RESEARCH General Education

COLLEGE TEACHING
Best college teachers adaptable, like working with students

Mark Reutter, Business Editor
(217) 333-0568; mreutter@uiuc.edu

8/1/2001

Photo by Bill Wiegand Finance professor James A. Gentry, who has been honored for his teaching, is studying what makes a good teacher.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Everybody knows that good teaching is an art, but can it be improved by science?

Over his years of teaching, James A. Gentry, a professor of finance at the University of Illinois, has been struck by how well students can provide a set of criteria of what makes a college instructor special in their eyes. Gentry wondered if there weren't "characteristic benchmarks" for exemplary teachers – certain good practices that could be identified empirically to help other teachers.

To find out, Gentry asked the chairmen of finance departments around the country to nominate one or two faculty members who were regarded as the best teachers. The nominated professors were asked to fill out a psychological profile and write a brief story explaining why they were so good.

Gentry and his co-author, Robin W. Pratt, president of Performance Equations Inc., then collected the same data from a random selection of finance teachers.

They found that exemplary teachers scored significantly higher in information processing, self esteem, extroversion and expression of support for students. This added up to superior abilities in two broad dimensions: creating intellectual excitement in a classroom and developing interpersonal rapport with students.

"Exemplary teachers enjoy student contact more, are more gregarious in and outside of class and exchange more positive expressions with students than do their colleagues," Gentry wrote in a working paper. There were no significant differences on the dimension of "awareness," or perceiving what is happening in the classroom, but there was a difference in the ability of exemplary teachers to focus better on student responses and questions.

This led the researchers to pursue a third dimension of teaching, which they identified as "confident adaptability," or the willingness to seize a teaching moment. Such flexibility can come from student questions or from using examples from current events to make an abstract point more vivid and relevant to the class.

"Teachers are selling ideas, so they need to read the mood of the class," Gentry said in an interview. "This means not getting hung up on whether point five of the discussion comes first or last, and not getting flustered or sidetracked by student questions. Our empirical work indicates that the teachers who succeed best in the classroom do not dominate and control, but take risks and want the students to take charge of their own learning."

Gentry and Pratt present a three-dimensional cube that plots the characteristics of exemplary teaching and how those dimensions relate to overall performance. Their working paper is titled "Learning From Exemplary Teachers."