When Michelle D. Miller leads faculty workshops, she often does what she calls a “party trick” that she uses on the first day of class with her students: learning everyone’s names. As professors have thanked her at the end of her presentations, they’ve often asked how she had pulled that off. So Miller, a professor in the department of psychological sciences at Northern Arizona University, decided to explain her process and the science behind it in a short book. A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Student Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can is scheduled for a November publication from University of Oklahoma Press. I spoke with Miller about the challenges — and potential payoffs — of learning students’ names, and how instructors can best go about it. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Most of the book is about how to learn students’ names. But first, let’s talk about why. Why would a professor go to the trouble of learning students’ names when classes might be large, and students might be in them for only a short time?
Especially in the post-Covid era, a theme that came up over and over was creating a more inviting, more inclusive classroom atmosphere where it’s less about you, this undifferentiated mass of students, and me, the professor, over here. That’s the very traditional approach, and so many of my fellow faculty are saying: This doesn’t work anymore.
We want to have classrooms where students are working with the ideas and engaging with skills we want them to develop — not just watching me show off my skills up at the front of the room. And how do you do that? Well, one great way is to have these exchanges where we’re talking about ideas, those vibrant discussions, and those are absolutely powered by the ability to actually call students by name. Instead of, well, “You in the corner, I think you said that, and the young person in the front row with the blue hat said this,” we can use the names. In my experience it transforms the first couple of weeks of a class in particular.
I was fascinated to read that learning names is different from learning other words or information about someone. That sounds true intuitively, but I was unfamiliar with the research evidence supporting it. Can you give us a quick recap here?
This is one of the areas that we had one of those rare home runs in my field of origin, psycholinguistics, which is my background in tandem with working with faculty on teaching and learning. It’s called the Baker-baker effect where, you’re a research volunteer, you look at a random picture of somebody and you say, “This is Mary Potter and she’s a baker.” You start thinking about all these associations: “Oh, I bet she has to get up early, I wonder if she’s ever made brioche.” This rich associative network kicks in to really make it a lot easier to fix that baker word in your memory. If you say “this is Mary Baker” and she does something else, like she happens to be a potter, well, that essentially arbitrary association between Baker as a name and baker as an occupation, it triggers a whole wave of very different cognitive processes, and one that makes it very, very difficult.
You lay out a four-step process for learning a name: attend, say, associate, retrieve. Can you briefly run though how it works? And is there a part of the process we’re most likely to mess up?
It does start with attention. That is the easiest step to miss — and the hardest one to compensate for. That is a theme of a lot of my other work about learning sciences: that attention just doesn’t get the due it should. The more we do the research, the more we realize that any kind of meaningful learning is going to require focused attention, and there is not a lot of that to go around. And especially in a name-learning situation outside of the lab, when I am introduced to a person, there’s a myriad of other things going on. I’m probably attending to my own internal social anxiety and thinking about what I want to say. But if we don’t attend at that point, there’s no going back, because there’s no little tape recording, there’s no security camera in the head we can rewind. That’s probably the step where we really need to train ourselves: Oh, a name is coming, time to kick in my processes for actually picking that up.
So, saying the name. We actually have different mental mechanisms or representations for how a word is said or articulated on the output side rather than how it sounds on the input side. They’re related, but those are two different things. And if I can’t say their name, I need to go back while it’s still socially acceptable to do so and get that name all over again.
“Associate” can involve all those little mnemonics that we’re told to use. And as I talk about in the book, those are also problematic. So it’s sort of the step that has the parentheses around it.
And then retrieve. If you want lasting learning, where you can come back next week and use those students’ names, you better retrieve it. So, think back, quiz yourself after class. As you’re starting the new class meeting, go around the room and say, Can I at least silently say each person’s name in my head, and who did I not get? And go back and reinforce those names.
What strategies might a professor try to work on pronouncing students’ names correctly? You write about some new technologies designed to help with this.
This is absolutely an area where technology can be a complement to our memory and our learning ability.
There are banks of pronunciations of names, and many of them are reasonably comprehensive. I know from experience that there’s nothing like, if there is a name that is unfamiliar to you personally, being able to hear it, to try to match your pronunciation to the standard in the recording. More individuals are putting their name pronunciation in things like email signatures. It’s something that I might be able to share, say, in an online course, with my students.
It’s a hard truth but it is one that I did try to get across strongly in the book: Yes, you are going to mess up. This is just something that’s challenging. It’s challenging for virtually everyone, and you are no exception. However, whether it’s an individual student’s name or students in general, you don’t get to just say, “Well, I might make a mistake, and I’m not going to try.” This comes across loud and clear from others who have written on the subject. The worst-case scenario is to imply or state outright, “Oh, your name isn’t typical to me, your name is challenging, your name is hard.” Or to say, “Well, I’m going to call you X, Y, and Z.”
