A New Way of Thinking About Teacher Development

In teacher education, we often focus on what teachers know and what teachers do. We help teachers develop knowledge of language, pedagogy, planning, assessment, and classroom management. We also help them build practical skills: how to set up tasks, explain clearly, give feedback, monitor learning, and manage interaction.

All of this matters. But it may not be enough.

Again and again, when learners remember powerful educational experiences, they do not simply describe techniques or lesson procedures. They remember how a teacher made them feel. They remember whether the teacher seemed to believe in them, listen to them, respect them, control them, shame them, encourage them, or make space for them. In other words, learners often remember not just what the teacher taught, but how the teacher’s behaviour was experienced and what it seemed to mean.

This is where the idea of performative teaching becomes important.

Teaching is not only instructional. It is performative.

By “performative,” I do not mean artificial or theatrical in a superficial sense. I mean that teaching is always embodied, relational, and communicative. Teachers are constantly sending signals through their voice, timing, attention, facial expression, posture, responses, expectations, and ways of positioning learners in the room.

These signals are then interpreted by learners.

A teacher’s behaviour may signal:

• safety or threat
• trust or control
• recognition or dismissal
• possibility or limitation

And these signals matter because they shape how learners see themselves. A learner may begin to feel capable, included, and willing to participate. Or they may begin to feel anxious, silenced, exposed, or inadequate.

So the chain is not simply:

teacher behaviour → learning outcome

It is more like:

teacher behaviour → signal → learner interpretation → emotional response → identity impact

This matters because it helps us understand why certain learning experiences remain memorable for years. Learners do not only remember content. They remember what the teacher’s conduct seemed to say about them.

Performative strategies and de-performative strategies

Once we begin to look at teaching in this way, we can distinguish between different kinds of teacher behaviour.

Some behaviours are performative strategies. These are behaviours that have an expansive effect on the learner. They communicate recognition, trust, safety, encouragement, patience, or belief. They help learners feel that their voice matters. They increase confidence, participation, and agency.

Other behaviours are de-performative strategies. These are behaviours that have a constrictive effect on the learner. They communicate threat, dismissal, excessive control, ridicule, indifference, or lack of belief. They reduce confidence, narrow participation, and may damage the learner’s sense of self.

This distinction is useful because it allows us to move beyond vague claims about “good teaching” and focus more precisely on how teacher behaviour is interpreted by learners.

But there is still another layer.

A useful parallel: cognition and metacognition

In education, we often distinguish between cognitive skills and metacognitive skills.

Cognitive skills involve doing the thinking: understanding, remembering, problem-solving, analysing.

Metacognitive skills involve thinking about thinking: monitoring it, reflecting on it, regulating it, becoming aware of how it works.

A similar distinction may help us think more clearly about teaching.

If performative skills refer to the embodied and relational ways teachers enact their presence in the classroom, then perhaps we also need the idea of meta-performative awareness.

What is meta-performative awareness?

Meta-performative awareness is the teacher’s capacity to notice, reflect on, and regulate the meanings their behaviour may be sending.

It is the awareness that teaching is never neutral.

It is the capacity to ask questions such as:

• What am I signalling to learners right now?
• How might this response be interpreted?
• Does my behaviour communicate trust or threat?
• Am I opening up participation or closing it down?
• Am I positioning this learner as capable, visible, and valued?
• How is my embodied presence shaping the emotional climate of the room?

This is not just a matter of personal style. It is a professional capacity.

A teacher may have strong performative skills in the sense that they naturally create warmth, presence, rhythm, trust, and participation. But without meta-performative awareness, they may still fail to recognise when their behaviour is being read in unintended ways. Equally, a teacher may know many techniques, but unless they reflect on how those techniques are embodied and relationally enacted, their practice may remain technically competent but emotionally flat or even unintentionally constrictive.

Why this matters for teacher development

This is where the idea becomes especially important.

Teacher development has long emphasised knowledge and technique. More recently, it has also begun to pay attention to identity, reflection, emotion, and presence. But the concept of meta-performative awareness helps bring these strands together in a particularly useful way.

It suggests that teacher education should not only help teachers learn what to do. It should also help them become aware of how their conduct is experienced by learners.

This means supporting teachers to reflect on:

• how they respond under pressure
• how they distribute attention
• how they use voice and silence
• how they signal approval or disapproval
• how they manage authority
• how they create safety
• how their embodied presence affects learner confidence and participation

In this sense, meta-performative awareness becomes a higher-order professional capacity. It is not simply reflection in general. It is reflection specifically on the embodied, relational, and identity-shaping dimensions of teaching.

Rethinking the data through three categories

This way of thinking also helps us organise learner narratives more clearly.

Rather than treating all remembered learning experiences as one undifferentiated body of data, we can see at least three categories:

Performative strategies: teacher behaviours remembered as having an expansive effect on the learner’s confidence, participation, agency, or identity.

De-performative strategies: teacher behaviours remembered as having a constrictive effect on the learner’s confidence, safety, participation, or identity.

Meta-performative awareness: reflective accounts in which participants show awareness of the broader relational, embodied, and emotional significance of teacher behaviour, often by comparing positive and negative experiences or drawing more general conclusions about what good teaching feels like.

This third category is especially interesting because it shows that some learners are not only remembering what happened. They are reflecting on what teaching means.

Why this concept matters now

At a time when education is increasingly shaped by technology, systems, metrics, and AI, there is a risk that the human presence of the teacher is treated as secondary. Yet learner memories suggest the opposite. What remains with people is often not the worksheet, the platform, or even the content itself. It is the experience of being seen, dismissed, encouraged, exposed, trusted, ignored, inspired, or recognised.

That is why performative teaching matters.

And that is why meta-performative awareness may matter even more.

If we want to develop teachers who do not simply deliver content but shape meaningful, inclusive, and transformative learning experiences, then we need to help them become aware of the signals their behaviour sends and the identities their classrooms make possible.

Teaching, in this sense, is not only about instruction.

It is also about presence, interpretation, and impact.

And perhaps one of the most important tasks of teacher education is to help teachers become aware of that fact.