How to Use Get To Know You Questions to Build Self-Awareness.
When a new school year begins, get to know you questions and activities become a prerequisite for building a strong classroom community. Even though it might seem unnecessary to spend time on get to know you questions and worksheets, the opposite is true.
By being engaged with get to know you questions and activities, students develop strong bonds and robust connections and establish their place in and belonging to a social group.
A teacher can design get to know you questions for purposeful communication in a classroom to teach various vital goals, such as allowing students to:
- talk about their interests
- discover their values
- reaffirm their strengths.
Through simple but uniquely targeted get to know you questions and interactions, students also build their self-awareness and raise their emotional intelligence (EQ), essential for successful functioning in a modern world.
Read about self-awareness and and how to teach it in this article.
In this post, you will discover various ways to bring get to know you questions and activities into the classroom.
As a mom of a six-year-old, I’m most interested in how my child’s teacher can create a connection, how interested she or he is in my child, and how the activities they do in the classroom serve the purpose of getting to know you discoveries.
When a teacher knows students’ favorite foods, toys, cartoons, it does not only build connections between the teacher and students, but it also creates a potential for a booming get to know you trend growing into a get-to-know-the-world endeavor inspired by a teacher and willingly pursued by students.
So how can you as a teacher hook your students, bring them on your side, and create an environment where students can cultivate their self-awareness through discovering their feelings, emotions, values, strengths, and interests?
The answer is this:
If you want to use purposeful and value-yielding get to know you activities that have self-awareness building potential, teach students how to learn about who they are, what they love and hate, what makes them unique, and what they are good at.
Let’s see how get to know you questions in a classroom can be an inspiration for a variety of activities.
Grab this FREE “Self-Awareness Teacher’s Guide”!
A. How Get To Know You Questions Can Support Students in Learning About Their Values.
Every search starts with curiosity. Every get to know you question revolves around the context students need to be exposed to build the initial understanding of the concept.
- When starting a conversation about values, start with the definition and examples of values. Students, especially at the elementary level, might have a struggle at first understanding many of the abstract concepts such as “strongly held belief,” “cultural values,” “moral values.”
- However, even though a learner might not be able to grab the concept right away, the teacher’s consistency and the resources used in the classroom for this topic will enable students’ language to develop and follow the concept’s understanding. Eventually, through get to know you questions related to students’ values, learners will acquire a solid knowledge about values.
- To introduce the concept of values, present the concept in a context – a story, for example. Books or short stories about significant historical figures or ordinary people are invaluable in providing food for thought.
- Choose stories or biographies where the character/ person exhibits a variety of values through actions and ideas. Don’t forget to prep students for reading comprehension by introducing essential vocabulary first. It might be a necessary step if you have English language learners.
- Engage students with discussion questions about the character/person they have read about to bring their attention to the values described. Use discussion questions to initiate a get to know you experience with questions students ask one another. Here, students will start discussing values and have an initial exposure to them.
- Bring get to know you questions related to values into students’ homes by asking them to interview their parents or grandparents. The questions for home surveys can target values directly (For example, “What are your family values?”) or can talk about such essential concepts at home as “success, respect, empowerment, education at home, etc.”
- Create an opportunity for students to share their family surveys in-group/ partner discussions; create a chart of common family values for the class to prepare them to think about their values through get to know you questions directly relate to values.
- Give students time to think about their values and explain their choices. (For example, “What are your top 3-5 values?” “Why did you choose them?“) Let students discuss their choices with the partner to understand better what they are writing about. When some get to know you questions start popping up, students will want to find out more about each other. You can provide some prompts for discussion to boost the opportunity for get to know you questions.
- Arrange opportunities for self-reflection through short writing prompts. It is the best way to know what students could retain and how deep they understand the concept.
- Finally, allow students to present their values in the class. Talking to an audience will lead to other get to know you questions from the classmates and give a presenter a chance to learn more about themselves.
Final advice:
Do find time for the students to present their ideas about what they’ve learned in class through presentations or pair-share conversations where different pairs rotate partners to talk to each other.
Grab this done-for-you resource to teach values.
B. How Get To Know You Questions Can Support Students in Learning About Their Interests?
All kids are interested in something and pursue hobbies. The natural urge to try new things and be passionate about their interests can be a great asset to the classroom vibe and the classroom community.
Please, find time to introduce activities that can engage students in discovering their interests and sharing them in the classroom. The best time for these activities is the beginning of the school year when many happy-tanned kiddos start forming the classroom community.
How can you inspire your students to share their interests and build strong bonding? Well, think beyond simple get to know you questions and make it an exploration.
- Of course, start with a definition and examples that can inspire kids to think about their interests. Talk about the language people use when speaking about their interests, such as “I love…“, “I’m passionate about…”, “I spend a lot of time…”, “I like to learn about …” etc. Follow with turn and talk to start students’ initial investigation of their interests.
