a sentence, open enough that nobody is wrong.

Because the jar empties rather than generating forever, a circle has a visible end. Thirty children, thirty slips, and the count on the jar tells the room how far round it has got. That is the same reason teachers use a jar of lolly sticks, and this one does not fall off the desk.

Icebreakers that are not the same five

Everybody has sat through two truths and a lie. The icebreaker set is ninety questions nobody has heard at every event they have been to, and the silly set is there for when a room needs permission to stop being serious. For a team check-in there is a set written for a short stand up: what went well, what is in the way, what you would like help with.

The grown-ups sets sit behind a button that says exactly what they are: office-party level, never rude. They are for a table of adults who want something with more in it than a favourite colour, and they are never what the page opens on. If you want a particular set in somebody else's hands, the share link carries which one, and nothing else.

Write your own, and keep them

The most useful jar is usually the one somebody wrote for their own room: the questions this class needs this term, the ones a family actually wants answered, the ones a group has been avoiding. Type them one per line and they become the jar. They are kept in this browser so they are still there next week, and they are never put into a link or sent anywhere.

It sits beside the other things a circle or a table needs: the spinning wheel to choose who answers, the countdown timer to keep an answer short, and the hidden information cards when everybody should get a different prompt in private rather than one out loud.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.jar.bank, pph.jar.custom and pph.jar.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.