What Makes a Good Doctor?

"I went to a new doctor today," she told me. "I'm glad I switched to him. He's a really good doctor."

"Great!" I paused. "What made him seem like a good doctor?"

The woman's reasons weren't very complex. The doctor looked her in the eyes and had a nice smile. He took time to explain things to her and didn't seem like he was rushing on to the next patient. And he spoke with the woman as if she, too, were intelligent.

"Sometimes doctors talk to you like you don't know anything." She looked thoughtful. "He wasn't like that."

During that conversation, it struck me that none of the woman's reasons had anything to do with the skill of doctoring. None of her reasons conveyed the physician's expertise in medicine or his experience or credentials. Everything the woman mentioned had to do with the doctor's interpersonal skills.

He was friendly and, therefore, he was a good doctor!

A doctor's perceived friendliness even affects malpractice lawsuits! If you were to analyze a huge number of malpractice lawsuits, you would discover that there are highly skilled doctors that get sued a lot and mistake-laden doctors that rarely get sued!

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In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell writes about a researcher who analyzed communication skills of two groups of doctors. In one group were doctors who had never been sued. The 2nd group's doctors had been sued at least twice. The doctors who had never been sued spent an average of 18.3 minutes with each patient. The lawsuit-experienced physicians spent just 15 minutes. Those who had never been sued were better listeners and encouraged the patients to talk by saying things like, "Tell me more about that."

But it goes even further. Researchers took audio recordings of doctor-patient interactions and filtered out the content frequencies. After content-filtering, all the words sound like garble--you can't understand the words that are spoken. But you can still hear the tone of voice. A panel of judges rated 40-second clips of the garbled conversations for characteristics like warmth, hostility, anxiousness, and dominance. Based on a mere 40 seconds of garbled conversation, the researchers could accurately predict which doctors had been sued and which had not!

The implications for teachers are many. How we say things matters as much as what we say--maybe even more. The impressions we give off with our tone of voice impacts our students more than we can know.

Do you think we could evaluate teachers based on a 40-second clip of garbled communication with their students? What would we find?

Also in Blink we hear of research on college professors. Here's what Malcolm Gladwell writes, "The psychologist Nalini Ambady gave students three ten-second videotapes of a teacher--with the sound turned off--and found they had no difficulty at all coming up with a rating of the teacher's effectiveness. Then Ambady cut the clips back to five seconds, and the ratings were the same. They were remarkably consistent even when she showed the students just two seconds of videotape."

In those videotapes, there was no sound! Body language, in addition to our tone of voice, communicates volumes to our students. They get impressions of us before we open our mouths, before they open a book.

What can we take away from all this?

First, let's be more conscious about how we present ourselves to our students. Do they perceive that we care about them? Do they believe we enjoy teaching them? Would they think that we are "warm"? I'm not a doctor, so I'm not in danger of being sued. But how is my effectiveness as a teacher impacted by my tone of voice and body language?

Worth thinking about...