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How to Build Relationships with Students--Eat with your students to learn more about them and their families

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How to Build Relationships with Students--Eat with your students to learn more about them and their families

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Leeson- CTE - personal website and game idea

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You found our list of the best icebreaker questions for work.

Icebreaker questions are prompts you include at the beginning of a work meeting or activity to facilitate quick introductions and team building. For example, the prompt might be "share your name, role, and what you usually eat for breakfast." The goal of these questions is to have fun, create points of connection between participants, and build confidence speaking in front of the group. You can use icebreakers for work, and in meetings with coworkers, college students and other groups. Other common spellings for these prompts are "ice breaker questions" and "ice breakers questions."

These questions are similar to get to know you questions and can be great for virtual team building, as a team building activity for conference calls or as part of The 8% Rule.

This list includes:

So, let's get to it!

Random Icebreaker Generator

Press the button to generate random icebreaker questions.

Fun Icebreaker Questions

Funny Icebreaker Questions

Good Icebreaker Questions

Best Icebreaker Questions for Meetings

Good Icebreaker Questions for Work

Great Icebreaker Questions for Adults

Fun Team Icebreaker Questions

1. Which fictional team is the best team of all time?

2. Which real team is the best team of all time?

3. Would you rather be an Avenger or a Power Ranger?

4. Would you rather join Metallica or Backstreet Boys?

5. Were the Spice Girls a good team?

6. What is your earliest memory of teamwork?

7. What is something you accomplished as part of a team?

8. What was the first team you were part of?

9. Have you ever won something as a team?

10. Would you rather do a large project independently or as part of a team?

11. On a scale of 1 - 10, how much of a team player are you?

12. Can lone wolves be part of a team?

Here is a full list of team building questions and this one with team bonding questions.

Icebreaker Questions for Students

Weird Icebreaker Questions

Community Building Questions

1. What is a good way to give back to the community?

2. What is an easy way to do something nice for someone?

3. Who is someone in your community that makes a difference?

4. Would you rather live in a city or a town?

5. What is the best example of a community you have seen?

6. Would you join a community in space if it was permanent?

7. Would you rather live 100 years in the past or 100 years in the future?

Inappropriate Icebreakers

1. How much money do you make?

2. Who is your office crush?

3. What was the most difficult thing about your childhood?

4. Have you ever seen a therapist?

5. What is your mother's maiden name?

6. How did you get your worst scar?

7. What is the worst advice you have been given?

Holiday Icebreaker Questions

1. What is the first gift you remember receiving?

2. What is your earliest memory of Christmas?

3. Have you ever told someone Santa is not real?

4. How do you like your potatoes?

5. What is the best holiday or winter treat?

6. What is a simple holiday tradition you like?

7. What is your New Years resolution?

8. Would you rather live at the North Pole or the South Pole?

9. Which holiday song is your favorite?

Here are more holiday icebreaker questions.

Icebreaker Questions for Kids

How to run good icebreaker questions

Running good icebreakers is more difficult than most people think, especially for adults or at work. You have likely been to a conference or meeting where you are prompted to "say your name, and what you hope to get from the session." This question is boring.

Instead, start with a fun or interesting question so that people want to listen to the answer. Then, have the host prompt with the icebreaker, name who will go next, and then give their own answer as a demo. If the participants are in a circle, you can continue in that direction, and in online meetings each person can nominate who goes next before sharing their answer. This format helps make it clear who should speak and win, which also removes anxiety for some folks sharing out.

Most importantly, choose the best icebreaker questions for your group. Factors to consider include group dynamics, familiarity, the setting, how much time you have, and your goals. If you are in doubt, then choose a unique question over a common one.

Final Thoughts

Icebreaker questions are a fun and easy way to increase engagement at work, meetings, and events. You can spend just five minutes on this activity and learn a lot about your coworkers o; it is worth it!

Next, check out these icebreaker questions for virtual meetings and our question generator for more ideas.

You may also be interested in five minute team building exercises, most likely to questions, this or that questions, would you rather questions and question games.

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Icebreaker Questions for Work: The #1 List in 2023

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A list of fun icebreaker questions for work. Includes categories like "good", "great", "best', "weird" and "funny."

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This is an interest inventory I made for student teaching this year. I decided to make a little worksheet that was student friendly for the kiddos to fill out as I was working on my contextual factors. It's important that we get to know our students at the beginning of the year. Some of the questions include favorites: book, tv show, movie, color, etc. And other questions ask academic questions: what's your favorite grade? Have your students fill this out at the beginning of the year to understand how to accommodate and make adaptations for each and every student!

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Student Interest Inventory: Get to know your students.

