NUTSHELL NOTES

"Teaching tips in a nutshell" - The University of Colorado
at Denver's One-page Newsletter for Teaching Excellence

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Volume 2 Number 4

Our Personalities — What We Think Matters; What Our Students Think

What we think we are conveying to students is not always what they perceive, and behavioral traits we think should matter in class are not always the same that students would pick. In summary, we see things much differently from opposite ends of the classroom, and what students perceive heavily affects our student evaluations on global questions that describe overall satisfaction with instructor, teaching or the course.

One of the most insightful studies was done by Kenneth Feldman of SUNY at Stony Brook. Feldman compared personality characteristics of instructors with perceived importance to teaching as measured on global questions by professors themselves, by students, and by faculty colleagues.

Correlations between personality traits of professors and evaluation of overall effectiveness as teachers. (after Feldman, 1986)

Feldman's study revealed that professors in general do not feel that their personalities have much effect on their teaching, but their students and colleagues disagree. In the large population that Feldman studied, values in the table above 0.2 are statistically significant; those higher than this can be useful to determine what traits are helpful to keeping student satisfaction high and making departments nicer places in which to work.

The only traits that all agree are important to successful teaching are self-esteem and enthusiasm. This tells us that one of the best things we can do to assure successful teaching at UCD is to build the self-esteem of ourselves and our colleagues. This is an important point for deans, chairs and administrators to know; any action that dampens enthusiasm or hurts self-esteem likely translates to damaged teaching performance in the classroom. The action of "putting someone in his or her place" has expensive consequences.

Things we are likely underrating in their importance are warmth, sensitivity, leadership initiative (not to be confused with mere aggressiveness, overcautiousness, and inflexibility which the research shows work against us), being friendly, and keeping a careful check on our own emotions on those days we feel overly stressed or overly tired. Being the smartest (brightest) or the most original (independent) person in the department is not so important to teaching success as many other traits.

RESOURCE: Feldman, K. A., 1986. The perceived instructional effectiveness of college teachers as related to their personality and attitudinal characteristics: Research in Higher Educ., v. 24, pp. 139-213.

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