The social side of school: Why

teachers need social psychology

Citation Gehlbach, Hunter. 2010. The social side of school: Why teachers
need social psychology. Educational Psychology Review 22, no. 3:
349-362.

Published Version doi:10.1007/s10648-010-9138-3

Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:4460862

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Running head: THE SOCIAL SIDE OF SCHOOL

The social side of school: Why teachers need social psychology

Abstract

Teaching and learning are fundamentally social enterprises. In attempting to

understand, explain, and predict social behavior, social psychologists have amassed

scores of empirically-grounded, fundamental principles. Yet, many such principles have

yet to be applied to classrooms despite the social nature of these settings. This article

illustrates how infusing novel concepts from social psychology into teachers’ repertoires

holds untapped potential to improve their pedagogy, ability to motivate students, and

capacity to enrich students’ understanding of subject matter. This article first examines

three domains of social psychology – social cognition, influence/persuasion, and

interpersonal relations – and illustrates how applications of principles from each domain

could benefit classrooms. Next, two exemplars are presented to demonstrate the efficacy

of past interventions that are rooted in social psychological principles. Finally, pathways

through which teacher educators can introduce new social psychological concepts and

applications to teachers are explored.

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As currently practiced in most schools, learning and teaching are fundamentally

social acts (Goodenow, 1992). Students learn by interacting with their teacher and

through working with one another. Even when students read or interact with inanimate

objects such as an abacus or vial of solution, much of their potential learning remains

unrealized until a social interaction occurs. In these instances, the interpretation of the

experience often facilitates learning when a teacher or fellow student explains what has

happened, what is happening, what should happen next… or, in the case of my own math

and chemistry experiences, what should have happened.

Teachers’ roles in the classroom are equally social. Explaining concepts, keeping

students on task, and communicating with fellow faculty members and parents are

obviously social. Although less obvious, planning classes and grading papers are

anticipatory social acts in that these activities require teachers to forecast how students

will react to lesson plans and comments, respectively. Even monitoring a study hall

includes exchanges of gestures and facial expressions, setting up seating arrangements,

and developing community norms that affect the social experience for everyone involved.

Given the fundamentally social nature of learning and teaching, greater

knowledge of core concepts that elucidate complex social dynamics and guide ensuing

behavior would be a tremendous boon for teachers. The discipline of social psychology

has great untapped potential to help teachers understand and manage many of these social

aspects of the classroom. Although some concepts from this discipline (e.g., self-

efficacy, stereotype threat, etc.) are already known in education circles, many are not.

Realizing the potential of these lesser-known concepts will pay off in three important

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ways. First, because social processes are fundamental to so many aspects of learning and

teaching, intervening at this level often produces multiple desirable outcomes (i.e., one

intervention might have an array of benefits). Furthermore, by drawing on fundamental

principles, applications of these ideas may be generalized across many facets of teachers’

jobs (i.e., one principle may have multiple applications). Second, the effects of

interventions that successfully modify basic social processes can be disproportionately

large. In other words, by changing social processes that occur repeatedly, small

interventions can have big effects. Third, because social processes often set cycles in

motion, interventions that establish positive patterns of interaction can be long lasting.

This article focuses on the benefits of increasing educators’ – particularly

teachers’ – knowledge of the social side of school. However, it is important to

simultaneously weigh the costs of ignoring this side of schooling. Achievement gaps,

dropping out, and school safety provide illustrative examples – although the costs impact

students across many more domains. First, with respect to achievement gaps, ignoring

the social aspects of school seems likely to reify discrepancies between racial groups.

Teachers who fail to de-bias their perceptions and expectations of students are likely to

foster differential achievement outcomes for students of different races (Ferguson, 2003;

Rosenthal, 1991). As the student population in this country diversifies and education

becomes more and more important in the workforce, attention to this issue becomes

increasingly urgent. Second, students who experience a diminished sense of belonging at

school are less likely to remain motivated and engaged in school; consequently, they are

more likely to drop out (Fine, 1991; Juvonen, 2006). Attention to this issue is similarly

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urgent given that Latinos, the largest and fastest growing minority group in the country,

are dropping out of school at a rate of over 20% (National Center for Educational

Statistics, 2009). Third, ignoring social facets of school has troubling implications for

school safety. From school shootings, to bullying (and “cyber-bullying”), to

psychological safety it is clear that the social climate in schools has a tremendous impact

on the extent to which students feel safe (E. Aronson, 2000b; Juvonen, 2007; Olweus,

Fry, Bjoerkqvist, & et al., 1997). As Reynolds et al. (2008) emphasize, students must

feel safe before learning can occur. Furthermore, the complex mechanisms underlying

the problems of achievement, dropping out, and safety can easily feed off of one another

to form destructive cycles. In sum, although this article focuses on anticipated benefits of

social psychology, ignoring the social side of school carries grave costs for students’

motivation, achievement, and psychological well-being.

