Lie to Me and Writing Tutoring

LIE TO ME AND WRITING TUTORING

"You can observe a lot just by watching." -Yogi Berra In the opening scenes of Lie to Me, a fox television series, Dr Cal Lightman sits in an interrogation room in front of a muscular prisoner in an orange jumpsuit. The prisoner is a white supremacist who has placed a bomb in an African-American church, yet the prisoner isn't talking. Lightman begins thinking aloud, throwing out guesses about locations while a room full of law enforcement personnel watch through the glass . After the prisoner hears the name of one location, the corners of his lips twitch toward a smile for a fraction of a second, and Lightman dismisses that possibility, but the name of the next location makes the prisoner react differently. At the second name, the prisoner confidently states that going there would be a waste of time, slightly shrugging one shoulder while speaking. "That's the one," Lightman says, turning his head toward the FBI agents behind the one way glass. "That's where he hid the bomb." In this scene, Lightman (who is loosely based on Paul Ekman, a researcher in the field) asks a series of questions, using nonverbal communication to guide him. Much like a tutor, he sits down before a stranger and lets the stranger guide the interaction. He makes educated guesses based on his instincts, but he adjusts his instincts in light of what he sees in front of him. Watching a show like this one raises some real questions about tutoring. Are there universal nonverbal signals? Can tutors learn to read those signals? How much information should they have about nonverbal communication? In a field that celebrates diversity, it is One of the causes is the increasing consensus in nonverbal communication research, which has produced several significant findings. It found evidence supporting the universality of certain expressions (called emotion cues or affect displays). It has found a reliable way to determine a felt smile from a false one that holds true across cultures (wrinkling around the eyes). In education, nonverbal communication has been shown to have a significant impact on affective learning, student evaluations, and student motivation. This research has focused on immediacy, how educators can send effective nonverbal communication messages (Riggio citation). These findings are hopefully well known, but they raise a crucial question, "what messages are consultants receiving from students?" If there are universal nonverbal signals, what do consultants need to know about them? If there were a real life Dr. Lightman, what would he see on the faces of students? No matter the context, it is clear that writing center consultants cannot do their jobs without some degree of skill at nonverbal communication, but it might not be clear how reading the nonverbal signals of students can help consultants . According to the Bedford Guide, tutors switch between multiple roles during conferences, such as "the ally," "the coach," "the commentator," and "the counselor" (Ryan, 28-30). Given this goal, facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice can provide some information about when to switch between them, particularly with the role of "the counselor." Cristina Murphy argues that helping students become better writers requires building relationships much like those between therapists and clients ("Freud in the Writing Center: The Psychodynamics of Tutoring Well"). Learning to read students' nonverbal communication offers the possibility of helping consultants build just such a relationship. This idea of reading students signals in the Writing Center has been raised before. In the Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors, Leah Ryan suggests watching videos of tutoring sessions or sitcoms with the sound off (Ryan 31). In an article titled "Using Videotape to Train Tutors," XXXXXX advocates using videotapes to assess, among other things, nonverbal communication in the tutoring session (citation needed). However, neither of these pieces advocates formal training in nonverbal signals. Instead they suggest that intuition and tutoring experience should be enough background to profit from some informal reflection. In a "contact zone," where students of diverse ability levels and backgrounds meet to learn collaboratively, I believe that this is probably not enough. Informal reflection and personal experience should be coupled with the findings of communication research in order to help tutors understand the signals that students are sending. Although providing consultants with a large list of student behaviors would be too much, it seems wise to touch on a few types of signals that are particularly relevant. One type of message that consultants should watch for is initial signs of emotion. In NVC research, these are called affect displays or emotion cues (Givens). These universal signs of emotion include signs of happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise, fear, and contempt and surprise. They are detailed by Paul Ekman in his work Emotions Revealed, and in David Givens' spectacular Nonverbal Dictionary. Since these displays of affect are rarely masked, they are relatively easy for a consultant to spot. If a student looks emotional, acknowledging that fact can open the door to greater rapport and a more productive session. The initial check of a student's nonverbal signals also serves a second function. It gives a student-centered baseline for interpreting later signals. Since everyone has a communication style, it is no surprise to say that each person also has a nonverbal communication style. Observing the student's nonverbal communication before the session begins provides an opportunity for alert tutors to spot the next important type of signal. After an initial check of the student's nonverbal signals, the next task for the consultant is to watch for affect displays that suddenly appear during a session. Frustration and anxiety are two signals that a particularly important. Since consultants do not know the ability level of students, we need to be sure to ask questions of an appropriate difficulty level, questions that challenge students without frustrating and demotivating them. This idea is based on Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal development. However, tutors sometimes ask questions that are beyond a student's ability to answer. A tutor might accidentally interrupt a student during a session or paraphrase a portion of text in a way the student finds objectionable. Since most students will not announce that they are getting frustrated, nonverbal signals are a crucial source of information. Two common facial signals of frustration are a sudden tensing of the lips or a sudden knitting together of the brow. Another one is a momentary increase in the intensity of eye contact, a quick glare. In addition to those facial signals, gestures that suddenly appear during a session are a third source of information for consultants. If a relatively stationary student suddenly begins finger tapping, head-scratching, nail biting or fidgiting with clothes at some point within a session, these actions, called adaptors, are signs of stress (Textbook, p247). Animals, as well as humans, display an increasing number of these movements in the presence of stressors. However, these gestures are less significant than the facial ones since they are indicators of stress, not a particular emotion. To some of you, these types of signals may have seemed obvious. The few examples I have given may seem to be common knowledge. One might object that consultant training should concern themselves with knowledge of the writing process and proper questioning techniques rather than blink rates and eyebrow movements. Indeed, they might also point out that the diversity in student populations makes applying universal interpretations an ethically hazardous goal, and they would be right to be concerned. However, if consultants already base decisions within tutoring sessions on nonverbal cues, how can we justify leaving them uninformed about the scientific consensus? A small section in a tutoring manual and a short discussion during tutor training could provide consultants with the opportunity to decide for themselves, as a part of reflective practice, how much they need to and ought to know about this issue. After all, it is probably true that many writing consultants (such as myself) applied for the position because they are good with writing, not because they are good with people. For those that object, on the other hand, that Cal Lightman is an unrealistic example to provide consultants, that it makes reading body language seem too effective, I offer them a story about a horse. In 1904, William Von Osten revealed to the world that he had spent the past two years teaching his horse to communicate. By tapping its hoof a correct number of times, the horse appeared to have mastered the rules of arithmatic, converting fractions to decimals, and how to read the time of day off of a standard clock face. The horse was even able to perform these feats when Mr Von Osten was not present. It took Oskar Pfungst, a Berlin psychologist, to realize the secret. The horse could only answer the questions when someone in the room knew the answer. Pfungst realized that "In the course of the long series of lessons in arithmetic, the horse must have learned to spot more and more accurately the tiny body movements with which the teacher unconsciously accompanied his own thinking. These movements the horse learned to utilize as cues....The horse's performance and the great accuracy it achieved in perceiving these tiniest of movements remain amazing." (In Katz, 1953, p.15) So, even though consultants will never become Dr. Lightman, with some background information and frequent practice, we might be able to be as clever as that horse. -------------------------------------- What to read facial expressions sudden increases or decreases in gestures tone of voice when reading from the text tone of voice when asking questions tone of voice when answering questions ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Our goal as writing tutors): to make the people we work with better writers by facilitating changes in teh way in which they view and produce writing.