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

Especially when we combine that with the fact that we are all very quick to pick up what this non-verbal communication is saying. In
Emotional Contagion
, the authors suggest that:
    It doesn’t take much in people’s expressions, voices or actions for others to pick up on what they are feeling. Researchers have found that teacher expectancies and affect toward students can be determined from brief clips of teacher behavior.
    (Hatfield
et al
. 1994)
    The research the authors are referring to is a study reported in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
that showed, regardless of whether they had a year’s teaching with a professor or saw just 30 seconds of video of a professor teaching,
with the sound turned off
, students could still consistently tell who the good teachers were (Ambady and Rosenthal 1993).
    Because so much communication is non-verbal it can get to us without our realizing it too, influencing us in a subconscious way. The authors cite the famous example of the ABC newscaster who was inadvertently more positive in the manner in which he delivered the news on Ronald Reagan’s 1986 presidential campaign compared to his counterparts on NBC and CBS. A follow-up telephone survey by the researchers found that Reagan was more likely to be voted for by the viewers of ABC News.
    Time well spent is to observe a colleague in their classroom with a particular group and watch not
what
they say but
how
they say it. What are the subtle differences in the tone of voice, the look on the face, their body language as a whole in their interactions between different sorts of children? Remember, the differences can be very subtle from the movement of the eyebrows when being asked a question to the ‘texture’ of the voice being used in the response.
    The question I put to teachers is what is the look on your face as a particular class enters the classroom? Is it a happy face welcoming them in that looks like you are pleased to see them? If not it should be, or at least the resemblance of one. So often I have seen teachers whose words, tone and looks convey the message, ‘I don’t want to be here and I don’t want you to be here!’ But we have a moral, ethical and professional duty not to look like that. We need to, at least, look like we
want
to be there. They
have
to be there, but we
choose
to be there. We’re even paid to be there. What, too, is the look on your face as the class leaves the classroom? (‘This is the time when I usually smile!’, as some teachers point out to me, only half joking … .) Remember that I pointed out in the previous chapter that we learn through association. If they go out happy they are far more likely to come back in happy. Don’t make me requote the research about the endoscopy … .
    Not only does your enthusiasm beget theirs, it also has positive effects both on their behaviour in the lesson and on how well they actually remember what they learned. In one piece of research, a cohort of new teachers was split into two, with one group given ‘enthusiasm training’. 2 By analysing video footage of their lessons over an extended period of time, the researchers were able to determine that the pupils who were taught by the teachers who had had enthusiasm training exhibited greater levels of ‘on-task behaviour’ than the control group. Also an intriguing paper entitled ‘Audience recall as a function of speaker dynamism’ published in 1966 showed that there was a ‘significant and strong’ relationship between the enthusiasm of the speaker, something they called ‘speaker dynamism’ and the immediate recall of what was said. ‘It is concluded that audiences remember more from a dynamic lecture than from a static lecture’ (Coats and Smidchens 1966), the researchers conclude, prompting one of those ‘Well duh!’ moments in the reader.
    What intrigues me about this research, apart from the fact that anyone could be surprised by the results, is the idea of ‘enthusiasm training’, something I certainly never received at teacher training college. Maybe we should reserve our ‘Well, duh!’s for the fact that, despite what we know about the efficacy of dynamic teachers, ‘enthusiasm training’ is not part and parcel of teacher training. So, just what is ‘teacher enthusiasm’?
    A paper published in 1978 in
The Journal of Teacher Education
entitled ‘Effects of Enthusiasm Training on Preservice Elementary Teachers’ identified eight overall component