Should You Call Role?

This might be a controversial opinion, but I don’t take role in my ESL classes. Here are a few reasons for and against calling role for your attendance-taking system.

Pros:

Calling role is without-a-doubt the easiest way to track your class’s attendance. You don’t have to worry about coming up with any complicated methods for taking attendance, and since it’s so straightforward, your brain isn’t scrambling to track attendance and remember names. You just call a name and write down if they are present or absent.

If you’re dealing with a particularly unmotivated or messy class, calling role can help reinforce with the students what you expect of them. If the students know that you’ll be calling role once the bell rings, then they will learn that they shouldn’t be late, and they should be seated in their desks ready to go at the start of class. In addition, it can help remind students that you are taking attendance, and that their presence each lesson is important.

In my opinion, even if you’re calling role, you should still take the time to learn your students’ names and calling role can definitely help you do that. Saying a student’s name and putting a face to that name each lesson can help solidify everyone’s names rather quickly.

 Cons:

If you’re pressed for time, calling role can eat up a lot of your class time. If you had a class with under twenty students, it might not be that big of a deal. But for my classes, which are around forty students, it ends up taking up more of my class time than I would like.

Perhaps this is because I teach at a university level, but to me, it feels infantilizing to call names. None of my students have ever specifically said this to me, but I feel a little awkward calling out each name one by one. And I know from past experience that if I feel awkward or uncomfortable, usually that translates to the students, even if it’s in a subtle way.

This might be one of the reasons I feel uncomfortable calling role, but I don’t like how impersonal it feels. Once I realized how much students are touched by the fact that I care to learn and remember their names, I’ve always wanted to show them that I do know their names, and I don’t need run through a list of names robotically at the beginning of every class.

Finally, my number one reason for not calling role is to better set the tone for the class. Before the bell rings, students are coming in, chatting with each other. I’m also walking around the class making small talk with different students. Energy is high, and once the bell rings, I want to play off of that. I like to start the lesson on a high note, focusing on what we’re going to do and bringing in a feeling of participation right at the beginning. I’ve found that stopping that natural conversation for a stilted administrative task brings down the energy. I don’t want my students to think of my class as an ordinary, “boring” class; instead, I want them to think of my class as more of a lab—a chance for them to practice and speak and learn in a light-hearted, fun way.

I know not everyone will agree with me, and that’s okay! Teaching is an art, not a science, and each teacher should find what techniques and routines work with their style. So, do you call role? How do you choose to track your attendance? And if you haven’t before, maybe you can try not calling role in the future!