Getting to Know Your Students

As I was scrolling through my Instagram feed earlier this week I found this post from teacher 2 teacher (tchr2tchr). The post is of an image of a giant post-it note with the question What do I want My Teachers to Understand about ME? The students then write their responses on a separate post-it note and stick it to the giant one. Having an activity like this at the beginning of the year is a great way to know your students. Students can tell you things that might not be in their personal files or things that they don't want to talk about out loud in front of their classmates. Students do not have to write something serious down on their post-it note and can give more than one answer. If a teacher wanted to give limits, you could say that you would like them to write one that is fun and one that is about school.

This allows teachers to get to know their students in a different manner than filling out a questionnaire or asking them directly.  My initial reaction to this post was I would love to implement this in my classroom someday. One note I do have is that I would want to put some ground rules into place. I would make sure that students knew that what they wrote would only be read by my eyes unless they wanted to volunteer to share what they had written, and they would have to write two things down. One that was something interesting or fun about them. This could be a hobby they like to take part in or their favorite sport. Students would also have to write something serious down to. For instance, what they are nervous about this school year or what they want to work on. As a teacher, you can collect this data and have it on file, and it can help you when making small groups or lesson plans.

Not only is this a great idea for the beginning of a school activity.  This activity can also be used for other subjects as well. This tool can be a great way to get a discussion started in the classroom. Students can read about something whether for history or reading. You could have made up questions to be answered that the students have to go around the room to answer at least 3 questions, and then talk about the responses. This can also be used to summarize passages and then the students have to talk about it to the class and "be the teacher". 

I have seen many other good ideas from teacher 2 teacher and hope that I can implement them in my classroom someday.