A one-time intervention to help teachers and students empathize with each other halved the number of suspensions at five diverse California middle schools, and helped students who had previously been suspended feel more connected at school,according to Stanford University research published in April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Changing the mindset of one teacher can change the social experience of that child’s entire world,” said Jason A. Okonofua, a Stanford University social psychologist who led the experiments.
In a series of experiments, the Stanford researchers found teachers often view respect in terms of cooperation and compliance. For students, respect involves “a basic recognition of your humanity,” Okonofua said, including remembering a student’s name (and pronouncing it correctly), not speaking down to students or embarrassing them in front of their peers, and expressing interest in their perspectives. Both college- and middle-school-age students reported losing respect for teachers who disciplined students in a dismissive or punitive way, and said that they would be more likely to misbehave in such a teacher’s class.
In a separate series of experiments, Geoffrey Cohen, a Stanford professor of organizational studies in education, found that just a short, encouraging note on a highly marked-up essay could change the way students considered their teachers’ critiques. Adding a note saying “I’m giving you these comments because I have high standards and I know you can reach them” significantly boosted students’ willingness to rewrite the paper: from 62 percent to 87 percent for white students, and from 17 percent to a 71 percent of black students.
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