Rather than documenting those contributions from social psychology that have

gained traction in education, this article looks forward to identify domains in which novel

social psychological concepts could be applied to education but have not yet been

translated widely into practice. Three guiding questions focus this goal. First, I explore:

What might social psychology do for teachers? I provide three examples of the types of

social psychological concepts that could contribute to education but that are rarely

employed currently. Next, by describing two instances when social psychological ideas

have been implemented in classroom settings, I examine: How effective have social

psychological interventions been in the past? In the final section – How might these

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potential contributions of social psychology be realized? – I consider different avenues

through which social psychology might be infused into teachers’ repertoires.

What might Social Psychology do for Teachers?

Before exploring this first question, a basic definition of social psychology is

needed. This task is deceptively challenging. As Elliot Aronson notes, “There are almost

as many definitions of social psychology as there are social psychologists” (p. 5, 1999).

Some scholars focus on how people think about themselves and others (e.g., Fiske &

Taylor, 1991), others on influence and persuasion (e.g., Cialdini, 2009), and others on

interpersonal and inter-group relations (e.g., Devine, 1995). In thinking about social

psychology’s potential to improve schooling, Myers’ definition, “Social psychology is

the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another,” (p. 4,

2007) covers three critical aspects of students’ and teachers’ daily social experiences. It

also adequately covers three core domains of the discipline: social cognition, influence

and persuasion, and interpersonal relations.

Although a few teachers may have basic knowledge within a few of these

domains, it seems unlikely that most teachers’ understandings of the core ideas in these

areas would allow them to develop applications for their pedagogy. Prominent

educational psychology texts (e.g., Mayer, 2003; Slavin, 2000; Sternberg & Williams,

2002) rarely have substantive sections on social cognition, influence and persuasion, or

intergroup relations. In those instances when these texts offer enough detail to provide

prescriptive suggestions to teachers, the research basis for those prescriptions has been

called into question in some instances (Dacy, Nihilani, Cestone, & Robinson, in press).

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Major state and national tests for teaching certifications (e.g., Massachusetts Tests for

Educator Licensure or Praxis) do not require knowledge of these domains for their exams

(Educational Testing Service, 2010; Pearson Evaluation Inc., 2010). Likewise, the

National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (2010) do not cover these core

concepts from social psychology. There is no evidence that teacher professional

development opportunities provide this exposure either (Choy, Chen, & Bugarin, 2006).

Thus, infusing certain applications of social psychological ideas into teachers’ repertoires

seems like a promising approach for bringing important, new ideas into education.

Instead of attempting to catalog the universe of social psychological concepts that

offer untapped potential, this article focuses on three examples. These examples illustrate

the breadth of social psychology with potential classroom applications (e.g., social

cognition, influence and persuasion, and interpersonal relations) while illustrating a range

of outcomes (improved pedagogy, bolstered student motivation, and increased student

understanding) that these applications might impact. Thus, the examples serve as

prototypes that might spark ideas for other novel applications of social psychological

principles within classrooms. Although the article’s remains focused on classroom-based

applications and outcomes, these principles may be equally helpful in facilitating

teachers’ understanding important social dynamics elsewhere (e.g., communicating with

parents and relationships with administrators).

Reducing Biases and Facilitating Social Perspective Taking to Improve Pedagogy

Within social cognition, a long tradition of research has examined how people

make sense of and perceive each other. Historically, much of this research has focused

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on biases and mistakes that plague people’s efforts to understand others (Gilbert, 1995;

Ross, 1977; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Though little of this research has focused

specifically on teachers (see Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968 for a well-known exception),

presumably they are as susceptible to these biases as anyone else. Recently, this research

has been complemented by a renewed interest in the converse of these biases – accurate

perceptions of the self and others. Specifically, the proliferation of social perspective

taking (SPT) research and its impact on other outcomes has important applications for

teachers (e.g., Ames, 2004; Davis, 1996; Hall, Andrzejewski, & Yopchick, 2009; Ickes,

1997).

