Teacher's Attitude Toward Students and Teaching Effectiveness
Thesis:
Teacher's attitude toward students has a close relationship with his teaching effectiveness, and will cause different reactions in students both students' learning activities and teacher's teaching effectiveness.
Outline:
1. Introduction
• The relationship between teacher's attitude toward students and teaching effectiveness
• Four relevant questions concerning teacher's attitude and teaching effectiveness
2. The positive effects produced by favorable teaching attitudes
2.1 To establish a sound relationship between teacher and students.
2.1.1 Genuineness / Realness
2.1.2 Understanding
2.1.3 Awareness of individual differences
2.2 To enhance teaching effectiveness
2.2.1 Expectation
2.2.2 Praising
2.2.3 Encouraging
3. The negative effects produced by unfavorable teacher's attitudes toward students
4. Teaching styles and their influences
4.1 Permissive style and its influence
4.2 Authoritarian style and its influence
4.3 Authoritative style and its influence
5. Factors affecting teacher attitude
5.1 Internal elements
5.2 External elements
6. Conclusion
Teacher's Attitude Toward Students and Teaching Effectiveness
教师对待学生的态度和教学效果
Abstract:
Teacher have different attitudes toward different students, which will be felt, observed and accepted by the students and cause different results in students so that forms different teacher-student relationship. Different teacher-student styles will leave students different roles to play. Since students are an most important part in teaching and learning, their attitudes and behaviors will surely affect teaching effectiveness. But, no matter what kind of attitudes a teacher may adopt exactly toward his students, if he want to increase his teaching effectiveness, the first thing he must do is to establish a sound relationship between he and his students, then could he use expectations or others to enhance effective teaching. Attitude adopted by a teacher can be influenced by many factors includes teacher's own characteristics, his relationship with peers and so on, so a good teacher should try to minimize these influences, to use a fair and suitable attitude toward his students.
摘要：对待不同的学生，教师往往会有不同的态度，学生能感受到，观察到这些不同的态度，并接受它们。当然这些态度会在学生种引起不同的效应，而且在此基础上建立起不同的师生关系。而在不同的师生关系模式中，学生能充当的角色会有很大的差异，学生在教学过程中扮演着一个重要的角色，他们的学习态度及行为当然会影响教学效果。但是从另一方面来说，教师对学生究竟采取什么样的态度，只要是想提高其教学效果的话，他首先必须和学生间建立起一种和谐的教学关系，然后他才有可能使用教师的期望或其他方式来提升教学效果。教师采用的教学态度会受到来自于包括教师自身性格特点，同事关系在内的各个方面的影响。因而，一位好的教师就应该努力将这些影响最小化，学会采取一种公正的，合理的态度来对待他的学生。
Key words:
attitude; teaching effectiveness; teacher-student styles
关键词：
态度；教学效果；师生关系模式
1. Introduction
You may have heard some students say, “I do not like having (a certain) class because the teacher is so unfair in treating me.” Or others say, “I like going to school. My (a certain subject) teacher is rather poised and warm.” So we can see teacher's attitude toward students, undoubtedly, has great effects on his students' attitude toward learning, on students' learning behaviors, and ultimately, on teaching effectiveness. To know how can teacher's attitude affects teaching effectiveness, we should first ask four questions.
First, what is attitude? Social psychologists generally define attitudes as relatively lasting clusters of feelings, beliefs, and behavior tendencies directed toward specific persons, ideas, objects, or groups (Baron & Byrne, 1984: 126). So teacher's attitude toward students is a relatively enduring orientation that teacher develops toward students and their behaviors.
What is effective teaching, then? Effective teaching is a kind of teaching that enable students to learn and achieve. Certainly, students' psychomotor development, social adjustment, personal growth and so on are all important outcomes of education (Armstrong et al, 1989: 256). But here, we restrict the discussion of teaching effectiveness mainly to students' academic achievement.
