Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

combined effect of simultaneous verbal, vocal and facial attitude communications is a weighted sum of their independent effects – with the coefficients of .07, .38 and .55 respectively.
    (Mehrabian and Ferris 1967 quoted in Lapakko 1997)
    And with this, the idea that, in all communications, 7 per cent is words, 38 per cent is tone of voice and 55 per cent is the look on our faces, was born. Although the research has since been shown to be flawed from an academic point of view and such a conclusion is not exactly what the researchers were actually saying (‘My findings are often misquoted … Suppose I tell you that the eraser you are looking for is in the second right-hand drawer of my desk in my third floor office. How could anyone contend that the verbal part of this message is only 7 per cent of the message?’, as Mehrabian pointed out nearly 30 years later) it has still become one of the most frequently cited pieces of research ever (including by this author on many occasions both in print and verbally; as writer and critic Neville Cardus once said, ‘It is a dreadful pity when a beautifully spacious generalization is upset by one or two simple facts’).
    Whatever the overall proportions are, the fact that communication can be broken down into various elements only one of which is the words thatare being used, remains indubitable. And the fact that great teachers use this to their advantage is equally so.
    The word ‘enthusiasm’, as I mentioned in
Essential Motivation
, comes from the Greek word ‘entheos’ meaning, literally, ‘the God within’. It is, as all good teachers know, contagious. Lack of enthusiasm, as the less good teachers sometimes seem to overlook, is also contagious. We talk of motivation but, here again, we need to be aware of de-motivation. Children who come to the lesson ready and willing to learn but become switched off by our behaviours and attitudes.
    The way that we contaminate or infect others with our own emotional state, known as ‘emotional contagion’, has been the cause of a great deal of interest and study for centuries. In their fascinating and scholarly book
Emotional Contagion
, Professors Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson cite this definition of the phenomenon:
    the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally.
    (Hatfield
et al
., 1992, pp. 153–54, quoted in Hatfield
et al
. 1994)
    In other words, your state helps create their state. But your baggage is not their baggage and it should be left at the door. Similarly, their state can influence yours and neither is their baggage your baggage. What, then, can you all do to ensure that the beginning of each lesson starts with a clean emotional slate for all concerned? One technique I came across is to start the lesson with a ‘Brain Dump’, a process by which all the destructive and stressful flotsam and jetsam are ‘dumped’ from the brain by spending two minutes scribbling them all down on a piece of paper and then throwing the piece of paper away. It’s a bit like a performance review action-planning sheet in that way.
    Another simple strategy I have been encouraging teachers to do at the start of each lesson is simply to smile. Not only does smiling have a positive effect on others, especially if it is a full Duchenne smile where the eyes ‘smile’ too as opposed to just the mouth (research shows that the difference between the two can be observed strongly in the look on the faces of Olympic gold medal winners compared to their silver medal-winning counterparts; 1 elsewhere, research (Seligman 2003) has shown that bronze medal winners are actually happier than silver medallists) but it can also improve your mood. Research from the University of California in 1990 proved, by training volunteers to mimic ‘muscle by muscle’ (and we have 44 facial muscles capable of making 5,000 different expressions) the facial expressions associated with emotions like happiness, anger and disgust,that ‘voluntary facial activity produced significant levels of subjective experience of the associated emotion’ (Levenson
et al
. 1990).
    So, if you want to
feel
happy,
act
happy. Like a lot of the neuroscience, it’s not rocket science.
    If, then, the way we look communicates at least as much as, if not more than, the things we say, maybe we have to be careful in the things we are communicating?