Dramatic Behaviors of the Effective Teacher

Abstract

This study provides strong evidence that certain dramatic style behaviors systematically covary with whether one is perceived as an effective teacher. Almost 500 students evaluated target teachers, representing 97 separate classes, on two independently administered instruments. The first instrument measured dramatic style behaviors that had been generated from earlier work. The second instrument measured teacher effectiveness. A special unit of analysis was created for this research—namely, the average perception of the teacher across students and across classes. The major conclusion is that effective teachers seem to be doing something qualitatively different in terms of dramatic style behaviors than poor teachers.