Identifying student needs

Much of your knowledge and understanding of your students will come from all of the time you have spent with them in the classroom – all of those interactions help inform your understanding of who they are, what they feel and think, and what their particular needs are.

This is valuable knowledge to make use of, but sometimes we might need to teach students we know less well, or that we are meeting for the first time, or we might want to deepen our understanding of our current students’ needs.

It might also be that when we are teaching students in an online environment their needs are different to when they are in the classroom.

Reflection Questions

What are some of the different ways you come to know and understand your students’ needs just by interacting with them daily in the classroom?

What helps with that process?

What can get in the way of that process?

Tools for Identifying Student Needs

There are lots of ways we can use to explore and develop our understanding of our students’ needs and these tools will be useful in different sorts of circumstances and contexts.

Sometimes we might want to know how students think and feel in a general way about a particular topic, skill, or aspect of a course. Sometimes we might want to identify in a very specific way the level of understanding or knowledge students have.

We might also want to engage in this process by ourselves, with colleagues, and/or with our students.

Much of the material covered in Module 5 that discusses assessment for learning will be very useful when determining student needs, so issues of assessment-informed understanding will be left for that module. Instead, we will look at a powerful tool for identifying student needs that builds on our discussions of empathy and reflection.