One famous professor of philosophy at NYU begins or ends every class with a story. The subject of the story might be his family or his life, but there is at heart a clear ethical dilemma that reinforces the day’s material. A fi nance professor illustrates concepts with his children’s activities. For example, he tells how his daughter persuades her younger brother how he might apportion his allowance or his candy to her benefi t in what became a net present value example.
Stories help memory. They give the students a context for their more esoteric course material. They anchor theory in concrete, visual detail, and they change the language of the course. It engages the students. Once listeners hear the narrative structure begin, they are eager to hear what happens next.
The story can open a door for students into the lives of their professors while still making a relevant learning point. Holding out your life to students through a story touches all their senses as well as reinforcing memory through chronology and language. More than a few neurons are fi ring. From there the student can make associations to the lecture that could not be made from an idea or the facts on a PowerPoint slide.
Keeping the students energized
We know that the middle portion of any speech or lecture or class of any length is where attention is at its lowest. The student is most passive. We know we all suffer from a form of attention deficit. My estimate is seven minutes on average is all we can count on for focused attention. Many tricks allow us to work against
these habits. Sharpening our awareness of timing as a tool to create and use energy will help shape structure of our lessons.
Thinking about where the action is located and the kind of learning students are being asked to do will keep the class energized and the professor, too. Shift the learning from the podium to the class and back again. And remember that some play-acting helps. In acting, we learn that energy and enthusiasm can be created by deciding to be energetic and enthusiastic. By our own presence, even following the lead of the learner, we can keep the energy level of the student higher.
Eye contact
How do we follow the lead of the learner? This fi rst rule for following the learner is to see the individual student—‘eyeball-to-eyeball’. This eye contact brings the professor in touch with the student and the student in touch with the professor. You are making an emotional connection. One prominent researcher at a business school who consistently received poor student evaluations was often told by his students on the evaluation sheets that he did not care about the students. They said other things as well, but the reaction was emotional and negative. He did care. He spent many hours preparing. The students made comments about his being knowledgeable and that he was a productive researcher; they recognized his scholarship.
They just did not realize that he wanted to be in communication with them. When he invited me to consult with him, I attended his class after our interview , I was astounded to note that after 20 years’ teaching, he was not making eye contact with his students. He never looked at them directly. He was turning his head, glancing in the direction of his students, but never actually looking into their eyes or really seeing them.
When the speaker does not see his audience, the audience, without every effort, will involuntarily turn off. This will often take a physical turn: going to sleep, getting restless, or other physical responses to boredom. What interests me is the emotion aroused by it—the angry response. Notice this in yourself when you fi nd yourself listening to a knowledgeable speaker on a topic you espouse interest in, yet fi nd that you cannot pay complete attention; observe the speaker’s eye contact. You may fi nd that the speaker is not really looking at any individual in the audience. This is true of an audience of any size: in rooms of two hundred, if the speaker makes eye contact with a single member of the audience in every section of the room, then all members of the audience will feel that they are being seen as well.
The professor derives many benefi ts of eye contact: losing self-consciousness, and gaining sustained feedback. Against our intuition, sustained eye contact reduces performance nerves. As important as helping with performance nerves, it provides a feedback mechanism, for example, for pace, volume, and variety.
Feedback from eye contact, careful observation, informs the professor of content issues. The feedback indicates whether a concept was sufficiently explained, or whether the students are tuned out or turned off, whether it is time to move on, ‘they’ve got it’, or whether this is really important and they are not quite getting it: say more about that. The feedback loop needs to be completed; during a lecture eye contact is crucial.
In one class I observed, the professor made eye contact with the PowerPoint slides, her computer and then, lastly, the class. The attention of the students flagged, energy in the class was fl at, distracted. The more she talked while looking away from them, the more the students had to fight to keep engaged. When she began to focus more on them, she realized that the students were getting only about half of the lecture, if that much. Their feedback signaled their confusion. She began to offer examples, practice sessions, illustrative cases, and so on. In short, she began to teach.
For the student, it assures them that their performance is being observed—the professor is audience for their work. They learn from the professor what it is like to have objective and constructive feedback on their work. We know from playing with our children and from observing their play how much influence is gained from simply being present to them. Eventually, through time in class and time in profession, the students will evolve their own feedback mechanisms. Until then, the professor as witness and model helps them learn to reflect on their learning.
As these examples indicate, eye contact offers much more than might fi rst appear. For the younger student, needing a relationship with the professor is more obvious, but it is no less significant to the older student. Our progress in the course depends upon it. I am not ignoring the skills of the self-directed learner, the learners who know how to do the work regardless of the teaching. These students are always there, but as we know, learning is much more than just hearing and recalling facts. Eye contact is critical, specifically, for moving forward into practice and application, and supportive connection. It also should be a reminder that learning begins with the emotions, our motor skills are close to our emotional center in the brain, the root of emotion comes from motion, ‘e-motion’.
Read More : Teacher guide : Stories for learning
