Welcome to EduTips, a side project of a Cult of Pedagogy podcast where I share one quick idea to make your teaching better.

This is Jennifer Gonzalez and I am your host.

This EduTip is sponsored by the Modern Classrooms Project, which empowers educators to meet every student's needs.

Created by educators for educators, the Modern Classrooms Project can help you create your own instructional videos, design structures to support self-paced learning,

and ensure that each of your students achieves mastery.

Join their free online course to learn the basics or sign up for their virtual summer institute this summer, where their experts will prepare you to launch a modern classroom of your own.

Ready to transform teaching? Visit modernclassrooms.org to start learning now.

Today's EduTip is help students learn each other's names.

One of the lessons that came from the pandemic is that most people really need social interaction.

Spending time in community with other people teaches us to work together with others, gives us a sense of security, offers lots of opportunities to understand human behavior, connects us to new ideas, art, books, music, hobbies, and even career pathways, and ultimately shapes us into richer people.

And presumably, it's one of the reasons so many of us send our students to school rather than educating them at home.

So it has been alarming to me that as my own three children have moved into high school and beyond, the number of people in their classes whose names they actually know has gotten smaller and smaller.

I can't count the number of times. I've said something along the lines of, does anyone in your biology class do X, Y, or Z, or who else besides blank is in your English class?

And they'll shrug and say something like, I don't know, I don't know the other people in my class.

What? I don't know if this is just my kids or if it's common everywhere, but it's so sad.

Yes, I know there are logical explanations for this. In elementary classrooms, classes are smaller, more self-contained, and students' names are all over the place on their desks, cubbies, or lockers, and so on.

So it makes sense that they more easily learn the names of their classmates.

Once students get older, they switch classes all day, the academic work gets harder, the pedagogy often becomes less interactive, and yes, I'll say it for you, they are always on their phones.

On top of that, technology has made it a lot easier to manage most of the business of learning through devices.

So whether students are in school or at home, they can access their schoolwork pretty seamlessly.

This makes physically interacting with other people far less necessary than it used to be.

But just because there are valid reasons for this apparent lack of interaction in some secondary institutions, it doesn't make it right.

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