Though known by many names (social role-taking, empathic accuracy, everyday

mind-reading, interpersonal sensitivity, etc.), the core construct of SPT entails discerning

the thoughts and feelings of others with particular attention to how others perceive the

situation. According to this formulation, SPT is a complex aptitude, consisting of an

ability dimension as well as a motivational dimension (Gehlbach, 2004). In other words,

for SPT to impact outcomes in the real world, people need to develop both the ability to

read the thoughts and feelings of others accurately, and the motivation to engage in SPT

frequently.

To the extent that people succumb to common biases that inhibit SPT accuracy

less frequently, they should perceive the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others

more accurately. Though numerous biases diminish people’s SPT accuracy, the

fundamental attribution error, naïve realism, and confirmation bias seem particularly

germane to classroom settings. According to Ross (1977), the fundamental attribution

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error consists of people’s pervasive tendency to explain the social behavior of others by

over-weighting the causal role of an individual’s personality traits and under-valuing

situational causes. Confirmation bias refers to the tendency for people to seek out and

value information that corroborates their pet hypothesis, often while ignoring or

devaluing contradictory information (Wason, 1960). Naïve realism is the belief that we

see objective reality; those that agree with our point of view also see objective reality; but

those who disagree must be (a) subject to different (presumably lesser) information, (b)

too lazy to process the information fully, or (c) biased (Ross & Ward, 1996).

Mitigating these biases will help teachers more accurately perceive their students

which, in turn, will enhance their pedagogy. To understand how, it is helpful to illustrate

how these biases can unfold in classrooms. Among their multiple roles, teachers must

monitor students’ academic progress – are students’ grades, homework completion rates,

and conceptual understandings improving or not? When a student’s rate of progress

declines abruptly, teachers need to understand why. In other words, this is a critical

moment for teachers to be motivated and accurate in taking the student’s perspective if

they are to help remediate the situation.

Similarly, it is a moment when the aforementioned biases can conspire to degrade

SPT accuracy. If a student fails a test, stops turning in homework, but otherwise seems

herself, a teacher might commit the fundamental attribution error by deciding that she is

unfocused – that she can perform adequately in school at times but lacks consistency.

Developing an equally plausible situational explanation (e.g., the student has a

hospitalized relative) takes more imagination and mental effort – teachers simply have

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less knowledge about students’ lives outside of the classroom. With this “inconsistency”

explanation in mind, the teacher becomes susceptible to confirmation bias. In other

words, instances where the student appears to be distracted will become more salient and

more readily remembered than instances where the student appears to be focused on her

work. As the teacher’s working theory accumulates supporting evidence it becomes

increasingly likely that the teacher belief morphs from theory toward “objective reality”

and alternative explanations begin to seem less plausible. By contrast, if the teacher were

to use a SPT strategy of considering alternative hypotheses (e.g., supplementing the

attribution of “unfocused” with two situation-based explanations), past studies indicate

that s/he would be less biased and more accurate in perceiving the student (Griffin,

Dunning, & Ross, 1990; Lord, Lepper, & Preston, 1984). By accurately discerning how

students understand their own situation teachers can devise pedagogical interventions to

help students recover – an intervention to help a student cope with a hospitalized relative

should look much different than one to help an unfocused student.

In addition to improving teachers’ SPT as a means to helping them better monitor

student progress, SPT can help improve teachers’ pedagogy in other ways. The more

accurately teachers infer their students’ thought patterns, the more readily they can

identify conceptual misunderstandings. For example, Gehlbach and Brinkworth

(manuscript under review) describe a science teacher whose SPT particularly focused on

anticipating where her chemistry students encountered problems due to their “non-

analytic, sequential way of thinking.” This SPT inference allowed the teacher to tailor

her lessons, spend more time on these challenging areas, and provide more examples and

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supportive materials. While teaching this material, she read students facial expressions to

gauge the class’ overall level of comprehension/confusion. Even for proficient

perspective takers like this teacher, aspects of SPT ability such as reading facial

expressions (Ekman & Friesen, 2003), and SPT motivation (Davis & Franzoi, 1991) are

malleable and thus can be improved. By more frequently and accurately assessing their

students’ thoughts in this way, teachers’ will present their material in clearer, more

effective ways, thereby improving their pedagogy.

