mckinney
“I’m terrible at names,” complained my friend Steve. He’s a respected professor of entomology who is fascinated by ugly bugs that make many of us shudder. “Really?” I asked. “How many species of beetles can you identify by name?”
“Thousands,” he said.
Obviously, he can remember some names.
Like Steve, many of us struggle to remember the names of acquaintances, despite being able to remember a great many names or details in our field of interest.
What about you?
- Do you forget the names of people at parties five minutes after they’ve been introduced?
- Do you dread making introductions for fear of drawing a complete blank, even if you know the people quite well?
- Do you have trouble keeping track of student names even at mid-semester?
Psychologists find that anxiety often interferes with people’s ability to learn and remember names. At parties, we’re often pre-occupied with the impression we’re making. When teaching, we may be worried about the content we’re about to teach or how well we’re presenting the material.
But whatever the context, be it cocktail party or classroom, remembering names indicates respect and concern, and can be essential to building a relationship.
I still remember the charismatic Professor Banchoff who taught my freshman calculus course in college. On the first day of class, he went around the room and asked each of us our names. When someone mumbled, or had a name that was difficult to pronounce, he asked us to repeat ourselves and then repeated the name himself. There were over 100 students taking the course so this initial roll call took a significant portion of the first class.
From that day on, when we raised our hands to ask or answer a question, Professor Banchoff called on us by name:
“Yes, Miss McKinney?” he would ask formally, when I raised my hand to answer a question. And when returning quizzes he might accompany my paper with “Good Job, Mary.”
We were all awed by Professor Banchoff’s memory (although we sometimes wished that it was less sharp when we skipped class or neglected homework assignments.). He regularly won awards for teaching excellence and received high marks for his clear and dynamic lectures. But I’m sure his impressive recall of our names also boosted his ratings. It always felt great to know that he knew who we were.
Do you know all of your students’ names? If not, and your class doesn't top 40 students, learn them. Even if you teach a large lecture class, you can still learn many names -- especially those of students who participate regularly.
I’m currently coaching a junior professor -- I’ll call him Jim -- who is concerned about getting tenure, in part because of below average teaching evaluations.
During one of our early sessions, I asked, “How large are your classes?”
“About 30 students,” he said.
“Do you know their names?”
“Well, some of them,” he replied sheepishly. “I’m terrible at names.”
“Let’s change that,” I said.
This year, even before the first day of class, Jim had downloaded the names and school I.D. photographs of each student enrolled in his courses. By the second class of the semester he’d memorized every name.
“What a difference,” he said. “I can tell they’re impressed that I’ve learned their names so quickly. And I feel much more confident during class discussions. Knowing their names has even been helpful outside of the classroom: I used to feel embarrassed when I ran into students in the hall, or they came to office hours, and I didn’t know their names.”
How To Learn Student Names:
1. Make it a priority. Focusing on any goal is the first step towards making it happen.
2. Read the registrar’s list before the first class.Pay attention to the names that may be difficult to pronounce.
3. Take roll call on the first day of class. Take your time, pay close attention and repeat each student’s name. Make sure that you have the proper pronunciation. If a student’s name is unfamiliar be sure to ask explicitly if you’ve got it right. Students who are shy, or from cultures where greater deference to authority is the norm, may hesitate to correct you unless prompted and yet will still find it grating to be referred to incorrectly the entire semester.
4. Ask the students what they prefer to be called and be sure to write down nicknames on the class roster. You may want to preface your roll call with a request for nicknames: while you are likely to wonder whether Elizabeth whether goes by “Liz” or “Beth”, you’ll have no idea that Amy Jones goes by “A.J.”
5. If you have access to students’ photos, use them to familiarize yourself with names as part of your preparation in the first weeks of class. My client Jim had been unaware that he had access to student I.D. photos until he checked with the registrar.
6. If there are no photos available, consider taking your own photographs. In Tools for Teaching, Barbara Gross Davis suggests taking Polaroid shots of students and pasting them on index cards with the students’ names and other personal information. Creating class “I.D. cards” is even easier with access to digital cameras.
