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It is important to get to know your students for many reasons.  We talk a lot about educating in a way that is culturally relevant.  Choosing literature, facilitating discussions, assessments; all of the activities of your classroom need to take into account what is culturally relevant for your students in order to educate effectively.   When classroom activities are culturally relevant, students are more likely to connect the new information to their prior experiences and therefore commit the information to memory more easily, (add citation).   Furthermore, students will be more motivated to participate in classroom activities if they find it relevant to their daily lives, (add citation). 

 During class discussion with Faith last week, a lot of interesting ways to get to know your students came up.  Faith mentioned the option of finding out what your students sort of activities are involved in outside of school and trying to attend some of these events, (soccer games, dance recitals, etc).  Another idea is to go to the cafeteria and eat lunch with a group of your students every day.  This activity sounds like a great idea because it is a relaxing time where students will hopefully become more comfortable opening up.  Certainly, being very open to communication with parents provides an extremely important perspective of your students’ diversity as well.  I also like the idea of assigning some sort of autobiography based activity at the beginning of the year to see what sort of things your students express. 

In the next few weeks at my placement, I plan to use the students’ “read to self time” as a method of getting to know them.  I will visit as many students as I can during each allotted time.  I will ask them to read me their favorite book.  Learning why that book is their favorite can be a very telling thing by itself.  This one-on-one time is a great opportunity to just ask questions.  Asking questions is such an easy way to find out more about your students.