At different times a teacher needs be a demonstrator, motivator, administrator and evaluator, just to name some of the aspects of the profession. The conflicting nature between some roles can cause misunderstandings between the teacher and the students, as it was noticed in some publications (Hargreaves, 2000; Howard and Henney, 1998; Marks, 2000). It is up to the teacher to restore the balance of a cooperative relationship and maintain it regardless of the students current performance.
Yet, despite potential obstacles, teacher’s impact on student lives is undeniable (Whitcomb et al., 2008; Coe et al., 2014). Teaching can be described as emotionally (Corcoran and Tormey, 2012) and cognitively demanding (Emmer and Stough, 2001). Hattie (2008) highlights the requirement that, for a successful lesson, the teacher needs to be aware of every student of the classroom. With their attention divided between the teaching material, personal presentation and noticing student responses, we see why it is easy to slip into mental short-cuts (Kahneman, 2011), such as attribution errors (Fennema et al., 1990). One of the differences spotted between expert and novice teachers, is their approach to students: while novice teachers focus on
2.7. Classrooms
the teaching plan, expert teachers adjust their approach to the comprehension of students (Westerman, 1991). This emphasizes both the importance of teacher becoming a reflective practitioner (Schon, 1984) and the fact that the ability is not one which is acquired easily. Judging only by non-verbal expressiveness, both experts and novices have equal difficulties of “deciphering” student’s state of mind (Jecker et al., 1965). Observable signals include previously mentioned, such as social gaze (duration of looking at the teacher, frequency and speed of looking away, blinking), head-arm gestures (chin rubbing, mouth movement) and facial expressions (brow raising or furrowing), which illustrates the first needed component – sending of social signals. Understanding students’ reactions depends on a number of circumstances, among other things how long are the student and teacher acquainted (Stader et al., 1990). This illustrates the second component – reception and understanding of social signals. This draws a parallel with previously mentioned levels of meaning of the back-channel that Brunner (1979) identified (involvement, level of understanding, actual response). In order to evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching, teachers are constantly trying to establish a back-channel with a large population of students.
In the literature of teacher training, professional feedback to the teachers has been found to be highly valuable (Hattie, 2008), as a form of deliberate practice (Anders Ericsson, 2008) and a part of a broader knowledge-building cycle (Timperley et al., 2008). However, Range et al. (2013) observed that in order for the intervention to be successful, it needs to be well timed (long delays between action and feedback weakens the association needed for learning), and it largely depends on the experience of the persons giving feedback (Bernstein, 2008).
2.7.1 The shape of the classroom
Traditional classrooms remain the dominant environment for lecturing on all levels of formal education today (Moore, 1989). The geometry of the classroom has been presented as an emotional barrier for more natural interaction (Hargreaves, 2000). Students in the front rows are perceived as “more interested” (Daly and Suite, 1981), and majority of communication is oriented to the T-shaped region with the highest concentration of interaction focused on the front-centre of the classroom (Adams, 1969). This does not only affect the teacher’s perception, but students also adjust to the geometry of the classroom. Students who seek interaction with the teacher will tend to sit in the high-interaction places (Altman and Lett, 1970). It has been also shown that the seating arrangement will act as an amplification of students interactions – making high-verbalizers more active in the high-interaction zone, and making low-verbalizers even less active in the low-interaction zone (the edge regions of the classroom) (Koneya, 1976). The classroom environment greatly affects the perception of the teacher and students, but not always in favour of the learning process.
On the “student-centric” side of research, Daum (1972) found that distance from the teacher also has a significant correlation with the success of students. Finn et al. (2003) found that smaller class sizes (less than 15 students) affect the quality of the lecture in two ways: the
teachers takes less time to manage the learning process, but more importantly the students’ interaction between themselves also changed for the better. This seems closely related to students becoming more accustomed to studying in a large group, where individual visibility is questioned and situation makes diffusion of responsibility and social loafing easy (Forsyth, 2009).
2.7.2 Attention in learning
Several attributes have been connected with measuring student’s engagement: attention as the quality of interaction (Csikszentmihalyi, 2014), daydreaming as the periods of extreme dis-engagement (Lindquist and McLean, 2011) or time-on-task, a measure more connected with digital environments (Kovanovi´c et al., 2015).
In classrooms, teachers are trained to raise attention with various means and techniques. Breed and Colaiuta (1974) found that basic visual contact can raise the attention of students, and that teachers can be trained into recognizing non-verbal cues of low understanding (Stader et al., 1990). Goldin-Meadow et al. (1992) confirmed that, even with small children, non-verbal language can indicate if the child understands the lesson. Various structuring tools such as mixing activities (Middendorf and Kalish, 1996) have been suggested among various other approaches for maintaining attention (Davis, 2009). Techniques for classroom management, such as classroom orchestration (Dillenbourg and Jermann, 2010; Dillenbourg et al., 2011) have been introduced to help organize the many aspects teacher needs to fulfil in order to successfully manage the pedagogical scenario.
Moore (1989) pointed out that students’ attention already is divided between three types of interactions: i) learner-content, ii) learner-instructor, iii) learner-learner. The second of these has the priority over the other two in a lecture, due to its limited availability. But irrespective of position or grades, students have difficulty maintaining the attention during the whole duration of a lecture (Rosengrant et al., 2012). Even if it is not clearly quantified after how much time students lose attention, proposed values vary between 10 minutes (Wilson and Korn, 2007) and 20 minutes (Middendorf and Kalish, 1996), far shorter then the average duration of class period. Population-wise, it is reported that between 33% (Geerligs, 1994) and 54% (Cameron and Giuntoli, 1972) of students are not attentive during the class, with better attention percentage associated with the smaller class-size (Finn et al., 2003). And as we can intuitively guess, daydreaming episodes during classes have been negatively associated with student performance (Lindquist and McLean, 2011).
Assessing attention during the class has been the focus of several previous studies. The most wide spread technical aid for this purpose are the clickers (Caldwell, 2007), dedicated devices which can serve as a tool for sampling students opinions and cultivating a peer- instruction atmosphere (Mazur, 2009). Although not directly sampling attention, their purpose of identifying misconceptions during the lesson greatly aids the reflective side of teaching.