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This is an interest inventory I made for student teaching this year. I decided to make a little worksheet that was student friendly for the kiddos to fill out as I was working on my contextual factors. It's important that we get to know our students at the beginning of the year.

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FREE Back to School Interest Inventory for Grades 3-5

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Do you want to get to know your students better at the beginning of the year? Do you want to know some of your students' interests. If so, then this Back to School Interest Inventory is for you.It is a quick one page inventory that will help you to form a connection with your students.

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This simple fully editable one-page, two-sided interest inventory would be a great addition to a teacher's first day of school routine. It includes thought-provoking general questions for getting to know a student as well as a learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) inventory.

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This simple fully editable one-page, two-sided interest inventory would be a great addition to a teacher's first day of school routine. It includes thought-provoking general questions for getting to know a student as well as a learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) inventory. ...

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Use this forced copy slide template to get to know your students better!!

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How Empathy Maps Can Help Teachers Connect with Students

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How Empathy Maps Can Help Teachers Connect with Students

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Pulling together information about a student into what's known as an empathy map can help teachers provide better instruction.

Allison Shelley for the Alliance for Excellent Education

Being empathic toward students directly correlates with our ability to share in their feelings and perspectives and understand their academic needs.

Empathy maps can be a scaffold that individual teachers or grade-level teams use to begin empathizing with students while simultaneously increasing their knowledge of them-which is critical for raising equity in schools. The empathy-mapping process had its beginnings in product development and was initially created to help companies understand their customers' needs.

In education, an empathy map is a simple visual that captures knowledge about the behaviors, attitudes, needs, strengths, struggles, emotional states, and other key attributes of a particular student or group of students. In my coaching work with schools, the empathy-mapping process primarily becomes a helpful tool to assist grade-level planning teams in empathizing with their students and developing more equitable and personalized lessons.

Creating maps helps teachers consider things from the students' perspectives and takes into account a child's interests and challenges.

Additional opportunities to make better instructional decisions based on the true needs of students,

A better understanding of students and their life/academic circumstances,

Pertinent student information in one visual reference,

Callouts of key insights gleaned from data or research,

A common understanding among adults in a school, and

An equity-based, collaborative tool for teachers and other stakeholders who interact with the same students-which can be helpful for systemic diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work.

Empathy maps also provide the following benefits:

How to Begin Empathy Mapping

Creating empathy maps is relatively simple once you gather pertinent information about your students. This may include their goals, hobbies, interests, and areas of academic, career, and social needs, as well as data from assessments. Traditional ways of collecting this information about students can be through polls, surveys, and looking at student work (e.g., reflection journals, essays, digital portfolios, and passion-project-based learning projects).

However, knowledge about students can also be gleaned in classroom discussions aimed at checking in and building rapport, paying attention to what they care about (e.g., social issues), recognizing their gifts and abilities in how they transfer learning and in things they voluntarily talk about.

I encourage educators to update this data throughout the school year. Sometimes the kids change, and so should our perspective when empathizing with them. The key here is to use what we know to create a better school experience for them. Some examples of using what we know about students through our curations may include developing unit or project themes they care about, considering how they may want to transfer learning through the products they create, and the themes of other class-based activities (field trips, clubs, etc.).

Constructing the Map

Now that we have some pertinent data, we can begin the mapping process. Treat this as a fun and informative experience-we're creating an artifact for increasing our understanding to help students. We won't always get it perfect, so it should be considered a working outline.

If you want to freehand your empathy map or collaborate with others, the only materials needed are paper, sticky notes, and markers. I prefer to print worksheets from a template I created with the following five sections:

1. Interests and goals. These items should motivate, inspire, and emotionally compel them.

2. Areas of strength. These are areas that a student excels in. Knowing their assets can be leveraged by using what they are good at to help them build on what they need to improve.

Ability to interpret informational text

Understanding cause and effect

Unit conversion (proportional reasoning)

Developing habits of mind

Using design thinking for designing from the perspective of the end user

Disaggregated summative and formative assessment of key data points can also be addressed here for helping to drive future remedial/instruction focuses.

3. Academic needs. Areas of academic weakness in this section of the empathy map will vary among the content areas (i.e., English language arts, math, science, and social studies). Pay close attention to important concepts and skills that they will need for making cross-curricular connections. Here are some examples of concepts and skills that cut across multiple disciplines:

4. SEL needs. The integrated framework developed by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, offers essential competence areas that students need to hone their understanding, abilities, and attitudes across. These include self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.

5. Career needs. Career needs are an optional label in empathy mapping, as not all teachers focus their instruction on careers. However, content-area teachers should make career connections to the academic concepts and skills that they teach. Essential career skills like self-management, problem-solving, and the four Cs (communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking) can be addressed as needed.