Everyone can engage in SPT more frequently and become less biased and more

accurate in their perceptions of others. Training teachers to do so should improve their

pedagogy in several ways. Improving teachers’ SPT should enhance the accuracy of their

inferences as they monitor students’ progress. They should be better able to anticipate

and prepare for topics that will be conceptually challenging for students – as well as

gauge students’ developing understandings as the lesson is being taught. Other ways that

SPT in particular and social cognition more generally might enhance teachers’ pedagogy

are yet to be developed. Scholarship on SPT indicates that it could help improve people’s

communication (Nickerson, 1999) and conflict resolution (Corcoran & Mallinckrodt,

2000) – developing applications in these areas seem like other promising avenues for

researchers to explore.

Using Cognitive Dissonance to Bolster Student Motivation

Social psychologists have maintained a lasting fascination with how people

influence and persuade one another in social settings. One of the more interesting

general conclusions from this work is that the arguments we perceive to be most

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persuasive tend to come from our own mouths. In particular, the work on cognitive

dissonance (Festinger, 1962) has shown that we are adept at self-persuasion and that

cognitive dissonance can be a powerful motivating force. Subject to a couple caveats the

following rule usually holds true: the more we preach something, the more likely we are

to practice it. Unfortunately, few teachers are likely to have been exposed to this work or

how might be applied in classrooms (e.g., to help bolster student motivation).

In Festinger’s (1957) original experiment, subjects performed a mind-numbing

peg-turning task repeatedly until they were too bored to continue. Next, they were asked

to lie to the next participant in the waiting room by explaining how enjoyable the task

was. Subjects were then paid $20, $1, or $0 (depending on their experimental condition)

and asked for their true opinion of the task. Those who were paid $20 could easily

explain lying about a boring task because they were well compensated; those who did it

for free could feel good about their altruistic contributions to scientific knowledge.

However, the underpaid subjects found themselves in a bind. They had just performed an

excruciatingly dull task, lied to an innocent potential subject, and were not even properly

compensated for their efforts. Festinger inferred that, to resolve their discomfort, these

participants in the $1 condition rationalized their discrepant thoughts by convincing

themselves that they really did enjoy the task (i.e., practicing what they had already

preached). In other words, making this rationalization was easier than entertaining the

notion that they were an inconsistent person who lied to others for no particular reason.

Numerous replications and follow-up studies of cognitive dissonance ensued.

Cialdini (2009) notes a number of the seemingly absurd lengths people will go to in order

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to maintain consistency and not threaten their sense of self. He describes how people

have agreed to post ugly billboards in their yards, endured harsh hazing rituals, and

awaited UFOs for hours – all in an effort to maintain cognitive consistency. From these

additional studies, two particularly important caveats have emerged in the theory of

cognitive dissonance. First, to experience cognitive dissonance, people must feel that

they freely chose to engage in the behavior in question; second, that behavior must have

foreseeable negative consequences (Cooper & Fazio, 1984).

To see how teachers might employ cognitive dissonance to bolster student

motivation in a classroom, imagine that a group of eighth-grade teachers wants to address

their students’ flagging efforts on homework (or some other behavioral issue). To

address this problem, the teachers might implement a variation on a peer tutoring

program (Bloom, 1984). By collaborating with a group of fourth grade classrooms, each

middle school student would mentor a fourth grade student. In these advisory roles, the

eighth graders would be encouraged to stress the importance of thoroughly completing

homework assignments, thereby increasing their own experience of cognitive dissonance

if they neglected their own homework. Teachers should ensure that the eighth grade

students perceived that they freely chose to participate in the tutoring (perhaps by

offering an onerous worksheet assignment as an alternative to the tutoring). Leading the

eighth graders in a class discussion of the importance of setting a good example for their

fourth grade mentees would likely instill a sense of foreseeable negative consequences.

Furthermore, voicing their opinions publically to the whole class would likely make them

more binding (Cialdini, 2009). Thus, the necessary conditions of perceived free choice

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and the foreseeability of aversive consequences (Cooper & Fazio, 1984) could be

established.

J. Aronson, Good, and colleagues have attempted interventions with similarities

to the one just described using college students as tutors (J. Aronson, Fried, & Good,

2002; Good, Aronson, & Inzlicht, 2003). College tutors who espoused to their tutee the

view that intelligence is malleable experienced an increase in their own academic

performance. Importantly, these positive effects occurred for both the college tutors as

well as for the middle school tutees (for grades and standardized test scores respectively).