Next, why can teacher attitude influences teaching effectiveness? Since an attitude includes behavior tendencies, it will, to a great extent, determine teacher's actual behaviors toward students, which shall inevitably arouse different reactions in students toward teacher and teaching. Students are the principal part of teaching and learning, so their behaviors will certainly have influence on teaching effectiveness.
The last one, how exactly teacher's attitude toward student affect teaching effectiveness? To know the answer, we should first know that attitudes toward students vary from teacher to teacher. But, generally, they have two basically and completely different effects on teaching effectiveness: increase teaching effectiveness and decrease teaching effectiveness.
What kind of attitudes may increase teaching effectiveness, and what kind may not? How a kind of attitude a teacher adopts toward his students may influence his teaching effectiveness? What kind of influence may different teacher-student styles have on teaching effectiveness? What factors may affect teacher attitude? This paper will discuss all these questions one by one.
2. The positive effects produced by favorable teaching attitudes
Teachers' favorable attitudes toward students will lead to sound relationship between the two parties and enhance teaching effectiveness.
2.1 To establish a sound relationship between teacher and students.
To increase teaching effectiveness, teacher must first establish a real teaching and learning relationship with students who play a basic role in effective teaching. What kind of teaching and learning relationship — cooperative, harmonious, friendly, unstable or hostile — will be built? Teacher's attitude toward students play a very important part in establishing it.
2.1.1 Genuineness / Realness
According to Carl Rogers, Genuineness or realness, is the attitude most basic to the learning relationship (Ryan & Cooper, 1988: 443). Facing the students, some teachers try to be a “perfect” teacher who is described as democratic, understanding, kind, patient, loving, warm, fair, forgiving, responsive etc. In fact, this is not a real teacher, but an angel from heaven. A teacher, in front to the students, must be a real person, one who is being himself and who is free to be enthusiastic, interested, sympathetic, angry, bored, and sensitive. Only being a real person, can a teacher be known and be understood by his students; can he be accepted and respected by his students; can he really enter into a sound teaching and learning relationship with students which is the base for effective teaching.
2.1.2 Understanding
“When the teacher has the ability to understand the students' reactions from the inside, then again the likelihood of significant learning is increased.” (Rogers, 1969: 10). The facilitator who possesses this attitude can accept students' occasional apathy, hatred of authority, or expression of anxiety. For many times, student's failure in academic achievement is due to, not his ability, but his fear of failure or something happens to him suddenly that spoils his emotion. If teacher understand students' feelings, or the reasons that cause emotional frustration on students, he can help students explain and overcome the occasional emotional frustration, or at least let them know that their teacher is concerned about them, through face-to-face communication. You can imagine what kind of reflection a teacher's concern toward the students and the understanding about the students will arouse in students' hearts. To the students, he is not only a teacher, but also a father, a friend, a guide in their study, and life as well. The relationship between teacher and students is so harmonious that the students surely love their teacher, love the subject he teachers and the classes he gives. Liking the teacher, liking the lessons given by him, students will put them into learning.
2.1.3 Awareness of individual differences
The teacher should value the students as they are and as they are worthy — pride and encourage students when they do something well or better than before, or when they make their efforts — and accept both their differences and imperfections likewise. Students are different, different in learning ability, in cultural background, in academic achievement record, in personalities etc. Teacher should first be aware of this, then, he could treat them differently. This doesn't mean to treat them in an unfair or preferential way, but to treat them according to their respective characteristics. Teachers should recognize the differences in student abilities so that can set standards for performance that are congruent with what students can accomplish. Since students are different, instead of comparing one with another, or at least minimizing comparisons among students, especially those that compare low-achieving students' ability with others who receive rewards, teacher ought to find out and maximize the advantages in students and appreciate students who have diverse abilities — not just those who perform well on tests — and give scope to everyone's special skill. By doing so, those students who are not good in academic performance will feel they are treated fairly and equally by their teacher in a way of respect and appreciation. Knowing they also have strong points, with teacher's help, they will gradually set up self-confidence in learning well or better. Otherwise, frequent comparisons between students, especially the negative comparisons, will intensify students' doubts about their ability in studying and achieving, or just encourage them to concentrate on competition rather than learning because unless they do academic tasks better than others, they can not be approved by their teacher.
