The Term "Teacher Immediacy" Is Useful to Medical Educators.

Abstract

To the Editor: In medical education literature, recommendations on teaching skills include a set of behaviors that concern mannerisms, speech patterns, and interactions with students. Using humor, being enthusiastic, and encouraging student participation are examples of such behaviors. Though widely recognized as desirable teacher qualities, they are referred to by various terms in medical education literature. In the field of instructional communication, they are called “teacher immediacy” behaviors, defined as the teacher’s verbal and nonverbal behaviors that decrease the perceived psychological distance between teacher and students. 1 We propose that medical teachers and medical education researchers adopt the established term “teacher immediacy” as a crisp narrative/phrase for these behaviors. Detailed descriptions and measuring tools of teacher immediacy behaviors are found in the literature. In the works of Andersen 2 and Gorham, 3 examples of verbal teacher immediacy behaviors include addressing individual students by name, asking students questions, giving feedback and praise, encouraging students to talk, and basing discussion on something a student brings up. Examples of nonverbal immediacy behaviors include smiling, gesturing, vocal expressiveness, movement about the classroom, and looking at the class while talking. Decades of empirical studies have established that teacher immediacy behaviors are positively associated with student motivation, participation, learning outcomes, and satisfaction with the instructor, instruction, and course content. 4–8 A recent systematic review 7 of studies examining the association of teacher immediacy with learner motivation found that the studies were conducted in courses of various fields, mostly science, engineering, communication, business, and general education. Thus, teacher immediacy is an important contributor to effective teaching. Adopting the established term “teacher immediacy” in medical education will give the field a common language to talk about the same set of teacher characteristics, so the phenomenon will be more likely propagated and studied for its impact. Teachers can learn and use immediacy behaviors to increase their instructional effectiveness, and researchers can investigate the construct of teacher immediacy to understand its roles in various learning contexts.