Smile! And the world smiles back. Or something like that. Currently reading Beaudry et al. (2024)

A good relationship between teachers and students helps students learn better, but it is very unclear what exactly makes a good relationship. Is it trust as we recently investigated, or is it a feeling of belonging, or is it care, or all of it, or something else? Nobody knows right now, and it gets even more difficult if we consider that context, for example class size, is probably quite influential, too. Contributing to the SoTL studies on effective relational teaching, Beaudry et al. (2024) investigate what teacher behaviours correlate with good student evaluations in large classes (100+ students).

In an observational study of teachers with very positive student evaluations of their teaching (and here is why the idea that students evaluation can somehow measure teaching quality is highly problematic, as they also point out themselves, but then they still use them that way), they investigate rapport, confirmation of students’ worth, affinity seeking (i.e. doing things so others like you) and immediacy (establishing a sense of closeness, i.e. through humour, using names, …). They find that the teachers that scored highest in student evaluations smiled more and made more eye contact than the others: “students favor instructors who make more eye contact and smile more“. But it is important to note that this is a study in a Canadian context, and that eye contact can be perceived very differently in other cultures.

Beaudry at al. (2024) also find that encouraging participation (asking students questions or inviting comments) seems to be helpful — as we find in our own study that “students trust teachers who ask, listen, and respond“. Also displaying relaxed body language is deemed important because it is, by the authors, interpreted as “feeling comfortable and energetic, and conveying enthusiasm for the subject matter“.

What I find interesting is that the authors stress that “the most prevalent relational teaching behaviours are not necessarily the most important or effective“, and I believe that looking further into what is effective is important and interesting!

Beaudry, S. G., Terrion, J. L., Rocchi, M., & Bartleman, M. (2024). Relational Teaching Behaviours in the Large University Class: An Observational Study. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 15(3).