7. Often it is most difficult to remember foreign students’ names, which may be unfamiliar to Western ears. Be sure to write a phonetic version of the name if needed. For example, in one of my classes the name of a Chinese student was transliterated as Xiou -- but pronounced something like “Shaw.”
8. A common memory trick is to link the name with something or someone else – thus my student Xiou became the unforgettable George Bernard “Shaw” in my mind.
9. Think of another person you know who has the same first name as the student. Then make a link using a visual image. For example, I imagine my short-haired brunette student Susan with the wild grey mane of my cousin Susan, who hadn’t changed the style of her coiffure since the late 1960’s. The incongruous image cements the student’s name in my cortex.
10. Use humor in your associative links to make a lasting impression. I kept getting confused about whether a student was Egla or Elga until I imagined her with a hard-boiled Egg of a head.
11. Find a rhyme to create mental associations: Is Jim slim? Or an adjective that tips you off about the name’s first letter: Is Thomas tall? Can you visualize Sarah in a sarong? Again, humor helps. Thus Slim Jim becomes a life-size stick of dried beef sausage. And Sarah, well, sarongs fall off easily, right? (Need I admonish you that the mnemonic devises should be kept to yourself?)
12. Use your students’ names frequently both to call on them to participate and to refer to previous points made in the discussion. Davis points out that this technique can be used in even very large classes: Ask students their name when they make a comment and later refer to it as “Jeff’s point” or “Audrey’s contribution.”
13. When you take roll, consider creating a map of the seating arrangement labeled with student’s names. I’m always surprised at how consistently students sit in the same seats, or at least the same quadrant of the room. In my small classes, we sit around a large table and for the first few classes I write down who chooses to sit where as students arrive. Writing the names down also helps commit them to memory. Some professors ask students to sit in the same seats for a few classes, a request that communicates their earnest efforts to learn names. I prefer to keep my mnemonic methods mysterious. Either way works.
14. Using name tags for the first few class sessions can help students learn one another’s names at the same time it helps you. I ask my students to write their first names in very large letters so that I can read them from the front of the classroom.
15. When teaching very large classes it is tempting to give up. Resist the temptation. Try learning five names per class and try to use those names.
16. One professor I know uses name cards for her large classes. Students pick up the cards as they file into class and place them at the front of their desks. This United Nations style name card strategy is also useful because the tags that aren’t retrieved indicate absent students.
17. With any sized class, look at registrar’s list during week and see how many faces you can recall.
18. Make sure you know the names of students who visit you during office hours. Take a few minutes to ask the students about themselves, their major, where they are from, etc. Personal contact is one of the ways you can increase the effectiveness of your teaching.
Becoming an expert at memorizing names is a small but respectful step toward demonstrating personal investment in your students’ well-being. Building a mutually respectful relationship with students is as important as having an organized lesson plan, giving a dynamic lecture, or encouraging enthusiastic class participation. Positive student-teacher relationships foster engagement and achievement.
Learning your students’ names quickly and well may also provide a small boost of your end-of-term evaluations. The positive effects on your teaching reputation, departmental reviews and chances for tenure -- vis-a-vis evaluations, future class enrollments, etc. -- are secondary fringe benefits that may provide pragmatic motivation to invest your energy in the task.
Learning student names is just a minor, obvious task among the multitude of steps required to become an excellent teacher. However, like many basics of good teaching, it is often neglected. Being able to identify a student by name may be the first step toward cultivating a level of rapport that will make a difference in your students’ lives and your own career.
- FACULTY JOBS
Comments on What's Your Name Again?
This was very helpful, and it's consistent with what I've been reading lately about encouraging classroom civility and making large classrooms more engaging. Knowing students' names contributes to the perception of instructor "immediacy": availability, sociability, interest, and so forth -- which tends to yield happier and more productive classrooms.
