It’s easy for students to disappear into the margins or be overlooked as part of a "muddled middle." Consider using this roster audit exercise to reflect on assets that your students bring to class:

Pick a class roster to review or an unofficial roster of people you support
Identify one strength for every name: cognitive, affective, kinesthetic, academic or non-academic
Reflect on the strengths. Were there any patterns?
Reflect on names where you struggled or couldn’t identify a strength. Are there any patterns in how you interact with students? Does this suggest any gaps in knowledge or awareness you may have?
Set a goal for learning more about your students' strengths. Make a list of students whose strengths you need to learn about. How can you reach out to help them succeed? Messaging? Discussions? One-on-one meetings?
Consider planning an "Assets" class discussion or activity: Perhaps a class discussion or survey. For inspiration, consider these questions about getting to know student strengths (adapted from a list by Tricia Ebarvia, teacher and co-founder of #DisruptTexts on Twitter; part of a larger “get to know you” project). You might share the whole list with students, ask them to interview each other, ask students to draw questions from a hat, etc.

Content adapted from MIT Teaching Systems Lab course Becoming an Equitable Educator by Justin Reich; shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Text Transcript

- Using an asset mindset helps educators form learning partnerships with students in order to ensure that students experience meaningful and challenging curriculum. One important step in creating learning partnerships is being able to identify our students' strengths. In this TeachLab podcast clip, we talked with Professor Ilana Horn from Vanderbilt University. She described an effective practice that she used as an elementary school math teacher for identifying student strengths. It's called a roster audit.
- One of the things that I've done that's been pretty effective and it's not that hard to do is to ask teachers to take their rosters of the classes that they're currently teaching and see if they can go through and identify a strength for each child. And there's really interesting things that surface from that exercise. Sometimes, teachers realize things like "There are certain kids in my class that I haven't really talked to enough to be able to answer this question." Sometimes, they recognize patterns in "I can say I really recognize these kinds of strengths, but I have a harder time recognizing the strengths of my quiet kids." Or "I get so upset with the kids who act out that I can only see them as the bad kids, and I forget to look for what they have to offer." But I mean, it's sort of just a human truism in psychology that, like, we don't grow where we're not loved, right? And so, if you don't have a connection with a child over something that is good about them, something that you like about them, something that you can, like, celebrate about them, you're not gonna help them grow. That's just true of any kind of human development in any context. So, I think that pressing teachers to just look at the kids in front of them right now and to see where their blind spots are 'cause we all have them.