Följa John

Nedan finner du en kort sammanfattning av mycket intressant och viktig information om första intrycket som lärare gör på sina elever. Jag har alltid hävdat att det endast tar några sekunder att bedöma om en lärare har en chans att leda sina grupper på ett framgångsrikt sätt. Det bygger på min egen erfarenhet som observatör men också min första erfarenhet av att besöka klassrum under min lärarutbildning 1971 tillsammans med min gammelmoster som var rektor. Vi drog samma slutsatser – hon efter 45 års erfarenhet som lärare och rektor och jag som oerfaren lärarstuderande. Det tog oss bara några sekunder.

Nu har jag hittat forskning som bekräftar detta. Vad kan vi lära oss?1) Första intryck har betydelse; 2) Lärarens sätt att hälsa och göra entré är ofta avgörande; 3) Lärarens sociala färdigheter har betydelse; 4) Lärare och lärarstuderande bör tränas i konsten att utnyttja kropp och röst på bästa sätt för att stärka sitt ledarskap.

Informationen har jag hämtar från en blogg som heter Science bloggs.  Länken

Ursprunget är forskning av Nalini Ambady och Robert Rosenthal, Harvard University.

Ambady and Rosenthal extracted 3, 10-second video clips of 13 teachers from tapes of entire class sessions. These 39 clips were randomized and presented without sound to 9 female college students, who rated them on a scale from 1 to 9 for a variety of behaviors, including ”attentive,” ”confident,” and ”supportive.” The ratings were highly consistent between judges, with a global reliability measure of .85 overall.

These teachers were rated by their own students at the end of the term on a general effectiveness scale. I’ve created a table below to show the correlation of the ratings of the 30 seconds’ worth of clips with the end-of-semester rating:

The significant correlations — 9 of the 15 measures — are in boldface type. Concerned that their measure may only reflect a cursory evaluation of the physical attractiveness of the teachers, Ambady and Rosenthal had separate judges rate the teachers for attractiveness based on still photos. Even after controlling for physical attractiveness, the correlation between student ratings and the video clip ratings was still significant. Apparently after seeing just 30 seconds of nonverbal behavior, we can reliably predict teaching ability.

Not satisfied with comparing results only to student evaluations, Ambady and Rosenthal repeated the experiment with videotapes of high school teachers, and compared them to effectiveness ratings provided by the school principal. The results were comparable.

So how thin a slice of behavior is needed to accurately predict teaching ability? The researchers had an assistant unfamiliar with the task randomly select 5- and 2-second clips from the original 10-second clips. They repeated the rating task with a new group of female college students. The ratings for these shorter clips were less reliably correlated with the teacher effectiveness ratings, but amazingly, the 2-second ratings for college teachers were still significantly correlated with overall end-of-semester effectiveness ratings. Though these were the only short clips that were significantly correlated with effectiveness, neither the 5-second or 2-second ratings were significantly different from the 10-second ratings. What’s more, if the short ratings for college and high school teachers are combined, they do significantly predict effectiveness ratings.

So we do appear to be quite effective at making judgements about teaching ability even after viewing only a total of 6 seconds of actual teaching, and without even hearing the teacher’s voice.