... is one of my top priorities for the first week of class. Before the semester begins, I download photos of as many of them as I can from the Facebook. Nothing makes a student feel more welcome (and a little freaked out) on the first day of class than having the professor greet him or her by name before the s/he has introduced herself or himself. I take photos with a digital camera of those who don't offer Facebook photos of themselves, and I use a simple JavaScript program to quiz myself on matching names and faces. I've noticed that it makes a huge difference to my students' attitudes.
If you have a little time and a reasonably-sized class (maybe 30 or 40, maximum--I wouldn't want the professor to have tried this in any of my 600-student classes at a UC campus) there's the Name Game.
The student at the front of the course states their name, then the student seated next to the first one states their own name, plus the name of the first student, and so on. The person at the back corner of the class gets to state everyone's name, then you, as the instructor, go last.
Amidst the groans, laughter, and memory lapses, you all learn each other's names and bond a bit, as well.
The educational process need not be perceived as lofty, cold, or impersonal. Teachers are the bridge to intellectual motivation and progress; addressing students on a personal basis only serves to enhance this relationship.
I strive to learn the names of all of my students on the first day and I have found this to be very conducive to congeniality in the classroom.
I've successfully used a "name game" in small classes. In mine, on the first day of classes I ask the students to stand up and put themselves in alphabetical order -- by first name. They're already used to "where they are" in last-name alphabetical order, so the first name is sufficiently different that they don't roll their eyes at me.
It's also useful to get a feel for the dominant figures in class right off the bat. When the students ask where they should start, I just shrug and tell them to figure it out themselves. One or two students will then take charge. I can then leverage that information in my first day lesson.
One additional twist: once they're organized, I take roll in the order they're sitting, but I don't allow the student to talk. I point to a student and ask the class, "who's this?" and someone else will say, "Her name is Aubrey." Then I have to find Aubrey on my list. It makes a deeper impression (for me) than any other way -- and it gets the students learning each other's names as well.
Another tip for learning names early is to ask the students to mention their names as they are called on to speak during the first few classes. This allows you to call on someone without knowing his or her name and to get used to associating the name with the person. Hopefully, the next time you call on that person, you will be the one saying the name.
Also, for those of you who are still not convinced that learning names makes a difference in the classroom, I find that knowing students' names helps prevent awkward silences when you have asked a question that no one is volunteering to answer. I will simply call on a particular student by name to answer the question. It's a much quicker solution than blindly calling names from the roster.
This is well and good for younger professors but when you get older your memory abilities change. Interference, not encoding, is the problem. There are too many similar sounding names and too many similar looking students. I believe that the time spent memorizing names is wasted effort that might be better used by improving classes and doing other work. I explain to my students that my difficulty with a name is not personal and I generally have learned all of the names by the end of the course, through normal interactions.
A classroom can be made friendly, civil, personal through real human interactions and warmth, genuineness and respect, through smiling and other nonverbal behavior, not only through gimmicks like learning all the names quickly. The idea that someone shows respect by knowing a name is unfortunate because any con artist or salesperson can learn a name without any respect for the person at all.
Learn the names if you want. Learning the subject will enable you to provide better value to students. This becomes an either/or choice when our time is limited and we must decide how to spend it. I think the effort required to learn every last name is a waste of time to create a false impression and an unreasonable expectation among students about their place in the universe.
Anon (above) may assume that name-learning might be a gimmick for younger profs, but not necessarily for older profs whose short term memory may be crowded by the names of hundereds of students over the years. I don't want to disagree with the latter contention, nor do I intend to demean the reasons the point is made--I assume I will find the same obstacle after 15 or 20 years in the profession.
But for the junior faculty, let's not minimize the connection between learning names and course evaluations (a correlation made by the author). For those seeking tenure, those course evaluations can play a crucial role in how our teaching is rated, and for those not seeking tenure, they may be used for merit pay raises. Gimmick or not, name-learning can have real consequences.