Thus, there is some empirical indication that this type of approach can help students in

both tutors’ and tutees’ roles.

In addition to motivating students to expend more effort on homework, cognitive

dissonance could be used to help students persist on their academic goals for the year.

Teachers might facilitate this process by assigning students to write down their goals

through a regular classroom assignment. This relatively common exercise could be

strengthened by having students then try to convince a peer to adopt at least one of their

goals. To strengthen the intervention, teachers could assign students to inform their

parents of their list of goals and the reasons why they want to pursue them over the

course of the year. Finally, teachers could post each student’s goals around the classroom

so that they are publicly displayed. As Cialdini (2009) notes, by trying to convince their

classmates of the merits of their goals, they will likely convince themselves; by

describing their goals and the reasons for their goals to audiences like their parents, they

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will bolster their commitment to their goals; and by posting the goals in class, the goals

will remain salient for students.

Enhancing Student Understanding by Learning about Intergroup Bias

A third major domain in which social psychologists have substantially enhanced

our understanding of the social world, is that of interpersonal and intergroup relations.

One of the more intriguing phenomena to emerge from this domain is the research on

intergroup bias (Devine, 1995). One obvious classroom application of this work is to

guide teachers’ organization of groupwork and to improve intergroup relations between

students from different backgrounds or cliques. However, like all the social

psychological ideas presented in this article, this concept is flexible in how it might be

applied to the classroom. Thus, applications of in-group/out-group research could also

help students more deeply understand the content that they are learning.

Much of the research in this area has employed the “minimal group paradigm” in

which participants are selected into groups ostensibly based on some superficial criterion

(although in reality they are randomly assigned). In a classic example of the effects of

grouping individuals into in-groups and out-groups, Sherif and colleagues (Sherif,

Harvey, White, Hood, & Sherif, 1961) invited a group of young boys to summer camp

and randomly assigned them to be part of the “Eagles” or “Rattlers” camp. In spite of

each group containing boys from the same backgrounds, being the same ages, and having

the same interests, discord sparked quickly between the two groups. These groups were

“minimal” in that they consisted of nothing more than separate names and separate

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residences; the resultant conflicts were anything but minimal (including physical conflicts

and raids on the opposing group’s cabins).

More recently, Galinsky and Moskowitz (2000) created minimal groups by

having participants in their study estimate the number of dots on a computer screen.

They then randomly assigned participants to be labeled as “overestimators” or

“underestimators”. Although it is hard to think of a more trivial group designation,

individuals from each group favored their own group members over those in the out-

group across ten different traits.

Overall, this research tradition has found that categorizing individuals into these

types of meaningless groups has a wide array of effects. In-group members usually

allocate more resources to, are more cooperative with, and behave in more prosocial

ways towards members of their own group. Furthermore, they evaluate members of their

in-group more positively, associate more desirable characteristics with members of the

in-group, overestimate their similarities with other in-group members, and overestimate

their dissimilarities with out-group members (Devine, 1995). At the core of most

theories about why intergroup bias occurs is the idea that people derive self-esteem

benefits through associations with in-groups and/or derogations of out-groups (Hewstone,

Rubin, & Willis, 2002).

Knowledge of this concept might help teachers enrich students’ understanding of

different subjects in a number of ways. Within social studies, students often learn about

the treatment of slaves throughout different societies, Hitler’s genocide of the Jews

leading up to and during World War II, or more modern conflicts e.g., between the Hutus

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and Tutsis in Rwanda. Teachers who use this lens of intergroup bias to illuminate

individual or group behavior in these contexts provide new, meaningful insights into

historical events that students do not usually find in history texts. For example, would a

threat from a foreign power (i.e., an out-group common to everyone in the U.S.) in 1860

have prevented the civil war in the United States? Knowing that in-group members tend

to favor each other, could a stronger super-ordinate in-group identity as “Americans”

have prevented the civil war? Are their analogous approaches that could prevent modern

countries from devolving into civil wars? Because in-groups and out-groups often

permeate schools (Franzoi, Davis, & Vasquez-Suson, 1994), these types of explorations

may be especially effective in making history relevant to students. By examining

intergroup relations or other basic social factors that help explain historical events,

teachers can more easily connect their subject matter to students own lives. As social

psychological research on the self-reference effect indicates, students should better

encode and remember new material to the extent that they can relate it to themselves

(Symons & Johnson, 1997).

