Key Questions about Nonverbal Communication

1. What does research say about nonverbal communication and its function?
2. What are tutors trying to accomplish?
3. Is there any research about NVC and tutoring?
4. What does the research say about NVC and tutoring?
5. Is there any research about NVC and teaching?
6. What does the research say about NVC and teaching?
7. What are the major methods of performing nonverbal research?
8. Are there any important articles about tutoring and nonverbal communication?
9. Are there any important articles about nonverbal communication that are relevant, even though they don't directly reference teaching/tutoring?
10. Are writing center directors aware of nonverbal communication research?
11.Is nonverbal communication ability a factor in tutor hiring?
12.Is nonverbal communication ability a factor in tutor training?
13.Is nonverbal communication ability a factor in tutor evaluations/professional development?
14.

The Sage Handbook of NVC- weak

The Sage Handbook of NVC- weak

McCroskey, James C., Virginia P. Richmond, and Linda P. McCroskey. "Nonverbal Communication in Instructional Contexts." SAGE handbook of nonverbal communication. Ed. Valarie Manusov and Miles L. Patterson. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications, 2006. Print. More specifically, researchers assert that the verbal messages stimulate primarily cognitive meanings in receivers (i.e., the feelings and attitudes toward the teacher) (McCroskey, Richmond & McCroskey, 2000b). From this perspective, subject competence of the instructor is said to be the critical element in cognitive learning, whereas behavior, particularly nonverbal communication, produces a relational impact on the student attitudes and feelings. -424 Whereas more research is needed before a firm conclusion can be drawn, the instructional research to date suggests that nonverbal factors may have a much stronger impact on learning in the classroom than do verbal factors. This is particularly true for affective learning. -425 Effective teaching is dependent upon "appropriate" nonverbal communication of teachers. In our opinion, certification of teachers without substantial instruction in nonverbal communication concepts and skills would be pure folly. The success of teachers at all levels depends on how they communicate nonverbally. It may be that some teachers are genertically programmed to be more effective, whereas others are equally programmed to fail. -434 Similarly, administrators of teacher education and teacher/trainer selection should consider these communication abilities (or lack of) in their decisions to admit or hire people for their programs. -434 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nonverbal Skills and Abilities by Ronald Riggio, pp 79-95 For example, correlations between self-report measures of decoding skill and performance measure have been positive but low (typically below .20). -84 [This piece suggests that PONS is one of the few, well-tested methods of nonverbal assessment.]

Short Survey for Writing Center Administrators

Short Survey for Writing Center Administrators

Hello. My name is Jeff Cook, and I am employed as a writing center consultant at the University of Cincinnati's Center for Access and Transition. I am working on a project about nonverbal communication, and I would like some information about how it is used at your writing center. 1. Are you familiar with any research about nonverbal communication? 2. Are you familiar with any research about nonverbal communication in an educational setting? 3. How important, on a scale from 1 to 10, would you say nonverbal communication for writing center consultants? 4. Would you be interested in receiving some informative materials about nonverbal communication in education? (As a thank you for your participation, I would be happy to provide you with some links or a copy of my work.) 5. Do you provide any information about nonverbal communication to new writing center consultants? 6. Are nonverbal communication skills any part of the tutor training process? [Demographic questions]

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.

Teacher-Student Nonverbal Relationships

Teacher-Student Nonverbal Relationships Richmond, Virginia Peck, James C. McCroskey, and Mark L. Hickson. "Teacher-Student Nonverbal Relationships." Nonverbal Behavior in Interpersonal Relations (6th Edition). Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2007. 251-77. Print. 

 Research has indicated that students taught by lecture do as well as or better on tests of factual recall than those taught by discussion methods. -252 

On the downside, lectures are not as effective as other methods in fostering higher levels of learning (application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) or in developing psychomotor skills. Students tend to be passive; according to various studies, their attention frequently wanes in fifteen to twenty-five minutes and their retention decreases by as much as 80 percent within about eight weeks. -252 

Using student names, incorporating personal anecdotes and other means of self-disclosure, asking questions and encouraging students to talk, referring to the class as "our" class and to what "we" are doing, and using humor all contribute to immediacy, as do maintaining eye contact with the students, smiling, having a relaxed body position and using animated gestures, moving about the classroom during the lecture, and this point is very important to remember using a dynamic, vocally expressive style of delivery. These strategies have been shown to have both cognitive and affective learning payoffs. -253 

For teachers to effectively coach students until they master a skill, it is essential that they be able to break the performance of the skill into separate components so that they can offer corrective instruction. -256 

Some students got better and better at baseball just by getting more playing experience, but others simply repeated ineffective moves until they were pulled out of the game and allowed to concentrate only on one aspect of play until they got the hang of it. -256

 

Research provides evidence that students retain information longer when they have an opportunity to verbalize it, especially to their peers. -257 

 If students are given all the resources needed at the outset and a very specific model of what they are to come up with, much of the incidental learning from the group's process will be lost. The groups are then the educator's staff, working on the teacher's project rather than on their own. -258

 In this section, we have suggested that a teacher might wear many hats: speaker, moderator, trainer, manager, and coordinator. Most teacher look good in all of them, and most students get tired of looking at the same hat every day. The hat most students prefer on their teacher, whether the teacher is in speaker, moderator, trainer, manager, or coordinator mode is the nonverbally receptive, expressive, supportive teacher. -258 

 We have stated for years that the primary function of teachers' verbal behavior in the classroom is to give content to improve students' cognitive learning. The primary function of teachers' nonverbal behavior in the classroom is to improve students' affect or liking for the subject matter, teacher, or class, and to instill in them the desire to learn more about the subject matter. -260 

 Therefore our advice is to dress formally for a week or two or until credibility is established. Then dress more casually to project the image that one is open to student interaction. -261 

Unattractive children are commonly ignored by teachers, given less time to answer questions than their attractive counterparts, encouraged less to talk, given less eye contact, given more distance, and touched less by their teacher. This type of nonverbal behavior communicates to the unattractive child that he or she is not as good as the other students. -263 

 In the classroom, adaptors are probably the most common gestures used by students. The classroom is an anxiety-producing situation for many children. Observe a typical classroom and you will find students chewing pencils, biting their nails, picking at their desks or notebooks, pulling at their hair, smoothing their clothing, and clicking their pens. -264 

 Students use more adaptors in classes where they feel anxious or bored. -264 

 Increased teacher immediacy results in Increased liking, affiliation, and positive affect on the part of the student. Immediate teachers are liked far more than nonimmediate teachers. Increased student affect for the subject matter. Students who become motivated to learn the subject matter because of the teacher's immediate behaviors will do well in the content and continue to learn long after the teacher who motivated them is out of the picture. Increased student cognitive learning. Students with immediate teahcers attend more to the subject matter, concentrate more on the subject, retain more of the content, and when challenged can correctly recall more of the subject matter than students with nonimmediate teachers. Increased student motivation. It seems that the primary way that immediacy produces learning effects may be by increasing student motivation. Reduced student resisitance to instructors' attempts to influence or modify behavior. Immediate teachers seem to have more referent, respect, or liking power; hence students tend to comply with or conform to the wishes of the more immediate teachers. Nonimmediate teachers have more difficulty getting students to comply with or conform to their wishes. The teacher being perceived as a more competant communicator, one who listens and cares. Increased student-teacher communication and interaction. A reduced status differential between student and teacher. Higher evaluations from one's immediate supervisor. -276 [Starting with "The teacher being" I've only included the topic sentences for each of immediacy's effects.]