By Stacy Palen

David Brooks recently collated several different studies of teaching and learning into an Op-Ed for the New York Times titled “Students Learn From People They Love.” Two paragraphs of this article particularly caught my attention, one about in-person vs video teaching, and one about brain activity in a group. I’ll talk about each one separately, in this and the next post.

In the article, Brooks writes, “Suzanne Dikker of New York University has shown that when classes are going well, the student brain activity synchronizes with the teacher’s brain activity. In good times and bad, good teachers and good students co-regulate each other.”

This one caught my attention because I’m not at all sure what “synchronized brain activity” means. It sounds a little…unscientific.

But when I think about it more, I’m pretty sure I have a guess about what it feels like. I bet you do too.

We’ve all been in a classroom where the professor and the students were all working toward a common purpose, and we felt like the professor knew our questions before we could articulate them. Even hard things seemed approachable, because the professor was keyed in to our confusions. We would work extra-hard to please those teachers, and it paid off with faster and deeper learning.

On the other side of the desk, we’ve all had those students who helped clarify for us the confusion in the classroom. For better or worse, there’s sometimes that one kid who seems to respond to what we are saying just a little bit quicker. And when her eyebrows furrow, we pause and back up and try to explain again.

This sometimes extends to an entire classroom of students. I’ve had back-to-back classes in which the classroom vibe was completely different. In one hour, the group was chatty and involved and asked questions and was prepared each day. And the next hour, it felt like pulling teeth just to get them to actually push a button to answer clicker questions.

But all of this is very “fuzzy,” and that makes us uncomfortable. We would love to have a concrete set of steps to take so that if we want to improve student outcomes by 7.3%, we can simply invoke 20% more clicker questions in the classroom, and the student outcomes would improve accordingly. But if that were true, we would all be teaching perfectly already. It cannot possibly be so formulaic or teaching astronomy would be done by reading the cookbook.

Be reassured by the burgeoning research that learning is a social experience. It’s an interaction and therefore, each teacher-student pair does it differently. What works for me won’t necessarily work for you. And what works for you with student X won’t necessarily work with student Y. And even what works with student X for topic A won’t necessarily work for topic B!

This can be frustrating, but it also makes teaching fun and exciting. Teaching is a giant research experiment, where you are always trying something new, to see how it works. Not because there is one right answer, but because there are a hundred right answers, and matching up the method to the topic and the interaction is a subtle art.

The elephant in the room, of course, is evaluation. Brooks points out:

The bottom line is this, a defining question for any school or company is: What is the quality of the emotional relationships here?

And yet think about your own school or organization. Do you have a metric for measuring relationship quality? Do you have teams reviewing relationship quality? Do you know where relationships are good and where they are bad? How many recent ed reform trends have been about relationship-building?

In my experience, the answer to all of these questions is no because it’s really hard to measure these “soft skills,” like relationship building and communication. It’s much easier to measure changes in learning that are made by a change of specific instructional techniques than those that rely on interpersonal relationships between a teacher and their students.

So then the very best answer is to try things, all the time, to find the set of techniques that work best for you in your classroom with your students. And then sit down at the end of term and write down your thoughts for your evaluation file.

Explain what you tried, and why you think it worked or didn’t work, whether you’d try it again, and what you’d change. Your teaching will only benefit from the moment of reflection, and I suspect the committee that evaluates your work will too.