At the beginning of the academic year, have a look through your registers to see if there are any names of students you are unsure how to pronounce. Ask your colleagues.
At the beginning of each first lesson with your new classes, let the students know what you’d prefer them to call you. Are you a Miss? A Ms? Do you want them to include your surname?
Ideally, your school has a policy in place that means you have a column on your register for the phonetic spelling and preferred name of students in your class. This takes time to organise, with form tutors compiling a list of any students this is relevant to (you don’t need to get the phonetic spellings of names teachers don’t ever mispronounce). These forms can then be collected by heads of year and then passed on to the admin team/data manager/whoever is responsible for putting student data on the system. Then, when teachers take the register, there is an extra column there to help them out. The data from this column isn’t used for anything else, so doesn’t go home in reports or anything like that, but is just a useful prompt for the classroom. SIMS and ClassCharts have this as an option, and I’m sure other systems do too I just haven’t used them.
In your first lessons, unless you work in the most efficient school going, it is unlikely you’ll already have this prompt on your register.
So, when doing the register, apologise in advance if there is anyone’s name you mispronounce. It can be such a huge cause of anxiety for some students to go from lesson to lesson, especially in those early weeks, and have teachers totally mispronounce their names. It’s you who should be embarrassed about getting the name wrong, not the student, and make that clear.
If there’s a name you haven’t come across before and you do struggle with pronouncing it, ask the student to pronounce it for you. Immediately write down the phonetic spelling on a Post-It note. However much you think you will certainly remember by the next lesson, you will have taught a lot of different children since then and if a name caused you an issue initially, it’s unlikely being told once will be enough (unless you’re really good at that sort of thing, in which case, great).
It’s not good enough to ask a student to pronounce their name, apologise for not being able to pronounce it, and then in the next lesson go through the same process again. Keep the Post-Its on your computer screen until you’ve learnt the name/the phonetic spellings are up and running on the system.
Teachers can obviously have similar problems. Make a video of as many teachers as possible introducing themselves with their chosen title and making the pronunciation clear (or drawing attention to any common mistakes). Show this during form time in the first week. Even if you’re Mr Smith or Mrs Brown, it really helps for as many people as possible to be involved in these videos so not to isolate certain members of staff.
This is a really small thing but can make such a huge difference to students. Getting someone’s name right is the bare minimum and you repeatedly failing to do so sends a message to the student about what kind of person and teacher you are.
Why is this so important?
Mispronouncing student names can impact learning motivation and sense of belonging