Spaghetti, Babies, and Classroom Management

Let's say you're at an Italian restaurant and you notice a small child several tables away who had...well...a little too much fun with his spaghetti. Picture the scene. If you're imagination isn't super vivid right now, take a look at the picture below.

How would you feel if, at an Italian restaurant, you saw a child like this covered in spaghetti? Many people would think such a sight is cute. In fact, judging from the number of spaghetti baby pictures I found online, a great number of people admire how creative a kid can be with pasta. Some observers might feel a little bit bad for the parents...but only slightly. How did you feel when you saw the picture? Did you smile...at least a little bit?

As a casual observer in the restaurant from several tables away it's easy to smile and even whisper under our breath to others at our table, "Those parents over there have quite the mess to clean!" If you said something like that you'd be smiling, wouldn't you? I know I would be.

Now imagine that YOU are the parent.

How do you feel? Your smile has now most likely been replaced by an expression of dismay. Instead of feeling "a little bit bad" for the parents, you are horrified.

Rather than thinking it's cute and snapping a picture to share with the online universe, the parents feel like shrinking into the corner. They apologize at least 8 times to the server. Mom and Dad hurriedly attempt to clean the mess while glancing left and right to see who else may be scrutinizing them.

It is a rare parent indeed who can feel only a "little bit bad" for themselves and keep smiling while they clean the mess. These rare parents don't have to "force" the smile. Instead, they genuinely believe their little guy with the pasta hair is indeed cute. Sure, they may wish deep down that he kept his bowl right-side up, but such a wish is wayyyyy deep down and it doesn't cloud their smiles or dampen the twinkle in their eyes. These all too uncommon parents don't take themselves too seriously. They realize that a quick Google image search would confirm that this sort of thing happens all the time.

So...what does this have to do with classroom management? Everything. If we as teachers could take ourselves less seriously and truly en-joy our students (even when they do something stupid) then our own stress levels will plummet and we may even find that our students do stupid stuff less often.

I've seen it too many times. Teachers get upset at their students and let them know that they're upset. Too often some of my students have said, "You don't ever yell at us like ____ and ____ and ___..." I'm shocked that some teachers actually yell at a class of students for doing poorly on a test. Some teachers show frustration when students don't work hard, when they try to do as little as possible, when they prefer to cram rather than really learn...and the list goes on.

Can we try to take ourselves a little less seriously? Please? If we can be more like an observer at a restaurant instead of a frantic self-focused parent, our students will see that we actually like them. When they know that we en-joy them, guess what happens. They'll do just about anything for us. They will work harder. It's common sense and research-proven.

So, how about it? Will we choose smile at our students while we clean up their self-made "spaghetti messes"? Let's put away the threats and the scowls and treat them like we wanted to be treated when we were in school... when we did stupid stuff :-)

Body Language Trumps Spoken Content

Usain Bolt Celebrates a Victory

Usain Bolt's body language is unmistakable. We know what it means: VICTORY! Did you know that even blind people know what that body language means? According to Amy Cuddy, blind children who have never seen another person do the "victory pose" will assume the pose when they are triumphant in something!!! (Watch Amy's TED talk here: http://goo.gl/tJn7S3)

The point: Body language is hard-wired into us. People will always use your body language to figure out what you really think about something. AND your body language betrays your true feelings.

What "message" do students get from how we carry ourselves, from our body language, from our tone of voice? Do they perceive that we are tired or that we really don't think they want to learn? (I know most students would rather be having "free time" than sitting in your class, but how we react to that fact--our facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, ect--matters a lot!

Body language trumps spoken content every time. It's true.

Dr. Albert Merhabian from UCLA studied presentation effectiveness and found that the effectiveness of our communication depends a mere 7% on the words we use. 7%! How comfortable and confident our voice sounds adds 38% to the effectiveness of our communication. A whopping 55% of the message we convey hinges on nonverbal things like appearance, posture, gestures, movement, eye contact, and facial expression.

How we carry ourselves matters. A University of Minnesota study concluded that we are 43% more persuasive if we stand instead of sit.

Here's a bold concluding statement... :-) Focusing on "content" and "PowerPoints" is a waste of time IF teachers don't care about how they present themselves to their students. 

(In a future post, I'll talk about how to fine tune body language...)

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...