Genuineness (Realness), understanding and awareness of individual differences are all important factors in establishing real and sound teaching-learning relationship. Additionally, elements as warmth, enthusiasm, sincerity also attribute to the establishment of this relationship.
2.2 To enhance teaching effectiveness
2.2.1 Expectation
The attitude that teachers have about students' individual potentials for academic success is called teacher expectations (Crowl et al, 1997: 241) which predispose teachers to look for different levels of achievement from different students. Do teachers' beliefs about how well their students will do (expectations) affect how well their students do? The answer is yes. Investigating the impact of teacher expectations on grades, Rosenthal and Jacobson of Harvard University (1968) devises an experiment, “Pygmalion in the Classroom”, in which they selected by chance students to be academically received high scores on Rosenthal's “late bloomers' test”. With no other intervention in the system, these students one year later were reported by their teachers to have “blossomed” (Adams & Gullota, 1983: 280). How can we explain the Pygmalion or teacher expectation effect? We have known an attitude includes 3 components: the cognitive component (beliefs, thoughts and ideas), the affective component (feelings and emotions) and behavioral component (tendency to act) (James & Zanden, 1987: 174). Here, in this experiment, the students get the expectations from their teacher so that believe that they will
achieve much more than others. This positive belief makes them experience positive feelings when working on a challenging problem, also it will make them choose to learn something new about the subject rather than engaging in some other activities. So without extra instruction, they perform even better. The idea that teacher expectations for students' academic performance may become realities, causing some students to educational self-fulfilling prophecy (Berk, 1989: 682). So here, those who are perceived as successful in fact become successful. In our daily school life, the result is more obvious. Since teachers expect certain kinds of behaviors from high and low achievers, they treat them differently and thereby sustain the patterns (Brophy, 1983; Good, 1980; cf. Hetherington et al, 1986: 570). Not only do high achievers receive more instruction, they are given more time to think and answer. The receive more praise for correct answers and less criticism for wrong ones. In contrast, low achievers are not expected to know and to participate and are provided less opportunity and encouragement for doing so.
But at the same time, teachers should avoid extremely high expectation on students, that is to say, expectation should be realistic. According to Bandura (1972), people are capable of (a) holding beliefs about their ability to reach a goal, (b) assessing the effort needed to reach it, and (c) persisting it. This ability is called efficacy expectation (Crowl et al, 1997: 241). So there are two dangers of setting expectation levels that are beyond students' capabilities.
The first difficulty is that students may develop false hopes about what they can do in life which makes them overestimate their ability.
Second, such expectations may lead to frustration and, in time, to diminished self-image. The self-image problem is likely to arise when students find they are incapable of performing the expected level and go on to conclude that something is “wrong” with them.
The third one, it may make students give up efforts on the way to the goal because they can't persist it any longer.
So teacher should, on one hand, give positive expectations to the students; on the other hand, avoid to be an over-expectator. Unless the expectation is realistic and modest, it will not be effective.
2.2.2 Praising
Praising refers to the attitude teachers have about students' success or achievement for a task (academic task). So praise is usually given when teacher thinks that the students have accomplished the task so well, of sometimes have done it much better than before, that they worth praising. Teacher praise has long been considered an important factor in teaching effectiveness. N. L. Gage concluded that teacher praise has a positive effect on student attitude (Acheson & Gall, 1992: 32), because praise provides information about performance and leads support to feelings
of self-worth (Crowl et al, 1997: 254). It tells the students that they are successful and competent. As a result, it will arouse and last students' motivation for higher achievements.
