Types of help in the teacher's multimodal behavior

Psychological and social researches of last decades suggest that studying helping relationships may offer important suggestions for a better understanding of human behavior. In this work we present a study on the over-helping behaviors of teachers in their interaction with pupils, which may deepen our knowledge on how prosocial conducts can eventually produce unexpected effects over social interaction and cognitive development. To differentiate between helping and over-helping, we propose a taxonomy of communicative and non-communicative behaviors of teachers towards their pupils (Section 3), and an annotation scheme aimed to detect both helping and over-helping in teacher-pupil dyads (Sect. 4). Results of the study show how the annotation scheme presented allows to classify the different types of helping behavior, provides a reliable basis for the analysis of the teacher's behaviors, and suggest hints useful to empower teachers' self-reflection, in view of an improvement of the teacher-pupil relationship and of the pupils' learning processes. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.