These questions—from simple intros to explorations of students’ dreams and challenges—can help teachers build relationships on day one.
August 2, 2024Getting to know your students during the first weeks of school is essential for motivating them, understanding their individual needs as learners, and integrating them into the larger classroom community throughout the school year.
The back-to-school survey is one of the most tried-and-true strategies to quickly find out some of the most important information about your students—their cultural background, their interests outside of school, their struggles, their dreams, their academic goals. The responses you receive can also help set the groundwork for building strong relationships with students.
That said, asking the right questions can be tricky. Overly specific questions—for example, like “How many siblings do you have?” or “What is your favorite subject?”—aren’t all that useful because they tend to result in curt, uninformative answers, writes educator and author Katie Martin.
Instead, educators suggest asking open-ended questions that allow students to show you who they are in greater depth. The best surveys, writes educator and coach Elena Aguilar, result in answers that help teachers “create a classroom culture where student voice is valued, where students feel their needs will be attended to, and where students begin to trust their teacher.”
To help you get started, we’ve compiled a grab-bag list of 25 effective, teacher-tested survey questions—aimed primarily at middle and high school students—that you can use to quickly learn about students’ home lives, sources of support, strengths, weaknesses, learning preferences, and more. Some questions might be a better fit for your classroom than others; the goal is to find the right mix of questions to elicit the most helpful responses from your new students.
Show your students you care about who they are as people by starting your back-to-school survey with some light get-to-know-you questions. Uncovering their deeper interests and passions can help inform your lesson planning throughout the year, writes elementary teacher Tara Olagaray. To build engagement—and a sense of relevance—in the classroom, “I like to write math story problems that feature student hobbies,” like cooking, martial arts, or Roblox, Olagaray says.
Some students may struggle in school—particularly at the start of the year—because they feel like they don’t belong or that no one cares about them. Asking students to reflect on their sources of support—and share how you can help them feel supported—can bolster their sense of belonging from the start. Uncovering “the conditions necessary for students to learn, be happy, feel relevant, and be resilient” in school can greatly impact kids’ social and academic success, writes psychology professor Maurice J. Elias.
It’s helpful to know what your students are struggling with—not just academically, but personally. When Aguilar’s middle school students shared “difficult in-school or out-of-school experiences” in their survey responses, it opened the door for impromptu conversations with students and helped her support them throughout the year. On the flip side, asking students to reflect on what motivates them can help them keep a positive outlook when things get difficult—and give teachers an insight on how to tap into that motivation.
Knowing more about your students’ study habits, their preferred method of learning, and what engages them the most can help you differentiate your lessons and better assist students who fall behind. Additionally, there can be long-term academic benefits when students are given the opportunity to reflect on their own learning.