What Makes Your Professor Teach the Way They Do?

“Just like students want to get out of their dorm rooms and build relationships with fellow peers, they should also get out of the classroom and form relationships with their professors.”

In addition to vibrant clubs and engaging courses, TU’s Psychology department has several faculty-led research labs. For this piece, we sat down with Dr. Jonathan Mattanah, head of the Mattanah Attachment and Human Development (MAHD) Lab, to discuss his lab’s recently completed study, Faculty-Student Engagement Deepens Student Learning in the Classroom: The Role of Professors’ Attachment Security.

Plenty of research has been conducted on teaching; however, the literature has not yet explored the role of a professor’s attachment security in their approach to teaching. More specifically, what is it about professors that make them prone to use one style of teaching over the other? To answer this question, Dr. Mattanah examined two different teaching styles, a more faculty-focused information transmission style and a more student-focused conceptual change style. Unique to this study, Dr. Mattanah examined whether attachment style influenced these differing teaching approaches and students’ level of engagement in the classroom.

For the purposes of their study, Dr. Mattanah’s lab focused on three forms of attachment:

• Secure → individuals who are more open with their emotions and welcome close relationships
• Anxious-Ambivalent → individuals who cling onto relationships, yet have difficulty trusting that others think positively about them
• Anxious-Avoidant → individuals that prefer to keep to themselves and often reject close relationships

The hypothesis is clear: “faculty members’ attachment patterns will influence their ability to form an engaging, personal relationship with their students in the classroom, which, in turn, will facilitate the students’ engagement with the material and deepened learning of class concepts”. After two years of collecting data, surveying 140 faculty and close to 1,000 student participants from Towson University and Trinity College, Dr. Mattanah and his lab found support for their hypothesis.

Study results show that securely attached professors reported more positive emotions of teaching, and preferred a more engaging, student-focused classroom experience. As Dr. Mattanah points out, these professors are confident in “not being the expert in the room and encourage discourse.” The results for anxious-ambivalent attached professors were rather interesting; it appears as though their feelings about teaching mediate their instructional approach. Dr. Mattanah explains that anxious-ambivalent attached individuals want to form relationships but fear abandonment. Therefore, if anxious-ambivalent attached professors reported positive emotions in teaching, they were more likely to pursue a student-focused teaching style. However, if professors reported negative emotions towards teaching, they opted for a more professor-focused teaching style. Anxious-avoidant professors tended to prefer a more professor-focused teaching style.

Dr. Mattanah was very excited about these findings, as little research has been done on the interaction of attachment style and teaching styles in higher education. He confirmed that his lab will be expanding on their research in the near future!

Before ending our interview, Dr. Mattanah stressed the importance of students joining an extracurricular academic-based activity; “Just like students want to get out of their dorm rooms and build relationships with fellow peers, they should also get out of the classroom and form relationships with their professors.”

Want to get involved in the MAHD Lab?

Reach out to Dr. Mattanah at jmattanah@towson.edu, or visit his faculty page on the TU website.