Review of "Blink"

Here's another installment.

I'm finally reading Gladwell's "Blink," a book that Doyle Butts recommended to me a long time ago. Lots of interesting information and a good read, but not surprisingly, I'm focused on its relevance to our work at institutions like JBU.

One of the examples referred to is that students rate teacher effectiveness pretty much the same after 3 seconds as they do after 3 months. I googled the author of that study, Nalini Ambady, and found out that according to her research, this rating of "thin-sliced" teacher effectiveness also correlates to actual teacher effectiveness (as judged by how much content students will learn from a teacher). In short, students can, as a group, pretty much tell after three seconds whether someone is a good teacher or not.

So who needs end of the semester evaluations, full-day job interviews, or 4 years of teacher education preparation? Just videotape someone for a few seconds, send it around for blind responses, and presto, decision made. Doesn't sound right, huh?

Here's a link to a related "thin-slicing" article that includes a summary of Ambady's research in case you're interested. http://www.apa.org/monitor/mar05/slices.html

According to Gladwell's book, the reason we don't trust these snap judgments is that we overvalue our own expert opinion. He includes lots of examples where psychologists and doctors, to name two groups, collect more and more information that helps them feel more confident in their diagnoses but in fact have no influence in making their findings more accurate. They (we) get overwhelmed by the clutter of input and don't know what they're really supposed to be looking for. In our Enlightenment mindset, we assume that more information is always better, but it's not.

What our subconscious minds are doing, however, is judging some intuitively perceived patterns regarding the key aspects of what makes a teacher effective. Gladwell gives some examples of how in a field such as coronary care, scientists have determined what limited input really matters and what is "noise." Another example is Gottman's research on divorce, which correlates most strongly with the levels of "contempt" displayed in a marriage (most everything else being secondary "clutter").

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any research on teacher effectiveness that defines the key two or three factors to look for (what our subconscious is picking up on in those 3 seconds) and how to measure them. We can in general trust our collective snap judgments about someone's teaching effectiveness and that these snap judgments are in general correlated to real teaching effectiveness, but we appear not to know, yet, what it is about these judgments that we can trust. Might make for an interesting academic career for some educational researcher or psychologist some day. In the meantime, we'll have to muddle through with our current way of doing things.