I PUT A SMILE ON FOR YOU: EFFECTS OF SELF-AWARENESS ON TEACHER IMMEDIACY AND PERCEIVED TEACHING QUALITY

Abstract

Self-awareness has immense potential in effecting behavioral change. In the classroom, self-awareness can initiate behavioral regulation to enhance teaching and student outcomes such as teacher immediacy and affective learning, which are commonly associated with emotional experiences in the classroom. This study aims to examine the effects of different types of self-awareness – specifically comparing objective and subjective self-awareness – on teaching immediacy and perceived teaching quality. Participants were primed to have either enhanced self-awareness, other-awareness or awareness to inanimate objects, before they were tasked to teach a standardised material to a “student” presented in video format. Results showed that compared to other-awareness and awareness to inanimate objects, enhanced self-awareness (or objective self-awareness) does result in comparable increases in smiling proportion, which is also positively correlated with higher ratings of teaching quality. Unfortunately, the other-awareness manipulation was not successful and thus findings for subjective self-awareness were taken as invalid. Taken together, the findings suggest that increasing objective self-awareness can heighten teacher immediacy and perceived teaching quality, both of which have been proposed to be maintained through the emotion contagion cycle to potentially create a more positive classroom environment.