Professors as Performers and Motivators

What constitutes effective teach ing? Answers appear regularly in books and journals con cerned with college instruction, most of which have focused on the qualities of effective teachers (Meredith 1984), al though some have concentrated on the process of instruction (Cohen and Herr 1982) including the kinds of learning seen in students (Abrami, D'Apollonia, and Cohen 1990; Johnson and Johnson 1987; Slavin 1983). Portraits of effec tive instructors typically deal with in struction proper (Meredith 1985, Moses 1985) or with the interpersonal dimen sion of the classroom (Erdle, Murray, and Ruston 1985; Freeman 1988; Kegel Flom 1983; McFadden and Perlman 1989). In an earlier work, I used the terms intellectual excitement and interper sonal rapport to refer to these two in dependent qualities (Lowman 1984). In tellectual excitement combines two dif ferent qualities that, although concep tually independent, are often corre lated: how interesting and how clear students find an instructor's teaching. Teachers who have developed a per sonal style of public speaking?whether flamboyant, whimsical, sardonic, or quietly intense?that students find en