Some teachers, however, may find their praises are not so useful and successful in raising students' learning motivation and expectation. The reason lies in the teacher himself, not the praise itself. Those teachers may over use praise, or use them in an unsuitable or even wrong time or place which, on the contrary, makes the students think that they don't deserve it. Just as David M. Pedell points out when students believe they have not been successful, they will interpret praise as an indication that the teacher lacks confidence that they can do better (Crowl et al, 1997: 254). So teacher should know how to use effective praise. Brophy (1981) suggests that it should (a) be based on student's specific behavior, (b) provide information for students to use in the future, and (c) focus on students' past accomplishments as a context for describing present accomplishments (Crowl et al, 1997: 254).
Knowing how to use effective praise, teacher could, to a larger degree, arouse students' own expectation for higher achievement, raise students' motivation for studying which will create students' self-initiated learning.
2.2.3 Encouraging
It is a kind of attitude used more frequently toward those students who are trying hard but may be somewhat unsuccessful. Focusing on efforts rather than achievement, encouragement stimulates those students to continue trying. Students who have been encouraged accept themselves as they are, even when they are less than perfect or fall short of teacher's expectation. Encouragement used during class can also solidify students' place in class. Being encouraged, they feel they are contributing members and that teacher and classmates accept their efforts as valid, their ideas as useful and contributory, though may be incompletely right. They will focus not on their weakness and under-achievement, but their progress and efforts. When they are unsuccessful or under-achieving, they will also receive encouragement from their teacher, thus to make them remain confidence in further achievement.
Sure, element as genuineness, expectation mentioned here are not all the factors needed for effective teaching. We just can say they are some basic elements for teaching effectiveness. As we know, more enthusiastic, fairer a teacher is, more effective will his teaching be. We can not set a standard for the teachers that how enthusiastic, fair or warm they must be when facing the students. What we can recommend here is teacher should try to be a enthusiastic, fair teacher on the base of being himself, using expectation, praise and encouragement effectively on students.
3. The negative effects produced by unfavorable teacher's attitudes toward
students
As favorable attitudes can increase teaching effectiveness, unfavorable ones may reduce it.
You may consider how a teacher's effectiveness might be impaired by these following attitudes toward students:
(1) strong dislike for particular students
(2) extreme fondness for certain students
(3) biases toward academic achievement
(4) biases toward students' appearance / certain kinds of behavior as docility or inquisitiveness
(5) impatient, unfriendly or hostile attitude toward students' asking questions or asking for help or instruction
(6) treating them with disdain and contempt rather than patience and respect
Teachers who show preferential treatment, who can accept only students like themselves, and who reject those who are different can never fulfill the needs of all students (Adams & Gullota, 1983: 280).
When a teacher has a strong dislike or biases against particular students for some reasons as sex, appearance, disposition, family condition, especially low-achieving or under-achieving, he will, consciously or unconsciously, avoid public communication with them, and give them feedback that is superficial, inconsistent, and unconvincing on the quality of their work. He demands less from the students and give less praise, less wait-time for their answers, calling on them less, and often criticizing them more frequently. A student who is frequently criticized by a teacher, especially if he is already to be low in self-esteem, will lose confidence in his own ability and will tend in consequence to hard to change under-achievement because they attribute their performance to external forces — teacher's unfair treatment, teacher's traits, studying conditions, degree of studying difficulty — that are beyond their control. This lowers their expectations for success, their motivation to achieve, and ultimately, academic achievement itself.
Till now, we have known that attitudes can increase and also decrease teaching effectiveness. So what kind of attitude a teacher adopt toward the students may exert a great influence on students' academic achievement, social and emotional development. Teacher's different attitudes toward students cause different teacher-student styles that will make a strong impact on achievement both for the teacher and students.
