Ben Kestner's Blog
Thoughts on Education
What’s your name?
Teachers need to know the names of their students. Teachers also need to speak to students using their names. Sounds obvious, but some educators underestimate the immense power of addressing someone by name. There were times, when I taught at a large comprehensive school in London, when, after teaching a class for the best part of a year (two periods a week), I didn’t know all of their names. Children and adults notice when you don’t know them AND they notice when they do. I make it may business as a principal to get to know my students, how else can you build up a relationship? Walk down the corridors, smile, greet people by name, make comments like ‘good job with the basketball game at the weekend’ (sorry Alfie Kohn, I’m working on the praise thing!) and you’ll notice a huge difference. A parent probably knows their child the best. They can detect mood changes; they notice things which seem ‘out of the ordinary’. This can and is often put down to ‘hormones’, ‘teenagers’, etc, but if we as educators get to know students better, we can spot changes and we can respond to them. We can work in partnership with home to help the students. This can only be achieved when the teacher to student ratio is small. At our small international school we proudly state that our teacher to student ratio is low. This is usually interpreted as having small class sizes. This of course is educational more sound than large class sizes for obvious reasons, but I consider teacher to student ratio being ‘the number of students a teacher actually teaches’. It’s all very well having a maximum class size of 18. but if you teach 15 classes in a week, which some teachers do in a week that’s 270 students and if you only see them for 80 minutes a week, what chances have you of really knowing them? Going back to knowing their names, is it any wonder some teachers struggle with remembering names?
As a parent, when you go to look at a school or when you go to your next parent/teacher consultation day ask the teachers of your child; “How many kids do you teach a week?” and “How well do you know my son/daughter?”. Of course if they don’t know your son or daughter well it may not be their fault. Ask those questions to the people running the school!
Ben Kestner's Blog 