Psychology for teachers May 2009

 No, not another chance to vent about oddball bosses or colleagues (see a couple of posts below for your chance to do that), but serious research from the latest issue of Scientific American Mind (official motto “What TEFL magazines dream of growing up to be”) that is relevant to us TEFL teachers, reduced as ever as we are to waiting for interesting crumbs of research to drop from more well funded and supported (and frankly often much more interesting) academic tables:”In their analysis of more than 10,000 fifth-grade students in 71 Georgia elementary schools, [C.Kenneth] Tanner and his colleagues found that students in classrooms with unrestricted views of at least 50 feet outside the window, including gardens, mountains and other natural elements, had higher scores on tests of vocabulary, language art and math than did students without such extensive vistas or whose classrooms primarily overlooked roads, parking lots and other urban fixtures” Scientific American Mind April/ May 2009 pg 56

“In one school district… students in the sunniest classrooms advanced 26 percent faster in reading and 20 percent faster in math in one year than did those with the least daylight in their classes” pg 57

“Although bright light might boost cognition, recent work suggests it counteracts relaxation and openness- effects that might be more important than alertness in some settings” pg 57

I wonder which one is more important in TEFL classrooms. I’m a bright lights and temperature as low as the students will let me get away with kind of guy, but that might be a personal preference as much as trying to keep the students alert.

“the common practice of placing chairs along the walls of resident day rooms or lounges [of residential health care facilities] actually prevented socializing. A better plan to encourage interaction, researchers found, is organising furniture in small groupings around the room” pg 59

Hence the slow death of the once universal TEFL chairs with flaps??

In summary “school design can account for between 10 and 15 percent of variation in elementary students’ scores on a standardized test of reading and math skills”

To put it another way that is reassuring to neurotic teachers such as myself and shows that pressure on our schools is at least as important as what we do with our students, one admin member of staff told me that over 90% of student complaints in any school have nothing to do with the teaching.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 9:07 am and is filed under Classroom dynamics, Classroom management, Language learning tips, Linguistics, applied linguistics and SLA, links, TEFL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.