Learning by Feeling

According to Bank of Kentucky Endowed Chair in Education Mark Wasicsko, 80 percent of how we learn is emotional in context - how we feel about our teachers and subjects.

"Yet, when trying to improve the quality of learning in kids, attempts by legislators, government and school boards tend to focus on the content knowledge and skills of teachers, and technology and strategies," said Wasicsko. "But all of people's recollections and all the best qualitative research indicate it's actually the human qualities that make the impact."

It is the identification and prioritizing of those qualities - temperament, character, empathy and outlook - also referred to as disposition, where Wasicsko and his undergraduate students concentrate their research.

In order to stimulate national debate about misdirected efforts and the cultivation of those qualities found in the most effective teachers, Wasicsko is conducting an online survey at www.favoriteteachers.org to gather people's recollections of their school years to prove his point. His student researchers are evaluating the data by age, education level, occupation, etc., to understand what people think makes the best teacher.

"We're finding that 75 percent of people - especially students - remember the human qualities first," he says. "As you might expect, because it's their job, educators tend to emphasize knowledge and skills."

Wasicsko's undergraduate researchers will soon be presenting their findings to Kentucky legislators.

"The students will administer the survey to legislators to find out what their remembrances are," he said. "We think they, too, will most remember the human qualities. Yet, they keep passing laws that target the least effective things. We're actually trying to change public policy."

Wasicsko says only a handful of teacher institutions currently make deliberate efforts to improve the dispositions of future teachers. At NKU, they are slowly implementing research and applying the tools he and his students have developed to discover great-teacher material. Ultimately, he hopes their efforts will lead to a shift in how teachers are selected and trained.

"Initiatives like 'no child left behind' are prime examples of how we continue to focus our energies on the things that have the least impact on the future of kids," he said. "Kids should be interacting with high-quality professionals with the personality traits that allow the student to achieve more than a year's worth of growth with a year's worth of effort. We already know the most effective teachers are doing exactly that."