10 seconds is all it takes … to judge a teacher

by | Tuesday, November 05, 2013

snap

I just read of the sad demise of Nalini Ambady, social psychologist at Stanford. Her research on the accuracy of first impressions connected with me (from the moment I first glimpsed it). As the NYTimes reports (Nalini Ambady, Psychologist of Intuition, Is Dead at 54) Dr. Ambady’s research on how people make snap judgements tells us just how important first impressions are.

For instance in an study (titled Half a minute: Predicting teacher evaluations from thin slices of nonverbal behavior and physical attractiveness; Ambady & Rosenthal, 1993) they

… had students view soundless 10-second videos of professors teaching. The students were asked to rate each professor, none of whom they knew, for qualities including honesty, likability, competence and professionalism.

When their responses were compared with evaluations from students who had studied with those professors for an entire semester, they correlated to a striking degree… the correlation held even when the videos were trimmed to only two seconds.

This study resonated with my instincts and this is something that I have taken to heart. It is for this reason that I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking of what to do on the very first day of class… That first meeting for me is crucial. Matt and I wrote up our reflections on this (designing the first day)… many years ago. Sadly, for one reason or another, this article never made it to print. For the record here it is: Designing learning from day one: A first day activity to foster design thinking about educational technology

A few randomly selected blog posts…

21st century learning article receives ISTE award

Back in July 2013, the Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education (JDLTE) published our paper on 21st Century Learning. This paper written with Kristen Kereluik, Chris Fahnoe and Laura Terry looked at over a dozen different 21st century learning frameworks and...

The (type)face of Obama

As a follow-up to a previous posting about the many (type)faces of politics, here is an article in the NYTimes titled To the letter born, discussing the manner in which the Obama campaign has leveraged the use of typography in their campaign.

Ganapati Festival Photographs, 2011

The Hindu god Ganesh (the elephant-headed one) is celebrated across India, and the world, around this time of the year. The Hindu community in Lansing is no exception. A couple of days ago I was asked to take pictures of a music program at the local temple. It was a...

Symmetry: new ambigram

I love the idea of self-reference, words or sentences that refer to themselves in some manner or another. For instance consider the sentence, This is a sentence. This is an example of a relatively benign self-referential sentence. Other examples may not be less...

Aesthetics & STEM education: A new framework

Aesthetics & STEM education: A new framework

I have always been intrigued by the nature and role of the aesthetic experience in learning. A few members of the Deep-Play research group have been exploring this issue for a while (for instance we have written on, why science teachers should care about beauty in...

Oh Wow! Oh Wow! Oh Wow!

Much has been written about Steve Jobs in the past few weeks since his passing but the best piece I have come across is the eulogy by his sister Mona Simpson. Mona Simpson is an author and professor of writing and delivered this eulogy on Oct. 16 at his memorial...

David Jiles, Ph.D., Creativity Expert, Plagiarist!

I do not know who David Jiles, Ph.D. is. I do know that he is a plagiarist, an intellectual crook and a thief of the highest order! I do not write these words lightly. I was first informed of this by Mike Deschryver and have over the past few days attempted to look...

Understanding student engagement

I had posted recently about a Gallup poll on student engagement. Essentially the poll showed that student engagement dropped precipitously (though as I wrote, not as starkly as their graph indicated) as students moved from elementary to high school. My friend, Gaurav...

Shape of the earth, top 10 reasons

I have written previously about determining the shape of the earth... for instance, here is a post on seeing the shape of the earth using eclipses. (A somewhat similar effect could be seen in my photo of the moon during a lunar eclipse). On the web, I found another...

1 Comment

  1. Nada Mach

    Hi, Punya.

    It is so sad that she died so young!

    This is very interesting – I just downloaded your paper. I am wondering how we can streamline this for interview purposes (we interview all our teacher prep candidates before they move on to our second phase).

    best,
    Nada

    Reply

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Diigo links 11/15/2013 | DrAlb - […] 10 seconds is all it takes … to judge a teacher […]

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *