First (Day) Impressions
I’d confidently wager that just about every book on how to be a teacher says that the first day is the most important day of the year. That’s when you set the tone for the 179 to come. Cliche, yes, but what pressure!
What is the tone you want to set? And how are you going to get there? Seems to me, if there aren’t a few butterflies fluttering around those questions, you aren’t thinking about them enough. (Generic you, of course.)
Compound that with the power of first impressions, and oh man.
In his bestselling “celebration of the power of the glance”(14) Blink, author Malcolm Gladwell gives an inkling of how important those first 40 minutes can be, and how lasting are the judgments made in those minutes. Gladwell describes the power of the unconscious and spontaneous decisions we make regularly about the new people and ideas we encounter daily. He poses this question: “How long, for example, did it take you, when you were in college, to decide how good a teacher your professor was? A class? Two classes? A semester?” (12).
I, for one, made that decision with what I now might think is unfair haste. In that, I am sure I am not alone. And I see that I had little control over it.
Gladwell continues with an anecdote of some research done by Nalini Ambady, currently a professor in the psychology department of Stanford University. Ambady showed students three video clips of a teacher - no audio, just video. Ambady found “they had no difficulty at all coming up with a rating of the teacher’s effectiveness” (12).
How could that be? we teachers ask.
She cut the clips down first to five seconds, then to two. “They were remarkably consistent even when she showed the students just two seconds of videotape” (12).
What? Now, these were students who only saw the briefest of snippets of the instructor at work.
But.
“Then Amady compared those snap judgments of teacher effectiveness with evaluations of those same professors made by their students after a full semester of classes” (13).
Her findings... (gulp)
“A person watching a silent two-second video clip of a teacher he or she has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who has sat in the teacher’s class for an entire semester” (13). Gladwell calls that the power of the human “adaptive unconscious.” Without getting into the cognitive psychology of the set of mental processes, and the inflexibility of the judgments involved, I'd call it a powerful reminder of the importance of the first day of class.
So many of us have gotten less than helpful advice about how to handle that first day. “Don’t smile.” “Establish all of your rules on the first day.” “Give out the textbook and make them cover it as their first homework assignment.” “It doesn’t matter what you do on the first day, it’s pretty much a throw-away.”
I’ve done all of those first days. They didn’t achieve the tone I wanted. The first days I spent that way left me feeling like a sort of boring, tight, uncharacteristic shadow of myself, thinking man, if I were you, I’d change out of my own class right now.
I want students to know that our class will be rigorous. I want them to know we will be engaged every day in becoming stronger readers and writers and discussers and thinkers. We will think deeply and write widely and read the story of humanity among the many pages our eyes traverse. I want them to see that it is their story. I want them to know each other and themselves better for our efforts. I want them to know that their thoughts and ideas matter. That they matter - in the room, and in the world.
What is the tone you want to set? And how are you going to get there? Seems to me, if there aren’t a few butterflies fluttering around those questions, you aren’t thinking about them enough. (Generic you, of course.)
Compound that with the power of first impressions, and oh man.
In his bestselling “celebration of the power of the glance”(14) Blink, author Malcolm Gladwell gives an inkling of how important those first 40 minutes can be, and how lasting are the judgments made in those minutes. Gladwell describes the power of the unconscious and spontaneous decisions we make regularly about the new people and ideas we encounter daily. He poses this question: “How long, for example, did it take you, when you were in college, to decide how good a teacher your professor was? A class? Two classes? A semester?” (12).
I, for one, made that decision with what I now might think is unfair haste. In that, I am sure I am not alone. And I see that I had little control over it.
Gladwell continues with an anecdote of some research done by Nalini Ambady, currently a professor in the psychology department of Stanford University. Ambady showed students three video clips of a teacher - no audio, just video. Ambady found “they had no difficulty at all coming up with a rating of the teacher’s effectiveness” (12).
How could that be? we teachers ask.
She cut the clips down first to five seconds, then to two. “They were remarkably consistent even when she showed the students just two seconds of videotape” (12).
What? Now, these were students who only saw the briefest of snippets of the instructor at work.
But.
“Then Amady compared those snap judgments of teacher effectiveness with evaluations of those same professors made by their students after a full semester of classes” (13).
Her findings... (gulp)
“A person watching a silent two-second video clip of a teacher he or she has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who has sat in the teacher’s class for an entire semester” (13). Gladwell calls that the power of the human “adaptive unconscious.” Without getting into the cognitive psychology of the set of mental processes, and the inflexibility of the judgments involved, I'd call it a powerful reminder of the importance of the first day of class.
So many of us have gotten less than helpful advice about how to handle that first day. “Don’t smile.” “Establish all of your rules on the first day.” “Give out the textbook and make them cover it as their first homework assignment.” “It doesn’t matter what you do on the first day, it’s pretty much a throw-away.”
I’ve done all of those first days. They didn’t achieve the tone I wanted. The first days I spent that way left me feeling like a sort of boring, tight, uncharacteristic shadow of myself, thinking man, if I were you, I’d change out of my own class right now.
I want students to know that our class will be rigorous. I want them to know we will be engaged every day in becoming stronger readers and writers and discussers and thinkers. We will think deeply and write widely and read the story of humanity among the many pages our eyes traverse. I want them to see that it is their story. I want them to know each other and themselves better for our efforts. I want them to know that their thoughts and ideas matter. That they matter - in the room, and in the world.
On this year’s first day, I will be doing an activity that begins to dabble in all of that. I will be smiling. I will not give out textbooks. There is certainly important information and beautiful literature in our textbook, but I want to nurture their own living thoughts and give them a place of honor before we dive into American literature and Ancient Greek tragedy. I will not belabor a list of this-is-what-you-shall-not-do’s. I will treat students as if they know what appropriate school behavior is, and I will address behavior that is not, but starting with the this-is-what-you-shall-not-do’s says that my starting expectation is that they will misbehave. I believe in the idea stated eloquently by Goethe: “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”
I'll think my first day through at least 100 times between now and then. Even 25 years in, I still get the first day nerves. I hope I always do. If I have 2 seconds to make an impression, I want it to be the right one.
Comments
Post a Comment