A primary school teacher explains a mathematical concept to her students. "Twelve take away eight gives you what?" she asks, pointing to each number in the equation on the board.

"Four!" several children say, some of them holding up four fingers.

"That's right, four," says the teacher, completing the equation and pointing emphatically at the number four. "And if you want to check your work, you can add together the four and the eight"— she makes a sweeping motion around the four and the eight—"and you should get twelve" She cups both hands together, as if bringing the twelve, the eight and the four together. The children nod their heads in understanding.

The teacher, like most people, gestures as she speaks. Sometimes gestures are simply visual substitutes for speech: every child knows that a finger held to tightly closed lips means "be quiet"; that the thumbs-up sign means "okay." But we also gesture spontaneously as we talk, even on the telephone. Are these gestures meaningful, or are they just so much hand-waving?

Recent research indicates that gestures do convey critical, often unspoken, information. David McNeill, a professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Chicago, calls gesture "the long-neglected sister of language." McNeill and others have found that speakers use hand gestures to illustrate concrete images as well as abstract concepts. A student describing an algebra word problem about continuous change is likely to use sweeping or arcing gestures; but the same student, if describing a problem about discrete change, is likely to use choppy or zigzagging motions. Teachers would do well to be aware of the gestures they use in the classroom, says Susan Goldin-Meadow, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, because they "offer students a second window onto the task, one that students do take advantage of."

Goldin-Meadow and colleagues published a study in the Journal of Educational Psychology showing that students in small math tutorials were more likely to learn new concepts when teachers used gestures that appropriately reinforced their message. The teachers' gestures served not just to direct the students' attention to the numbers in the problem, but conveyed problem-solving strategies not directly expressed in speech. A teacher explaining the concept of mathematical equivalence might say, "Both sides of the equation have to be the same," first making flat palm gestures under one side of the equation, and then under the other.

Children were significantly less likely to learn if the teacher did not gesture or inadvertently used a gesture that did not correspond with her verbal instructions—a mismatch.

Goldin-Meadow found that all eight of the teachers studied produced mismatches about 20% of the time, often when explaining what not to do. In explaining strategies for solving a problem such as problem 3 + 4 + 5 = __ + 5, the teacher might say, "You need to make both sides of the problem equal," but point to all four numbers. The problem is that when children point to all four numbers in such a problem, said Goldin-Meadow, they mean to indicate that they would add all four of the numbers. When they wrongly repeat that strategy, Goldin-Meadow said, "the teacher is shocked as to where the child came up with that answer. When in fact, if you look a turn back, the teacher gave them that strategy with her hands."

Michelle Perry, an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois, has carried Goldin-Meadow's research into the classroom. She just completed a three-year study that looks at how teachers use gesture and other forms of nonverbal representation, including manipulatives, pictures, or writing. "A whopping amount of information is communicated in the non-spoken channel," says Perry. "We found that teachers use some sort of non-spoken representation every ten to twelve seconds, and approximately 50% of those are gestures that convey a concept."

In fact, humans seem to be hard-wired to gesture when they speak. In a 1998 study published in Nature, Goldin-Meadow and Indiana University researcher Jana Iverson showed that children and adolescents who had been blind since birth spontaneously gesture when they are speaking, even if they know that they are speaking to another blind person. Obviously, the young people had never seen gestures, and so had no model for gesturing. "I think this really does suggest that gesture is an important part of the whole speaking game," Goldin-Meadow says. She suggests that gestures may reflect or even facilitate the thinking that underlies speaking, adding "We don't know much about [the area of the brain] that generates language, let alone gesture. But we do know that gesture and speech are very much integrated at the behavioral level, that they're nicely timed with one another, and that they're semantically coherent."

This week's action suggestions:

• Pay more attention to the gestures you are using when you're training. Have a buddy watch you and give you feedback afterwards - or video yourself. Are your gestures helpful and congruent, or confusing?

This week’s FriendlyBrain Tip comes to you from Kimberly Hare of Kaizen Training. Kaizen Training Limited is a well-established consulting and training firm based in the UK and offering its services to the global business community. Training for Excellence is a leading-edge Train the Trainer company based in the U.S. and providing training programs internationally. For more information, contact us at info@wetrain.biz