I’ve seen some evidence that students respond positively to professors using their names, even if they don’t actually know them. Does it matter whether professors really learn names or use, say, table tents to call on someone by name?
Something that I cite frequently is this wonderful research article by Katelyn Cooper and colleagues that looked at a scenario like what I think you’re describing here. One of the things that I took away was yes, absolutely, it seemed to me [that there is] a very disproportionate benefit from learning even a proportion of the names, and from having the table tents and using them in class.
Just that one step is actually far more than the bare minimum. The next time that I teach a really big class with table tents, I’m going to continue trying to use them also to see how far I can get with memorizing their names. That becomes retrieval practice. And sometimes if I’m trying to master the room and I’m being transparent with the class, I’ll say, “Hey, I’m trying to get as many as I can even though there’s a lot of us. Okay, that row over there, everybody put your table tents down,” and then I try it, and they can watch me, and I might struggle or I might nail it. Either way I’m also showing them, here is how I am coping with a difficult memory task. I’m being active about it, I’m using retrieval practice, I’m coming back and trying again when I don’t get it right.
You also include some strategies for using pronouns, and explain why learning these works differently than learning names. Can you give a quick overview?
It is a completely different process. And so while the fact that it’s incredibly important for creating this inclusive classroom atmosphere and on the surface looks like the same issue — underneath the surface the processes that are going on are completely different.
When we use a pronoun, it unfolds in our brain on the order of thousandths of a second as we compose and produce sentences in our minds. As we do that, there are these online processes that make sure that all of the different parts agree, things like verb tense or the number agreement across verbs or nouns that we’re all familiar with. So the brains are doing that and chugging along, they’re usually pretty good at it, and when I assign a pronoun, I’m doing the same thing. I really quickly consult my mental representation of the person, grab the gender of the person and make sure that that all agrees. Which is all perfectly fine — unless there is something that is incongruent in my mental representation of that person’s gender. Perhaps I don’t know what their correct pronouns are, if I haven’t gathered that.
This is an uncomfortable thing, but I decided to just talk about it in the book anyway. If I’ve misgendered a student, if I make that error, I need to go back and say, All right, have I really thought through my representation of this person’s gender identity? So you kind of give a little bit of interior soul searching about that. That is really, in theory, the only way that I can ensure that process unfolds correctly from there on out.
And like many others in the field I share my own pronouns with students. That is a really good routine to get into, and this is one of many good reasons why.
You offer examples of some activities that professors can do early on in the term to start building a classroom community — and give themselves a chance to learn students’ names, too. Do you have a favorite?
I do an activity where students introduce each other — something I learned from a graduate student many, many years ago. The problem with the traditional ice breaker — go around and introduce yourself — from a memory standpoint, what is going on is I’m in my head rehearsing what I’m going to say, cause I want to look good to the group. I say it, and then I spend the rest of the time kind of rehashing in my head, “Did I get it right?” So I’m not paying attention.
This is an ice breaker that gets students out of that modality and gets them talking to each other. It also gives me time to be covertly rehearsing, picking up, and using students’ names throughout. So that is a favorite and it’s one that I unpack in a great deal of detail in the book.
I also adapt some of the more traditional basic classroom-assessment techniques. You write down the muddiest point on an index card or give me one question or something you hope to learn in this class. That’s a great thing for me to have and read. As they come hand them in, I look at the student, I look at the card, and what do you know, here’s their name again, and here’s a prime opportunity to recall.
You write that you can learn about 35 names at once, but there is no upper limit. I’ve talked to some professors who teach classes of hundreds who say they learn all or nearly all of the students’ names. There’s no trick to this? It’s just putting in a bunch of extra time on the steps you lay out?
Absolutely. Here I am going to hark back to a great book about memory, Moonwalking With Einstein. It’s about memory championships, and even though it wasn’t written by a psychologist, there are so many great psychological concepts in there. He went in thinking these people have a superpower, they were born with it, there’s something really special — and [discovers] no, they just learned a lot about the process and they’ve really honed their ability to engage those processes effectively. And so when I say there’s no upper limit, partly that just grows out of what we know about memory, but we can also point to people who are in memory championships who learn just astonishing numbers of arbitrary connections at a go because of technique, not because of talent.
But that said, sure, there’s definitely practical limits. Just the time alone that it would take to learn 100 at a go is probably just a little bit excessive for the setting. I really applaud those professors who have been doing this all along, regardless of whether they called it a certain thing or really dug into the psycholinguistic theory behind it.
