Cultural Intelligence Shapes How New Teachers Truly See Their Students

Every teacher education program promises to prepare novices for the diversity they will meet in real classrooms, but a new study asks what that promise actually looks like when it is put to the test. Published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, the research by Dolly Eliyahu-Levi of Levinsky-Wingate Academic College in Tel Aviv and Avi Gvura of Beit Berl College examines how cultural intelligence, often abbreviated as CQ, is enacted, negotiated, and constrained in the pedagogical decision-making of pre-service teachers during their practicum in multilingual primary classrooms. The title of the paper borrows a phrase from the educator Alon, that the role of the teacher is first to see the pupil, and the study sets out to determine what genuine seeing requires beyond superficial familiarity with students’ inner worlds.

The study employed a qualitative interpretive design centered on semi-structured interviews with 16 female pre-service teachers drawn from two teacher education colleges in Israel. Nine of the participants were Jewish Hebrew speakers and seven were Arab Arabic speakers, a composition that mirrors the linguistic and cultural fault lines running through Israeli primary education. The researchers analyzed the interview data through a hybrid deductive-inductive thematic approach anchored in the four established dimensions of cultural intelligence: metacognitive, cognitive, motivational, and behavioral. This framework, developed in the management literature to explain how people function effectively across cultural contexts, has rarely been traced so closely through the moment-to-moment decisions of teachers in training.

The metacognitive dimension, the capacity to monitor and adjust one’s own cultural assumptions in real time, emerged in the findings as reflective reframing. Participants described catching themselves mid-lesson when an interpretation of a student’s behavior was shaped by their own cultural lens, then deliberately pausing to reconsider. Rather than treating a child’s silence, hesitation, or indirect communication as disengagement, the teachers in training learned to ask whether a different cultural script might explain what they were seeing. This is not a trivial skill. Metacognitive awareness functions as an internal feedback loop, allowing a novice to revise hypotheses about students continuously instead of locking in early judgments that may reflect the teacher’s background more than the child’s reality.

The cognitive dimension, which involves knowledge of cultural norms, values, and communication systems, surfaced in the data as cultural and linguistic knowledge that participants actively sought out. In multilingual classrooms where Hebrew and Arabic coexist alongside students’ home languages, knowing something about a family’s expectations, a community’s norms around authority and participation, or the pragmatic rules of a child’s first language changed how teachers interpreted classroom events. The study emphasizes that this knowledge is not decorative background information. It directly informs pedagogical choices, from how a teacher phrases an instruction to how she reads a parent’s tone in a meeting. Cognitive CQ gives the novice a vocabulary for differences that would otherwise remain invisible or misread as deficits.

Motivational CQ, the drive to engage with cultural difference rather than retreat from it, appeared in the findings as interpersonal investment. Participants described deliberate efforts to build relationships across cultural and linguistic boundaries, spending time learning about students’ lives, initiating contact with families, and persisting through awkward or uncertain interactions. The researchers note that this investment is what converts abstract respect for diversity into concrete pedagogical action. Without the motivational component, knowledge and awareness remain inert. A teacher may hold accurate information about a student’s cultural context and still never deploy it if the emotional cost of crossing unfamiliar territory feels too high. The pre-service teachers who showed strong motivational CQ treated relationship-building as part of the curriculum itself, not as an optional supplement.

The behavioral dimension, the ability to adapt verbal and nonverbal actions appropriately across cultural settings, manifested as adaptive pedagogical strategies. Participants reported adjusting their communication style, modifying examples and materials to connect with students’ lived experience, and flexing classroom routines to accommodate different norms of participation. In practical terms, behavioral CQ is where the other three dimensions become visible to students. A teacher can reflect deeply and know a great deal, but if her classroom behavior never changes, children experience only the surface. The study’s participants described small but consequential adaptations, such as rephrasing instructions for second-language learners, allowing alternative forms of expression, and reading body language through a culturally informed lens.

Yet the findings are not a simple success story, and this is where the study makes its most distinctive contribution. The researchers found that the enactment of cultural intelligence is constrained by institutional demands, workload, and socioculturally sensitive situations. Pre-service teachers described practicum conditions in which standardized expectations, packed schedules, and the pressure to demonstrate measurable progress left little room for the slow, interpretive work of genuinely seeing each pupil. Culturally sensitive moments, such as discussions that touch on identity, religion, or political tension between communities, sometimes caused novices to retreat into safe, neutral routines rather than risk missteps. The study treats these constraints not as personal failings but as structural features of the practicum environment that systematically suppress the very capacities teacher education claims to develop.

Theoretically, this leads the authors to a reframing with significant implications. The study conceptualizes cultural intelligence as a situated, contextually mediated capacity rather than a stable individual competence. In other words, CQ is not a fixed trait that a teacher either possesses or lacks, measurable once and predicted to persist across settings. Instead, it is enacted differently depending on the classroom, the institutional climate, the linguistic landscape, and the sociocultural pressures of the moment. The same novice teacher may display sophisticated adaptive behavior in one practicum placement and appear culturally flat-footed in another. This situated view challenges assessment practices that certify cultural competence through one-off instruments and instead points toward evaluating how teachers respond under real conditions, over time, in specific multilingual contexts.

Practically, the study argues for practice-based teacher education that develops pre-service teachers’ capacity to respond effectively to cultural and linguistic complexity in multilingual classrooms. The findings suggest that teacher preparation should embed opportunities for reflective reframing within actual teaching episodes, coach novices through culturally sensitive situations rather than shielding them from such moments, and design practicum structures that protect the time and relational investment that cultural intelligence requires. If the goal is for teachers to see the pupil first, as the phrase from Alon that anchors the paper insists, then programs must go beyond superficial familiarity with students’ inner worlds and cultivate the metacognitive vigilance, cultural knowledge, motivational commitment, and behavioral flexibility that genuine seeing demands.

The research was conducted in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki, with ethical approval granted by the relevant committee and informed consent obtained from all participants, who were assured of anonymity through the use of pseudonyms and the right to withdraw at any time. The authors received no specific funding for the work and declare no competing interests. As classrooms across the world grow more multilingual and culturally layered, the study offers a technically grounded account of what cultural intelligence looks like in the hands of novices, where it breaks down under institutional weight, and why the first pedagogical act remains the effort to truly see the child in front of you.

Subject of Research: Cultural intelligence in pre-service teachers' pedagogical decision-making during practicum in multilingual primary classrooms

Article Title: “The role of the teacher is first to see the pupil” (Alon): beyond the superficial familiarity with the inner world of the students using cultural intelligence

Article References: Eliyahu-Levi, D., & Gvura, A. (2026). “The role of the teacher is first to see the pupil” (Alon): beyond the superficial familiarity with the inner world of the students using cultural intelligence. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09443-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09443-7

Keywords: cultural intelligence, pre-service teachers, multilingual classrooms, practicum, teacher education, pedagogical decision-making, qualitative research, Israel, CQ dimensions, classroom diversity, role, teacher