4. Teaching styles and their influences
Teaching practices differ among individuals. The means by which teacher treats and interacts with the students has strong effects on students' academic achievement. Here, I'd like to use Diana Baumrind's approach to parenting (1971; 1990; 1991. cf. Santrock, 1996: 184) to characterize teaching styles as permissive, authoritarian and authoritative in terms of 2 dimensions: (1) demanding; (2) responsiveness
4.1 Permissive style
Permissive style is a style in which teachers are very uninvolved in students' learning. Giving students total freedom and having few expectations and demands, permissive teachers fail to provide students with enough guidance and support. Regarding dealing with students as a boring job, they might squeeze time from preparing lessons, giving classes, assigning homework, correcting students' paper, communicating with students, and so forth. The teacher, when he is still standing in the classroom, on the platform, holding the book, his mind perhaps has flied to the office, thinking about a cup of hot tea or coffee waiting on his desk, fancying himself sitting in the comfortable chair, enjoying the satisfaction. In a word, he tries to do whatever is necessary to minimize the time and energy that he must devote to interacting with students. In such a class, you can imagine how much knowledge could the students learn from the teacher. Also, even those who once were interested in learning and want to learn well may one day lose interest and confidence in learning because their teacher has no interest and confidence in teaching; because they won't be expected by the teacher; because they can't be praised when they do something well; because they can't be encouraged when they make efforts
4.2 Authoritarian style
Teachers who have authoritarian attitude toward students value conformity, are dedicated and demanding. They allow little verbal exchange. “Do it my way. There will be no discussion.” You may often hear this sentence in an authoritarian teacher's mouth. They are harsh in their discipline and rigid in enforcing rules. While students do something wrong, or sometimes just something unfits for the teacher's value or usual style, absence of warmth and loving, they have a strong alliance on power-assertive discipline (shouting, physical punishment etc). Seldom do they try to understand the students' points of view. Students of authoritarian teachers are usually associated with anxiety, lack of initiative activity, poor communication skills, or rebellion. They may be divided into 3 groups.
Some students of authoritarian teachers are suppressive, exhibiting withdraw and passive behavior and often are unwilling to take risks. This is the first group, also the largest one. Being so afraid of their teacher that they are timid and quiet in class. Even if they have any question or problem in their learning, they are frightened of asking teachers for help. Day after day, students will find studying is too hard for them to keep up with their teacher. One day, their interest and confidence in learning and studying will die out.
The second one is those who want to rebel, challenging teacher's authority. The more they are suppressed by their teacher, the more freedom they want to get for themselves. The conflict between students' desire for freedom and teacher's unwillingness to allow it may actually encourage students to rebel. This happens more commonly with boys because they will be, in such circumstance, more quarrelsome and aggressive. When they can't find some degree of freedom and support, they may express their autonomy by the extreme action as dropping out of school. Since in their opinion, this is the best way to punish their teacher and challenge his authority. Students' rebellion, including disturbing classroom discipline, not finishing homework assignments, quarrelling with teachers and so on, plus teacher's wrong dealing, at least unsuitable, will lead to one result: teaching and learning is in a mess — teacher can't reach, students can't study. It's too bad, let alone students' dropping out, which leaves no space and nothing useful for discussing effective teaching.
The third one: students who try to, and also in fact, to some extent, get in good with the teacher. Since in the class of an authoritarian teacher, classes are always organized in such a way that students and teacher are adversaries who strive for different and often conflicting goals. So those who want to get on well with the teacher are seen by many students as “going over to the other side” for their own personal gain. The “good” students in teacher's eyes will be called betrayers in students' mouths. As time going, they will more and more have the feeling of loneliness and alienation because of the bad relationship with other students, which will affect their mood for studying.
