The first day of school always proves to be a little rough with getting back into routines, finding classes, meeting teachers, and your classmates. It is also met with student surveys and most of the time they ask the same stuff. What do you like to do? A list of favorites, favorite teacher memory, a favorite class memory, a favorite book. Not to say those are not helpful to know about students as understanding student interest is important for lesson planning. However, these 6 questions really get student’s thinking and really help you as the teacher dive deeper into your students.
1. What are you passionate about? ‘
This question is great because it takes the list of favorite and what they like to do and rolls all into one. This forces student’s to dive deeper than the surface level favorites to really discuss what they are passionate about and why that favorite sport or activity means a lot to them.
2. How do you want to be recognized?
This is SUPER important especially for my fellow middle school teachers. Some students want and are perfectly fine with whole group aloud praise. Some students do not want the attention to be on them even if it’s for something and would do great with a more quiet nice job as you hand their assignment back.
3. What do you see as your greatest strengths?
As humans we tend to always want to pick out our flaws and we tend to know our list of weaknesses pretty quickly. However, strengths are just as important if not more important and we often brush over those. Figuring out student strength can help to be able to challenge students and lets us as teachers match up students where one student’s weakness might be another student’s strength and that second student can help the first improve this area of weakness.
4. What classroom rules do you think are most important?
This allows for students to take responsibility for classroom rules and makes classroom management down the line so much easier. After you get these responses back you can discuss them and have students agree to them so that they are more easily enforced by you as the teacher but also other students will hold each other accountable.
5. What does a successful school year look like to you?
As a teacher it is important to know what student’s goals are for the year and how you as the teacher can help them achieve these goals. Every person should have goals and you can even share your goals with students not only to hold yourself accountable but as motivation when students see that others can achieve their goals they will want to achieve theirs as well.
6. What are the characteristics or attributes you want in a teacher?
This allows for student’s to discuss what they like or maybe even what they dislike in teachers. My job as a teacher is to help student’s learn so if something I’m doing (or not doing) is not helping a student or group of students to learn then it is important that I know that right off the bat.