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How can you spot a good professor?
An infamous study by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, ``Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations From Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness,'' shows that students can predict a teacher's ratings with significant accuracy after watching a 30-second silent video clip of the teacher at work. Resist the urge to attribute this to the superficiality of students' ratings. What is the nonverbal magic that an audience recognizes so quickly?
I believe self-confidence is the critical non-verbal quality which audiences pick up on very quickly. Do you agree? Here is more, full of good advice, via Greg Mankiw (now a member of the American Academy) and Craig Newmark.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 2, 2007 at 01:39 PM in Education | Permalink
Comments
I'm surprised that William Thomson's excellent "Guide to the Young Economist" (available on paperback from MIT Press) has not been mentioned in this context. Yes, this comes from one of William's former graduate students/advisees, but I think it's not just an automatic ad for my ex-advisor's book. It seems to me the book has a lot of sensible advice, along the line of the second link in the post, but targeted explicitly to the economics graduate student / new professor.
Posted by: Dimitrios Diamantaras at May 2, 2007 2:13:11 PM
I have some lecturers that definately suffer from self confidence. I think that there will be a strong correlation between the number of times lectures make eye contact with students and their ratings in the evaluation. This would be due to openness and flexibility of approach. Maybe that is self confidence, but it's a specific type of self confidence.
Posted by: thom at May 2, 2007 2:17:34 PM
Attentiveness, enthusiasm, interest, and interaction are probably all discernible to some extent.
Posted by: Lord at May 2, 2007 3:21:52 PM
Or maybe it's Asperger syndrome?
Posted by: alphie at May 2, 2007 4:09:07 PM
I will say this for a teacher's deliver as I say it about getting your way with a woman:
If you can make her smile, you are halfway up her leg!
humor always helps
Posted by: fred lapides at May 2, 2007 5:42:17 PM
I wonder how accurately people can predict the quality of a teacher by just seeing their name.
Without getting into specifics, I know I have avoided classes based on professors ethnicities more than a couple times, and I feel that that has paid off each time.
Posted by: Joey Jo Jo at May 2, 2007 11:54:30 PM
I wish to understand this post a little better: Is the fact that 30-second, silent, observations of teachers accurately predict their course evaluations suppose to indicate (a) that people can pick up a lot of information very quickly? Or it it perhaps (b) that end-of-term student course evaluations of teachers are extremely shallow and don't really measure teacher quality or effectiveness?
I lean toward (b), myself...
Posted by: Alex R at May 3, 2007 11:39:58 AM
It's humour for sure. The essence of humour is asymetric interpretation, i.e. learning.
Posted by: will mcbride at May 4, 2007 12:57:36 AM
The New Yorker Magazine did a great article on this subject about 8 years ago. Talked about Microsoft's Steve Ballmer making a hiring decision based on a person who asked a question in the audience during one of his speeches. Ballmer had his handlers track the guy down and offer him a job.
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