Chronicle of Higher Education, How Can Professors Learn Students’ Names? A Scholar of Memory Shares Her Process.:

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. …

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.

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