- Instead of asking students basic get to know you questions, share your interests with the students first. Bring or show things that you are passionate about and let students hear the words “interest” and “passion” in a context. Continue with offering students the opportunity to think about and write down their interests. They can also put them on the scale to figure out what they are most passionate about. Let students share in groups.
- Engage students in a task where they write about their passions using sentence frames, like “I’m most passionate about…” or “One of the reasons I love…. is that…” Let students share with their partners.
- Allow students to showcase their passions/interests through “expert opinion” writing, describe, show, and present their interests to the class. It’s here when students will come up with their get to know you questions to ask each other about their hobbies.
- Arrange those interest presentations in small groups that rotate members so that each student can present their interest to the partner/group more than once. You will most likely hear a bubbling conversation with get to know you questions popping up every second.
- Thinks about building classroom groups based on interests. Display students’ interests on the wall and allow time for students to explore other students’ choices.
- Continue with offering students some discussion questions, followed up with some group bonding activities where they will have to talk to find an interest they have in common.
- To engage students in some analysis of hobbies, offer students an activity where they can rate different hobbies based on various characteristics. For example, “Rate these five hobbies based on whether they need the most training or the least training.” “Rate these five hobbies as the easiest or the hardest to pursue. ”
Final advice:
Do find time for the students to talk about how their hobbies changed or grew. Can they showcase their expertise with mini-presentations of their interest? It can be done through a simple show and tell on Friday afternoon.
Grab this done-for-you resource to teach interests.
C. How Get To Know You Questions Can Support Students in Learning About Their Strengths?
By creating an opportunity for students to learn about their strengths, you will foster social and emotional development for students by exploring what they are good at and their personality, which is a massive part of self-awareness.
- Please, start with the definition and examples to urge students to think about their strengths.
- Read a story about a historical figure or an individual in the present that has distinguished strengths. Before reading a story, introduce the vocabulary, which can be especially helpful if you have ELLs. After reading, continue with some discussion of the story book focusing on the strengths of the individual the book describes.
- Before offering students get to know you questions with a focus on strengths, give students examples of strengths. Then, ask them to write down their strengths they think they have. Give students time to talk about their strengths in small groups. Before the group conversation, let students write about 3 of their strengths by using sentence frames to guide their writing.
- Bring strengths exploration to students’ homes by offering a family interview. Ask students to talk to their parents/ grandparent and ask questions, such as “What are your strength?”, “Is it easy to be brave?”, “Is humor a strength? Why?” etc. Let students discuss their discoveries in class.
- Let students draw and write about their strengths in a short or long format by offering prompts and sentence frames to guide their writing.
- Engage students with some discussion questions to talk about their partners. Talking to a friend/group will allow students to clarify their strengths and get ideas to help them understand the concept of strength.
- Find time for students to present their strengths in class. Get to know you questions will naturally start forming as students ask other questions about the presentations.
Final advice:
Students’ strength can reveal themselves in how they communicate with peers and how they perform in academics. When you notice what a student is strong in, point it out. For example, “I’ve noticed you are doing such a great job working with your group. You are a great natural leader!”
Grab this done-for-you resource to teach strengths.
It might seem that talking and learning about strength and values can be a hard thing to accomplish. Some of the concepts may be too abstract for students to internalize. However, the benefit of still sticking to teaching strength, values, and interests is that a teacher nurtures students’ self-awareness by urging them to think about themselves.
Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves pointed out in “Emotional Intelligence 2.0”:
“Not education. Not experience. Not knowledge or intellectual horsepower. None of these serve as an adequate predictor as to why one person succeeds, and another doesn’t. There is something else going on the society doesn’t seem to account for.”
There is nothing mysterious about what Bradberry and Greaves talk about. The EQ (emotional intelligence) (self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management) seems to be a potent elixir that allows everyone who nurtures and grows his/her EQ to exceed their goals and achieve the fullest potential.
Introducing students to the ideas of self-awareness and giving them tools to start building their EQ is something any teacher should start doing to make sure the students can reach their fullest potential in a classroom.
If you need more support, explore done-for-you activities for groups to teach feelings. Each feeling is explored in detail through writing, speaking, and reading activities. You can get:
Interested in how to teach emotions and their influence on behavior?
Consider this “Emotions & Behavior” Journal.
If you are determined to make the social-emotional learning part of your classroom, watch FREE “Mindful Teacher” workshop.
I will show you the easiest and the fastest ways to integrate mindfulness in your teaching WITHOUT having to follow another curriculum.
This workshop will give you ideas and tools you can put into your toolkit to start designing your own mindful classroom!
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Talk to you later!
Yanina.