4.3 Authoritative style
Authoritative teachers are firm but caring. They take responsibility toward students, and have demands from students as well. So they set limits and standards for students' conduct, but also set expectations on students that are consistent with their developing needs and capabilities. In the dealing with students, extensive communication is allowed, discussion is welcomed, creative thinking is encouraged, initiative activity is respected. Authoritative teachers regard restrictiveness and autonomy on students as balanced, which on the one hand set guidelines that developing individual needs, but on the other hand, provides students with opportunities to express themselves. Different from authoritarian teachers, authoritative teachers are warm and loving, and often employ a reasoning approach to discipline. Facing students' failure, instead of saying “How can you be so stupid. Couldn't you make it better, could you”, an authoritative teacher might say, “Once failure doesn't indicate eternal failure. Your efforts, together with mine, will overcome it. I know you will do much better next time.” Students who hear the first conversation may really think he is so fool that nothing can help him and save him, while students who heat the second one will realize that my teacher hasn't give me up, how can I give up myself. So the wish of becoming better and successful rises in their studying. To achieve this, they will, with the teacher's help, set a definite and realistic goal, find practicable means and make great efforts to achieve it. Listening carefully in class, they would like to express their opinions, cooperate with others, and try to make contributions to the talking or discussion in class. The homework assignments given by teacher will be finished on time. Meeting any problem, they won't hesitate to ask other students or teacher until get a full understanding about it. So these students will always get higher academic achievements than before, which makes the teacher has confidence in them, and will make more efforts in teaching. At the same time, the students will have self-confidence in learning and exert more efforts in studying. So forms a good teaching-learning circle.
To those high-achieving students, an authoritative teacher will give them more time and space in cultivating and developing their creative thinking ability. Discussion, exchanging and sharing ideas are encouraged. A real learning atmosphere is formed, including cooperation and competition. To learn more and achieve more, the knowledge taught by the teacher won't satisfy their demands and desire for studying, so they will spend more time learning something new and more difficult about the subject which makes them grasp the knowledge of this subject more comprehensively and solidly.
Possessing clear values, successful teachers use power and authority wisely. They know students respond best to teachers who exercise natural authority rather than arbitrary or abdication of authority by merely being pals with the students. So the basic but successful teacher-student relationship is one of adult to growing adult, with understanding and genuine concern about students' feelings and needs, respecting and communicating with the.
5. Factors affecting teacher attitude
Many elements, internal and external, can affect teacher attitude.
Teacher's own features is the most internal influent element, while the external factors include students' influence, the relationship with peers and students' parents and so on.
Students' characteristics, appearance, school-life performance and forth on, all can affect teacher's attitude toward them. Usually, to some extent, inevitably, teachers will favor the students who are like him, who can get high academic achievement. We can't say it is wrong, but as a teacher, he is the teacher of the whole class, not some certain students. So he should decrease the degree of liking certain students.
On the other hand, if a teacher can't get along will with peers, he must have the need to work off the negative feelings on his students or to use students to fulfill his own emotional and social needs. If a teacher can't get on well with some student's parents, as he might feel intellectually or socially, superior to them, he can hardly avoid inappropriate attitude toward that student.
It is almost impossible for a teacher's attitude toward students to avoid influences from other factors. But what a good teacher should do is to minimize those unfavorable influences so that he can adopt the attitude beneficial to the students, to the relationship between he and the students, to his teaching and student's learning.
6. Conclusion:
Students are sensitive observers of teacher attitude and behavior, and they frequently recognize, and become preoccupied with, aspects of the teacher's attitude toward them of which the teacher may be unaware, but will surely cause different results in students. Since students are an important part in teaching, their attitudes and behaviors will certainly affect teacher's effective teaching. So what kind of teacher-student relationship will a teacher establish –permissive, authoritarian, authoritative-depends mainly on teacher's attitude toward students. Sure, the authoritative style is a good one, which is favorable to teaching effectiveness. But to form it needs great efforts. He must first establish a sound relationship with his students, then he can enter into students' school life. He should know how to expect his students, how to praise them, how to encourage them. No matter what kind of attitude a teacher learning are most useful for teaching effectiveness. Of course, many factors can influence teacher attitude and teachers are usually like those who are like them, but to be a good teacher, and effective teacher, he should try to love every student, to understand every student, and to accept every student—both their strong points and shortcomings.
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