Beyond social studies classes, English teachers might offer students more

nuanced understandings of classics such as The Lord of the Flies or Romeo and Juliet

based on the ideas of intergroup bias. Although there is a less direct link to

understanding concepts in science and math, teachers might use the concept of intergroup

bias to help contextualize some of the current and historical controversies around the

content that students now learn. For example, science students might better understand

why there was such resistance to accepting the Copernican view of the solar system or

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mathematics students might better grasp why such hostility exists between those favoring

traditional versus reform approaches to teaching math.

How Effective have Social Psychological Interventions been in the Past?

One way to assess the promise of social psychology for improving education is to

examine instances where ideas and concepts from this discipline have been applied to

education in the past. Scholars studying achievement motivation (e.g., Midgley, 2002),

cooperative groupwork (e.g., Johnson & Johnson, 2009; Slavin, 1996), attributions about

intelligence (Dweck & Leggett, 1988), and teacher expectancy effects (e.g., Brophy,

1983; Rosenthal, 1991) have applied ideas from social psychology to educational

settings. The success of these research programs is, perhaps, unsurprising given that the

theories in these domains have obvious applicability to classroom settings. This section

describes two of the more isolated instances when social psychological concepts without

clear educational implications have been applied to classrooms; these types of concepts

exemplify the unrealized potential of social psychology for learning and teaching.

From the following examples, several benefits of these types of interventions

become clear: intervening at the level of social interactions can have multiple desirable

outcomes, modest interventions in oft-repeated social processes can produce large effects,

and the reinforcing patterns in many social phenomena may allow for brief interventions

that change interaction patterns to have lasting effects.

Example #1: The Jigsaw Classroom

One of the most famous and successful examples of social psychology in the

classroom is that of Elliot Aronson’s (1978, 2000a) jigsaw technique. The jigsaw

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classroom arose out of a need to improve relations between African-American, Hispanic,

and White students in post-desegregation Texas. Although variations exist, the basic

pattern of a jigsaw classroom is as follows. Initially, students are assigned to work on a

complex task in a small group which is heterogeneous with regard to race (or some other

category). The task is sufficiently complex and requires enough different skills and/or

knowledge, that no one group-member can complete the task alone. Instead, members of

this initial group must divide up and work with other classmates in “expert” groups. In

these second groups, students work with specialized resources or develop new skills.

After developing their unique expertise, they return to their original group to work on the

problem by synthesizing the new knowledge and skills that each group-member has

brought back from his or her respective expert group.

Cooperative groupwork can take many different forms, but several principles and

related research findings from social psychology illustrate why the jigsaw technique is

particularly effective. First, research on prejudice indicates that mere contact between

members of different racial groups is insufficient to ameliorate the ill-will between them;

other conditions must be in place (Pettigrew, 1998). Second, people tend to engage in

social loafing when working in groups unless individual accountability mechanisms are

in place (Latane, Williams, & Harkins, 1979). Third, according to the scarcity principle,

people tend to place a higher value on scarce information as compared to information that

everyone can access (Cialdini, 2009).

Each of these principles is embedded within the jigsaw activity. First, the groups

are structured for much more than mere contact. Students’ groups are cooperative and

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interdependent rather than competitive and independent; students enter into these groups

as equal status participants; they are striving to solve a common problem; the teacher

supports their interactions; and students have the potential to become friends. A

cooperative context, equal status participation, common goals, authority support, and

“friendship potential” are exactly the conditions that Pettigrew (1998) identifies as

facilitating prejudice reduction during intergroup contact. Second, students are held

accountable by their original groups for bringing back information from their expert

groups. Because the group relies on the knowledge and skills that each and every student

brings back from their unique expert group, social loafing cannot occur without harmful

repercussions for the entire group. Third, because the information that students bring

back from their expert groups is scarce – nobody else in the group has the specialized

knowledge from the expert group – the other members of the group are more likely to

value it.

The results of the jigsaw classroom are impressive. As compared to control

classrooms, students in classrooms that implemented the jigsaw technique regularly

experienced a wide range of beneficial outcomes including gains in self-esteem,

interpersonal attraction towards their group-mates, and empathy between students of

different races. Perhaps most importantly, the academic achievement of minority

students improved without any cost to the performance of majority group students (E.

Aronson & Bridgeman, 1979). Subsequent to the jigsaw’s initial success, these results

have been consistently replicated in classrooms all across the country (E. Aronson, 1999).

