“The psychologist Nalini Ambady once gave students three ten-second videotapes of a teacher- with the sound turned off- and found that they had no difficulty at all coming up with a rating of the teacher’s effectiveness. Then Ambady cut the clips back to five seconds, and the ratings were the same. They were remarkably consistent even when she showed the students just two seconds of videotape. Then Ambady compared those snap judgements of teacher effectiveness with evaluations of those same professors made by their students after a full semester of classes, and she found that they were also essentially the same.”
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, pg 13 (Penguin edition)
Lots of other stuff relevant to TEFLing in that book too. Sure everyone else has read it already, as I always wait till there are cheap copies in Book Off before reading anything, so anyone want to dismiss the book before I waste more time writing up stuff from it?
TEFLtastic 
No – it’s absolutely brilliant. Read on.
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Haven’t read Blink, but Gladwell’s Outliers (the story of success) is brilliant, too. Carry on…
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All his books are well worth reading. The stuff on Korean air crashes is amazing (Outliers?) – and food for thought for language teachers.
See, Alex, everyone has read the book. But thanks for the reminder. I might read it again now.
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Considering the end of semester feedback I sometimes get (‘I like his nose’), this doesn’t surprise me in the least….
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well, you know the importance of noses in Eikaiwa (see next post)
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Oh, how interesting!
What is the importance of noses?
I was just about to blog about noses (or growing ones) being tied up with lying in Anglo cultures and ego in Japan (tengu ni naru) Sounds like I should be patient and wait for next post
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Haven’t read “Blink” yet; “Outliers” is a great read, though.
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