Learning Students' Names Is The Best Way To Manage Your Classroom

One of the best ways to manage your classroom is to know your students' names.  Your students will be impressed that you made the effort and will be less likely to engage in disruptive behaviors.  Also, we expect our students to learn our subject matter so it's really not fair of us to say we can't learn their names.

Some tips to help you:

• Read over your class list several times before the first day so the names sound familiar to you.
• When a student asks a question, ask for his/her name before answering.  Use the name several times.
• Design a seating chart the second day of class (most students will have chosen where to sit by then).  Tell them you will be using the chart to help you learn names.  Refer to the chart when calling on someone.  Spend a couple minutes right before class looking at the students and chart to test yourself.
• More suggestions:  Phil Gerbyshak uses the acronym, READ so he can learn names.
• Use the Name Game as a collaborative learning exercise in class.  This not only helps you to learn names but also forces the students to learn each others' names.

Comments

[Jeff Hess]

Shalom Delaney,

Since I deal with relatively small classes (under 20 students) I use a digital camera to take pictures of everyone on the first day and tape a copy of the pictures and their names to my refrigerator.

Not only does this help me to learn names quickly, I also find that they poses they choose tell me a great deal about the students.

B'shalom,

Jeff

[Delaney Kirk]

Thanks for the good suggestion--would work for larger classes too!

[Sherman Dorn]

Some Course Management Systems will give you images from the student IDs (if they don't reset privacy to obscure them), and I then load the images into my copy of Mnemosyne (http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/) as flashcards. In the past semester, that's been helping me learn about half of the class's faces before the term begins.