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Example #2: Reducing Stereotype Threat

More recently, Cohen, Garcia, Apfel, and Master (2006) showed dramatic

reductions in the Black-White achievement gap through an intervention designed to

enhance Black students’ sense of self-integrity thereby providing a buffer against any

sense of stereotype threat that they might feel in the classroom. In other words, the

authors argued that by bolstering their sense of self-worth, students might feel less

threatened by classroom situations that could otherwise seem threatening and stressful.

They conducted a brief intervention early in the semester which consisted of having

students complete what was ostensibly a classroom assignment. For the assignment

students had to indicate which of a list of values were most important to them, write a

brief paragraph about why the selected values were important to them (in the treatment

group) or to somebody else (in the control group), and rate how much they agreed with

statements about the values (e.g., “I care about these values” for the treatment group, and

“Some people care about these values” for the control group). When the researchers

examined students’ final semester grades, they found that the Black students in the

treatment group experienced gains of .26 grade points in the first study and .34 in the

replication as compared to the Black students in the control group. Remarkably, they

found that these effects carried over to other classes (i.e., students’ overall grade-point-

average) as well. Given that the initial intervention took about 15 minutes and was so

simple, these substantial increases in grade-point-average seem almost too good to be

true.

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Running head: THE SOCIAL SIDE OF SCHOOL

The authors explain how this intervention impacts student achievement by

drawing on three assumptions based on past social psychological research related to

stereotype threat. First, students are motivated to maintain their self-integrity. Second,

negative group characterizations can threaten students’ self-integrity because students’

self-integrity is partially based on their group affiliations. For example, Black students

who feel that race is a part of their self-concept might feel personally threatened by

negative stereotypes of Blacks. Third, when these threats are sufficiently severe,

students’ performance will suffer. To address this causal chain of events, the authors

intervened by helping students reaffirm their self-integrity. In other words, by helping

remind students of their values, the intervention helped buffer students’ self-integrity

against the stress of negative race-based stereotypes. In the absence of threats to self-

integrity, the students in the treatment group had more cognitive resources available to

focus on learning. They note that this affirmation process also likely interrupts a

“recursive cycle” of threats to their self-integrity and “could have long-term effects” (p.

1309). This study provides a dramatic example of how a small intervention at the level

of students’ social cognitions can result in a large outcome in actual achievement over an

extended period of time.

To summarize, these two programs of research illustrate how both substantial,

multifaceted interventions and abbreviated, narrowly focused interventions rooted in

social psychological principles can produce multiple, dramatic, and lasting beneficial

outcomes for students. Given the success of these past applications of social psychology

and the unrealized potential of other social psychological concepts (beyond the three

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Running head: THE SOCIAL SIDE OF SCHOOL

examples previously described), the challenge becomes thinking of avenues for infusing

social psychology into teachers’ repertoires.

How might the Potential Contributions of Social Psychology be Realized?

In thinking about how this infusion of novel social psychological principles might

happen, the role of teacher educators, particularly educational psychologists, seems

pivotal. First, social psychological principles need to be adapted into actual classroom

practices. Scholars working within teacher education are uniquely positioned to perform

this translation function. They have the background and training in social science

research to understand and evaluate social psychological research, and they have a rich

understanding of the context in which teachers work. Second, the newly developed

classroom practices need to be evaluated. Because concepts and empirical findings do

not always generalize from the laboratory (the context for many social psychology

studies) to the classroom, new research needs to assess which applications of social

psychological principles transfer. The aforementioned research background and

contextual knowledge of teacher educators perfectly positions them to design studies that

can examine the efficacy of new applications of social psychological principles.

Given that teacher educators seem particularly well-positioned to help develop

applications of social psychology and disseminate them to teachers, how should they

approach this task? Although it might seem obvious to advocate for a class on Applied

Social Psychology in the Classroom for pre-service teachers, it seems unlikely that many

teacher preparation programs would adopt such a course. Most programs are already

over-saturated with requirements. A more promising approach to placing these ideas in

