We like to be looked at when we talk. Or rather, we need to be looked at. Unless a person is staring right back at us, peering into the dark mass of our pupils, we just can’t believe they are paying attention to what we are saying.

You see it in schools all the time. Teachers demand to be looked at when they are teaching from the front, when they are dealing with behaviour and when they are having a heart-to-heart. To refuse to do so is seen to be deceptive, to be inattentive, to be outright rude.

It’s worse with remote learning. If a pupil’s eyes wander in a live lesson, they could well be watching telly. If you can’t see their hands, they could be playing Xbox. “Keep your eyes on me, David - then I know you’re listening …”

If only it were that simple. Unfortunately, eye contact may not be all it’s cracked up to be. For a start, when we think direct eye contact has been made, it probably hasn’t. Shane Rogers, a lecturer in psychology at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia, explains that when you perceive that your gaze is being met, it could be that the other person is, in fact, looking at your mouth or around your face. It looks like they are staring into your eyes, but they aren’t.

Does that matter? In theory, if the perceiver believes the connection is there, that should be enough. And Rogers acknowledges that this perception is important.

“To avoid looking at the face of our conversational partner in western cultures is a non-verbal signal that we are feeling discomfort,” he says. “Something that is highly valued in our Western, predominantly individualistic, culture is self-confidence. Making eye contact with people is a signal that we are self-confident. We value self-confidence, therefore we value eye contact.”

However, we don’t actually like too much of it, says Carol Kinsey Goman, a leadership presence coach and body language expert. She argues that asking for 100 per cent eye contact is not just unreasonable, it is uncomfortable.

“As a general rule, direct eye contact ranging from 30 per cent to 60 per cent of the time during a conversation should make for a comfortable, productive atmosphere,” she explains. “Although ‘just the right amount’ of eye contact - the amount that produces a feeling of mutual likability and trustworthiness - will vary with situations, settings, personality types, gender and cultural differences.”

While one person may feel comfortable with eye contact for 40 per cent of a conversation, another may be comfortable with up to 60 per cent. Cultural differences can play a huge role in the level of eye contact that a person will be willing to accommodate. Studies have found huge differences between Western and Eastern cultures in the levels of eye contact deemed socially acceptable, and also differences between countries within those cultures. What is more, special educational needs and disabilities, such as autism, can affect eye contact times, as can the developmental stage of a child (younger children tend to hold a gaze for longer).

So, getting eye contact right in the classroom is a gamble: without asking your pupils, you’re never going to know what the individual threshold of each one of them is at any moment in time, which makes eye contact rather tricky.

Added into the mix is the fact that we can avert our eyes for numerous reasons that can be context dependent, says Rogers.

“We reduce eye contact when we are talking about something shameful or embarrassing, when we are sad or depressed, and when we are accessing internal thoughts or emotions,” he explains.

In these situations, demanding eye contact may have the exact opposite effect to the one you are attempting to create - and, yes, an off-hand “look at me” is a demand. If you are trying to manage behaviour, have a pastoral conversation or even just trying to be kind, asking for - or expecting - eye contact is likely to make the situation worse, not better.

Why do we think eye contact is important in these situations? Mainly, it’s because we have come to believe that eye contact has a mysterious power to make someone truthful. That, says Kinsey Goman, is a myth.

“While some liars (most often, children) find it difficult to lie while looking directly at you, many liars, especially the most brazen, actually overcompensate to ‘prove’ that they are not lying by making too much eye contact and holding it too long,” she says.

Unfortunately, it is not just emotional factors that influence eye contact. Rogers suggests that there may be cognitive reasons behind a lost gaze. He claims that to presume that a student staring out of the window is more interested in passing traffic than the content of your lesson is to misunderstand how the brain works.

“A student looking away does not always signify that they are not paying attention,” he explains. “It might be that you have said something that is making them think hard on the point you have made. In that situation, it is quite a natural thing for the student to disengage from looking at the teacher’s face in order to fully process what they are learning about.”

A research digest from the British Psychological Society reiterates this point: “Eye contact is such an intense experience, it even seems to consume extra brain power, making it difficult to perform other challenging mental tasks at the same time,” it states. The report explains how researchers in Japan put people through a test in which they had to generate verbs while staring at an on-screen face or averting their eyes.

“Making eye contact impaired the participants’ performance on the hardest version of the verb generation task, presumably because it consumed spare brain power that might otherwise have been available to support performance on the verbal task,” it concludes.

Interestingly, eye contact can make you a worse teacher, too: by trying to make eye contact with 25 students during the teaching of a complex topic, you might find yourself struggling to remember what you were teaching in the first place.

“Eye contact does increase the cognitive load on the presenter, as you are processing facial signals from your audience members,” says Rogers. “Teachers don’t need to feel they must be constantly looking at the faces of the audience. There might be times, when speaking about some more complicated material, that it is useful to disengage gaze away from the audience to allow oneself to process the information better and communicate more clearly.”

This will be even more important if you are trying to teach via a video-conferencing platform during periods of remote learning. During the lockdown months, “Zoom fatigue” became the topic of much debate, with psychologists explaining that the virtual environment was forcing participants to more closely read non-verbal communication. Doing so left them exhausted.

So, eye contact is tricky: it is crucial to communication and relationship building, but also a potential blocker in emotional and learning conversations.

Given that teachers need to engage in all of this, where does that leave them?

As always in teaching, it’s about balance. Appreciate the limitations, amplify the benefits, don’t be too quick to judge a look away and, ultimately, do what your mother always told you: don’t stare.

This article originally appeared in the 19 June 2020 issue under the headline “Tes focus on…Eye contact”