Student Interest and Reading Questionnaire

At a recent training they highlighted the importance of getting to know your students. Us teachers spend countless hours with our students, don't we know them enough? I feel like I do a very good job by having conversations with my kiddos but nothing on paper.

Plus 'Knowledge of Students' is a component on my evaluation (anyone else use Danielson's framework?). If my pay is going to be determined by my evaluation scores (along with test scores) then you bet I'm going to attempt to get some high scores. So basically I need some proof I know my students rather than just those conversations my students and I have. This is where student interest inventories comes in!

Having student's fill out a student interest questionnaire/inventory at the beginning of the year allows me to get to know my students better but also understand their needs, how they work, and what I could use (internal or external) to push them to do their best. Once students fill out the questionnaire, I have it the rest of the year I could pull from. They are going to go right into my student's information section in my teacher binder for easy access.

I plan to tailor my lessons to student's preferences by reading books that relate to their backgrounds and interests. Also relate math skills to those interests and create problems that relate to them.

I got a little carried away and rather than making one questionnaire, I made four. I want to know a lot about my little guys and gals! Download all of the questionnaires here or by clicking on any of the pictures.

The first one is on student's favorites:

Then I created one on their home life and family:

I began to add school related questions on this school survey:

Finally they will answer questions on reading:

Students will fill out each one for their 'Do now' or morning work the first week of school and then on Friday they will write questions to ask me. We will go over the questionnaires and the questions they write in our morning meeting. I am really looking forward to seeing their responses and getting to know more about them every day of the first week!

The questionnaires are very flexible so do what fits your needs. You could read students the questions, use the questions to talk about these topics as a class, or even use these questions as writing topics.

I plan to give students the exact same reading questionnaire at the end of the school year because I'm hoping those answers are much, much different!

How do you get to know your students better?

ps. I'm linking up to Monday Made it!