How to Learn and Remember Students’ Names with Ease?

How to Learn and Remember Students Names with Ease? – Teachers are tasked with interacting and guiding at least hundreds, if not thousands of students at a school. At the beginning of a school year when a teacher starts teaching a class with many fresh faces in it, they need to learn and remember names of each one of them. It is not only important for communication but when teachers call students by their names, it also helps build trust and gives a feeling of closeness to the students.

Even today, when mobile teacher app have become the preferred mode of teaching and learning, as opposed to traditional offline classes, getting students’ names correct is an integral way of expediting the process of bonding with new students. As an educator, your aim should be, being able to recognize every student by their names by the end of the first week itself. Below are a few excellent ways which will help you in remembering your students’ names fast. Using only a couple of ways mentioned in this article might do the trick for you. Whether you teach in a traditional offline classroom or in a live class, these are the fail-safe methods of learning students’ names fast….

Start by introduction-

In your first class, ask each student to briefly introduce themselves to their classmates and to you. Moreover, you could also ask the students to say their first names every time they interact, in the initial days of the session. This way, you get to hear the names of your students much more on average than you would otherwise. Repetition helps in committing the names to your memory without much voluntary effort on your part. Therefore, asking your students to introduce themselves and saying their names each time they speak is the first step towards learning their names fast.

Use seating charts-

In the initial phase of the session, take the help of seating cards for remembering your students’ names. It involves permanently fixing every student’s seat in the classroom and arranging their seats in some meaningful order such as alphabetically or alternating between genders. In this way, you have less trouble putting the students’ names to their faces. This seating arrangement need not continue throughout the year and once you get a hang of your students’ names, they may be set free to sit wherever it pleases them.

Association-

An effective way to memorize names is by associating the new names with any person you already know, who has the same or similar name. For instance, if you have a new student named Rohan who has no beard, then imagine your friend Rohan’s short-boxed beard on little Rohan’s cheeks. Even though it may sound hilarious and silly even, the visual link generated by this simple act of superimposing the mental image of your friend on the new student’s image with the same name will in fact help you in remembering little Rohan’s name in no time.

Using images-

You could ask your students to bring a picture of themselves on the first day of the session, or alternatively, you could take a picture of each student, yourself. Next, you could place the pictures of the students in a register and write their names next to their photograph. You could also place the pictures in the seating chart or in the attendance register. That way, you would see it more often. Needless to say, doing this will make it so much easier for you to correlate and remember the name of each student with their face.

Using name cards/name tags-

Using name cards is yet another way of effectively committing students’ names to your subconscious. You can place a name card on the desk of each student. Alternatively, you could also ask the students to wear name tags, at least for the first week or so. For primary students, it is great idea to place the name tags on their backs so that they don’t rip it off playfully. Using name cards or name tags will help both, the teacher and the fellow classmates in putting students’ names to their faces.

Learning and remembering students’ names is an important function of teaching. Ideally, teachers should be able to remember names of most students by the end of the first week itself. Using the methods mentioned in this article can provide a tremendous boost to a teacher’s ability of learning and remembering their students’ names with ease.