Hi Group,
I was looking for more articles on student-teacher interactions and I came across this one: “Student-teacher interactions and better science teachers”: http://www.iier.org.au/qjer/qjer18/waldrip.html
I thought that this was an interesting article because I want to increase interaction so comprehension can increase but this article looked at interaction from the student’s perspective. The article discussed a survey, the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (OTI), that was administered to secondary students.
Overall, the found that “better teachers could be identified through the perceptions of their students on the scales of the QTI. The better teachers could be identified as those whose students' perceptions were more than one standard deviation above the mean on the scales of Leadership, Helping/Friendly, and Understanding and more than one standard deviation below the mean on the Uncertainty, Dissatisfied and Admonishing scales.”
This survey/ article does add to one of my postings from last week that personality is important in the classroom. A teacher must be a positive type of person to help promote interaction. I remember a few of my instructors in college who carried that “tough, better than you attitude” into the classroom. That was the last person I would ever ask for help. Now that we are on that side of the podium, we must be better than them.
Ken
3 comments:
I think most telling about the article is that "of the 25 teachers involved in the study, there were five teachers whose students reported significantly favourable interactions." If only 1 in 5 teachers is meeting the standard, in general - and I'm talking in global terms here -there's a problem with the teachers, the students, or both. There's got to be some reason so many teachers don't have 'significantly favorable interactions.' I wonder what those reasons are.
I don't know about college teachers, but it is interesting that the survey showed that students favored better personality of teachers. I myself am strict and I like to have fun with the students. Many students have said to other teachers that I scare them and I'm mean, but then when they get into my class they say how much they enjoyed my class and that I'm not as mean as they think. I agree with Kevin, that ratio is scary, but I don't think you would get an accurate read on a teacher based on what students say. I don't like this idea of students rating teachers or filling out surveys on them.
I agree that students rating teachers can often be a scary thought. As an instructor at a community college where student evaluations are very important to tenure (or continuing contract as we call it), it is often misleading to see the results of such surveys. Often we rely too much on what students judge as effective instruction vs. the opinions of trained professional (such as teachers, deans, etc). For example, one of our student evaluation questions ask “Does the instructor use a variety of teaching strategies?” I have often received low marks on this questions which puzzles me. I use lecture, laboratory, group presentations, collaborative learning assignments in class, videos, and computer modules (just to name a few). Often students are not competent enough to fully understand the question and serve as a reliable judge. While I often doubt the validity of student evaluations, I do agree with the final result of this article in that the better teachers tried to interest students in the learning process, involve students in developing understanding, gave students responsibility and had a level of strictness that students were comfortable and such that they felt was conducive to learning. I agree that these are important traits of an effective instructor in any discipline.
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