But I also want to underscore that this isn't just a valueless gimmick in assessment terms: students who feel personal connections are more likely to stay in school and graduate, and they're more likely to consider the professors who know their names to be valuable resources (even if they may learn measurably more from a more experienced faculty member). This can have a positive impact on retention numbers, which is a big concern for administrations and departments.
And so I'm proud that I know the names of composition students by the end of the first class, and those of survey students by the end of week three. It matters to them, and it matters to me.
I am 100% in favor of genuinely caring about students, making connections with them, showing respect for them, and doing my best to help them learn. I do not believe that learning names using mnemonics does much to further any of that. I do not learn students names but I have very high student evaluations and there is no doubt I will earn tenure in a few years. Why? Because I use every opportunity to help students and thereby show that I care for about them and their learning. If I do not remember their names, they don't seem to mind. I apologize when I get the names wrong and they don't mind because they recognize that I've gone the extra mile for them in other ways, ways that matter. I am advocating more time spent on being genuinely helpful and less time wasted on tricks that simulate caring without doing much for students (beyond making them temporarily feel good). This boils down to whether we should massage student self-esteem to increase our evaluations or whether we should focus less on superficials and more on substance, in my opinion. I have colleagues who bake brownies for their classes, tell jokes (Letterman's top 10), etc. These are gimmicks and they both insult the seriousness of students' academic aspirations and they waste time that students pay a great deal for. When I visit my doctor, I don't care if he or she remembers my name -- I want to be treated competently and I want the doctor to do a good job on my behalf. We should not be encouraging students to expect a feel good experience -- we should be giving them the education they deserve. Less smileys on the top of the page and more comments in the margins.
Two days after this article was published, I received an email from Dr. Tom Banchoff -- the first time we'd been in touch since I was a college freshman at Brown University in 1977.
Banchoff wrote:
"One of my new sisters-in-law just sent me a copy of your article in Insidehighered.com "What Was Your Name Again?" and I thank you for the kind reference about the calculus course you took with me some decades ago. Now, am I correct in my recollection that you also took my Fourth Dimension Modes of Thought course and that you wrote an extremely engaging piece on hypercube quilt patterns in a Salem Crucible setting? That is still one of my favorites so I hope I have the right attribution...."
"I still make it a point to memorize the class lists that I get before classes start, so I can then proceed to identify faces with names for as many students as possible in the first class or two....It still impresses students when you show you care about them individually, at least enough to learn names, and other things as well. Students always seem to respond well to a question about how their other classes are going, for example."
Wow! I did write that paper for him almost 3 decades ago. It feels wonderful that he still remembers me and my work.
Tom Banchoff has been teaching at Brown University since 1967 -- and I think that his example proves that learning names can be more than a gimmick for young, untenured professors.
Most of us won't be able to remember our students and their work for 3+ decades. But we can try.
These are some great ideas which reflect the value of community that exists beyond the walls of academia. Beyond providing students "value" in the rigor of academic content, role modelling behaviors that will help them succeed in the workplace and in society (such as remembering names and engaging in civil, collaborative relationships) may prove more useful in the long run than the credits they accumulate in college.
I take roll at every class meeting, and instead of just calling out names, I ask weird questions...and the students have to answer the question (that's how I know they are present). This helps me know their names much more quickly, but it also helps the students get to know each other. Questions like "are you a cat person or a dog person," or "what's your favorite drinking game," or "when's your birthday (month/day)," help students feel more comfortable with each other. After the semester has progressed and I know their names and I forget to ask the silly question at the beginning of class, they'll call me on it. They want the questions! These questions take about 90 seconds out of our class time.
I believe that students are serious individuals seeking education, deserving of respect. I do not see how asking them "weird" questions promotes the dignity of their endeavor or mine. First, most of the answers to such questions are none of my business. Second, trivializing the joint purpose of education by wasting time on such nonsense sends the wrong message, in my opinion. Third, many of my students do not drink and why would a professor encourage the belief that most students do, by asking about the "favorite" drinking game? Fourth, what option does any student have if he or she does not wish to answer such a weird question? They are on the spot over something that is irrelevant to the course content. Fifth, should student time be used to aid the professor in remembering names, an exercise that is useless to the students and meaningless once the semester ends? Why not spend that 10 minutes teaching?
I think we have strayed from what remembering someone's name means in social contexts. It means that the person is important enough to you that their name is memorable. This cannot be true during the first week of class -- people become memorable through their actions and through experience with them. Flattering someone by bootstrapping their names artificially is manipulative, in my opinion. The goal is to increase student satisfaction with the course, inflating our student ratings. It does nothing to enhance student learning. It does give students a mistaken notion that they should be memorable without effort, that they are the center of the universe. This isn't courtesy, it is a misuse of student time to achieve a dubious goal.
I have heard of professors who play singing games during the first 10 minutes of class, to rev up student engines. Students may love wasting their time in these silly ways, but my students pay money for their education -- many are working their way through. This kind of thing insults their sacrifice for knowledge and a better life. It isn't good teaching -- it isn't any kind of teaching.
Almost twenty years ago I was part of a study that looked at the effect of the transition from high school to college on students by interviewing a random sample of students first in high school and again in their first semester at college. One of the most important variables in making students feel they belonged at college was “the name thing.” If faculty knew a student’s name that student felt connected to both the college and that faculty member. Students talked about how they felt that a faculty member who knew their name had expectations of them and they tried to meet those expectations. More recently we have looked at the success and persistence of students in science and again it was not just the marks that influenced persistence: the classroom climate was crucial. A student’s perception of the classroom climate as student-centered and one that promoted active – engagement teaching that involved the student rather than teacher-centered lecturing, was an important factor in persistence. Indeed for a cohort of academically able students there were no significant differences in the grades of persisters and those who abandoned science but there were differences in self-efficacy, attitude towards science and other affective variables. Knowing names is one way to make students feel connected to the class and the discipline. The name-game is an effective way of helping everyone in the class connect with everyone else and begins the semester on a positive note. L.O.D.
Do these benefits come from establishing a real connection between professor and student or from simply associating a name with a face? These studies don't bother differentiating between the two. No one here has argued against genuine connection between students and teachers as a pedogogical good.
On the first day of class, I ask the students to give me a list of 10 items (with details).
For example, for the first item, they named the City of Pittsburgh. When questioned further, they gave a (ficticious) population of 100,000.
For the second item, the named a pair of boots. When questioned further, they said that it was made of rattlesnake skin.
This continued for 10 items and in each case, the list was printed on the chalk board.
Then they were instructed to give either the name of the item (and I would give its corresponding number) or they could give me the number and I would report back to them what the detailed item was. (I credit Dale Carnegie for the mnemonic device.)
They were intriguied.
At the four week point in the course, I asked for a number or for an item ... and I knew the corresponding details of every query. [gotcha!]
Then I told them that if I could remember totally unrelated things that was presented to me 4 weeks ago, THEY could surely remember things we had been covering over & over again during the past 4 weeks.
Yes, I do make it a point to remember my students' names. Thanks for the tips in your article; I'm always interested in learning new techniques.
(I still remember the names of students from several semesters ago and when I see them on campus, I shake their hand and ask how their studies are progressing.)
I have had concerns over my being able to recall student's names in the early weeks of class. Since I have to evaluate these students on their performance, especially for the laboratory component of this class, I need to be able to know each student's name so that I can develop an individual plan for any that need extra assistance. By ignoring the identity of the student, I am rendering a disservice to him or her. Thank you for validating my hunch.
I have found that a really efficient way to remember students' names is to have them fill out an info card, which includes their name (what they like to be called), hometown, some extracurricular interests and email and/or phone for me to contact them. While a list-serve works, this kind of card is helpful for me to shuffle through quickly and find a certain student. Along with photos, these notecards are a great way to learn not only student names, but also other personal info that distinguishes them from fellow students. This then encourages me to ask them about a certain activity, or how a concert or show went that they performed in, etc. Of course, this works best for classes of 30 or fewer.