Career and technical education (CTE) teachers should map to identify areas of weakness that prevent learners from being fully informed about the benefits of developing or following an individual college and career plan.

It's important to point out that educators are not bound to use only the five labels suggested above. Feel free to personalize the process and include labels relevant to your teaching context.

Using Empathy Maps

The empathy maps we design are helpful only if we use them. I like to use mine to guide instructional decisions that best support my learners (e.g., instructional scaffolds and personalizing learning) and to avoid cognitive overload for them by incorporating activities in lessons that promote learning as productive struggle-and not frustration.

In my DEI work, I have found the empathy mapping practice extremely useful for determining where I needed to become more socially and culturally competent regarding the students with whom colleagues and I are striving to empathize.

The push for advancing equity in schools has made educators aware that we must find creative but practical ways to understand students culturally, socially, and academically. Through empathy mapping, you may discover those essential points to consider to help them learn and apply the life, social, and academic skills that are appropriate for them.

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How a Simple Visual Tool Can Help Teachers Connect With Students

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Pulling together information about a student into what's known as an empathy map can help teachers provide better instruction.

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September is here, and educators are starting to deep dive into their content - the meat (or tofu) of the academic year, if you will. We're working on building a welcoming, relationship-based learning environment; we've introduced and practiced classroom expectations and agreements; maybe we've even devised a collaborative social contract with our students. Now it's time to start in with the real learning, right?

Teaching All Brains

Our students show up to our classrooms immersed in experiences - some great, some not so great, and some traumatic. Our students' brains are looking at academic content with all those experiences as well. Some days, they might be 100% ready to learn, and other days not so much.

We adults can relate. Consider the days you come to work after a bad commute, a family argument, or lost phone/keys/backpack. It can be difficult to switch gears and get focused.

Well, for those children who experience deep and consistent trauma (food insecurity, family illness, transient living situations, institutional racism), they can have a hard time feeling safe enough to connect someone in the room, let alone connect with academic content.

It is our job and calling as professional educators to teach everyone who walks into our learning environment. We know that learning happens most effectively when teachers and learners have authentic connection. So, how can we take steps to foster this authentic connection with each of our students, considering their diverse experiences and fluid brain states (and ours!)? How do we meet our students where they're at, and invite them to reach their full learner potential?

Neuroscience For The Win!

Since teaching and learning happens in human brains, it's helpful to know a little bit about brain science. Zaretta Hammond, educational equity advocate and author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, explains it this way:

There's real science behind this idea of caring as the on-ramp to learning. When we feel cared for, our brain is flooded with neurotransmitters and hormones like oxytocin, the same hormone that makes moms fall in love with their babies even after the pain and effort of labor. These "happy chemicals" tell our pre-frontal cortex, the thinking part of the brain, that all is safe socially, emotionally and physically. All systems are a go for learning.

What happens if you don't feel safe or cared for? Ain't no learning happening. The flood of stress hormones like cortisol divert blood from the pre-frontal cortex to the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ in our reptilian brain, in preparation for fight or flight. Not the time for learning. The brain is signaling us that it's time to respond to threats, not lay back and chill.

In order to lower cortisol levels (not good for learning) and increasing oxytocin (very good for learning) in the brains of our learners, we need opportunities where we can demonstrate care. A great place to start is developing intentional practices that foster connection. Here are some ideas!

Hammond's Trust Generators:

Hammond, Zaretta. Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students. Thousand Oaks: Corwin, 2015

This Common Sense Education post talks about the theory behind games which are specifically designed to foster connection in the classroom!

Here is an Edutopia article with a list of six concrete connection-building activities to grow a caring learning community, with a special focus on English Language Learners.

Incorporating Austin ISD's Three Signature SEL Practices (welcoming rituals, engaging pedagogy, optimistic closures) into classroom routines creates opportunities for ongoing connection-building!

Exploring how to introduce culturally-responsive restorative practice community building circles into learning environments is a powerful way to foster authentic care in learning environments.

There are all kinds of ways to build intentional connection practices into teaching and learning relationships, and educators have often been using their own methods for years. What are some ways you will build authentic caring and connection in your classroom this year? Let us know in the comments, and tag us in social media to keep us posted at @austinisdsel!

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September is here, and educators are starting to deep dive into their content - the meat (or tofu) of the academic year, if you will. We're working on building a welcoming, relationship-based learning environment; we've introduced and practiced classroom expectations and agreements; maybe we've even devised a collaborative social contract with our students.

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Start the year by writing each student's name on a note card. Use each card to send home a happy note. Once each student has received a note, start again.