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Running head: THE SOCIAL SIDE OF SCHOOL

the hands of pre-service teachers might be to use part of existing courses to focus on

some of these ideas. Admittedly, space and time for new ideas are tight in these courses

too. However, social psychological principles can provide an efficient way to clarify pre-

service teachers’ understanding of topics that are being covered anyway. For example, a

conversation about Piagetian disequilibrium could easily incorporate the broader idea of

cognitive dissonance and its powerful motivational effects in other aspects of the

classroom. Discussions of diversity in classrooms are likely to happen in many courses

naturally, so introducing the concept of intergroup bias and research from the minimal

group paradigm provides an efficient explanation of why teachers often find it

challenging to integrate students from different backgrounds or cliques. Furthermore,

because the introduction of these concepts would center on social aspects of classroom

dynamics pre-service teachers will have had some prior experience with them (e.g., most

everyone has experienced cognitive dissonance or been an out-group member at some

point). To the extent that teacher educators can show pre-service teachers how these

concepts relate to their own experiences, these students are more likely to process the

new ideas quickly and remember them better (see Symons & Johnson, 1997 for a review

of the self-reference effect).

Although promising, this approach is only a partial solution at best. There are far

more worthy ideas from social psychology than might be squeezed into pre-service

coursework. Furthermore this approach would not help the myriad of teachers already

practicing. To augment the first approach, teacher educators can incorporate social

psychological concepts into professional development workshops. First-year teachers are

23
Running head: THE SOCIAL SIDE OF SCHOOL

particularly likely to be interested in classroom management, while more experienced

teachers prioritize pedagogical skills (Coalition for Psychology in Schools and

Education, August, 2006). Fortunately, many of the ideas from social psychology may

address multiple goals such as these simultaneously. For example, a professional

development session that helps teachers improve their social perspective taking should

help them to better anticipate where students may struggle to understand content and

determine which explanations are likely to work best. Likewise, these same skills should

also improve their personal relationships with students – an important focus given that

better teacher-student relationships are associated with a host of valuable student

outcomes ranging from improved academic achievement, engagement, and persistence to

graduation (Juvonen, 2007).

One problem endemic to much of teacher professional development is that

teachers may be reticent to change their classroom practices until they experience

evidence of a new program’s efficacy (Guskey, 2002). Fortunately, as the Cohen et al.

(2006) study suggests, even modest interventions may produce large and/or lasting

effects. Thus, leaders of professional development may be more likely to get compliance

from teachers by trying out small interventions, showing their effectiveness, and then

earning more latitude to implement larger interventions at a later date. In other words,

these small but powerful interventions may be an effective means for getting a “foot-in-

the-door” (Cialdini, 2009).

Infusing novel social psychological content into pre-service coursework and

professional development workshops will provide a useful starting place for expanding

24
Running head: THE SOCIAL SIDE OF SCHOOL

the role of social psychology within education. However, in their roles as researchers and

evaluators of effective classroom practices, teacher educators are particularly well-suited

for a third critical role. As teacher educators study the efficacy of applying social

psychological principles in their own research agendas, they can disseminate their

findings in practitioner journals in addition to outlets that serve academic audiences. By

simultaneously informing colleagues and practitioners as to which interventions

demonstrate the most potential, scholars can create audiences across two populations.

Through these multiple approaches the odds are much greater that teachers will

receive more exposure to the untapped potential of many of these social psychological

concepts. Furthermore, as has been well-documented by social psychologists, to the

extent that some educators receive multiple exposures to these ideas, they are likely to

view them more favorably (Zajonc, 2001).

Concluding Thoughts

Social interactions lie at the heart of classroom learning. As a result, thoughtful,

new applications of social psychological principles may have multiple, large, lasting

benefits for teachers and students. These applications are needed in schools now more

than ever. The current focus on standardized testing and high stakes accountability

requires teachers to develop an exceptionally effective, efficient skill set. Typically,

teachers must cover a tremendous breadth of content while keeping students sufficiently

motivated to retain the information; simultaneously, if they want to prepare students for

the type of integrative thinking that will be required in many 21st century jobs (Levy &

Murnane, 2004), they will also need to help students develop complex understandings of

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Running head: THE SOCIAL SIDE OF SCHOOL

this content from different perspectives. Although it would be naïve to think that

teaching teachers new social psychological concepts and how to apply them will be a

panacea, these principles do provide powerful tools to improve teachers’ pedagogy,

bolster student motivation, and enrich students’ understanding of multiple content areas.

Furthermore, depriving teachers of the tools to understand the social dynamics of their

classrooms carry a host of costs that schools simply cannot afford.

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Running head: THE SOCIAL SIDE OF SCHOOL

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Acknowledgements:

The author is grateful to Maureen Brinkworth, Jere Brophy, Kristy Cooper, and

Hahrie Han whose incisive comments improved this manuscript tremendously.

35