How can we train teachers to respond to learners in real time?

In teacher education, some of the most important aspects of teaching are often the least clearly understood.

As a teacher educator, a large part of my work involves observing lessons and giving feedback to less experienced teachers against a set of criteria. Much of that feedback quite rightly focuses on procedural aspects of practice: planning, staging, materials, aims, instructions, classroom management, and methodology.

But hidden among these more technical criteria there are usually broader, more elusive phrases such as these:

establishes good rapport with learners
purposefully engages and involves learners
creates and maintains an atmosphere conducive to learning

These phrases appear in many observation frameworks, including those used on courses such as CELTA and DELTA. They are clearly important. In fact, they may point to some of the deepest dimensions of teaching. And yet, in practice, they are often the criteria that are most vaguely interpreted.

Very often, they become the “safe” criteria. The ones we tick almost automatically. The ones we fall back on when we want to balance a weak lesson with something positive. The ones that seem too subjective, too general, or too slippery to interrogate properly.

Why does this happen?

I believe it happens because terms such as engagement, rapport, and positive atmosphere are so generic that neither teacher educators nor trainee teachers have enough clarity about what they actually mean.

What are we really judging?

Take the idea of engagement.

What does it actually mean to say that learners are engaged?

Are we talking about physical engagement, visible in posture, eye contact, movement, and alertness? Are we referring to cognitive engagement — the degree of challenge, attention, curiosity, and mental effort? Is engagement emotional, reflected in enthusiasm, investment, enjoyment, or frustration? Or is it social, seen in collaboration, responsiveness, and willingness to participate?

And how much engagement is enough?

Is a learner “engaged” if they are quietly following the task but only half committed? What about minimal compliance? What about the learner who appears attentive but is emotionally distant? What about the learner who participates enthusiastically but is not being intellectually stretched?

These are not minor questions. They go to the heart of what we think learning looks like.

More importantly, for teacher education, they raise a practical issue: what can a teacher actually do to enhance engagement?

If we cannot name the forms engagement takes, and if we cannot identify the teacher behaviours that support it, then telling a trainee teacher to “engage learners more” is not developmental feedback. It is merely an abstract instruction.

Rapport is not a magic quality

The same problem applies to the term rapport.

Observation criteria frequently ask whether the teacher builds rapport with learners, but what exactly does that involve? Are we referring to kindness? Patience? Supportiveness? Fairness? Calmness? Warmth?

Or is rapport also shaped by more performative qualities: enthusiasm, energy, humour, attentiveness, responsiveness, and the ability to make learners feel seen?

Perhaps rapport is not one thing at all, but a relational effect created through many small moments: the way a teacher listens, the way they respond to uncertainty, the way they distribute attention, the way they signal belief in learners, the way they handle mistakes, the way they use tone, gesture, pace, and presence.

If that is the case, then rapport is not simply a personality trait. Nor is it a vague interpersonal bonus. It is part of the craft of teaching. It is something enacted, interpreted, and experienced.

And that means it should be something we are able to talk about more precisely.

The gap in teacher education

Teacher education already provides strong support in many essential areas. We help teachers develop in methodology, lesson planning, classroom management, reflection, and professional learning. There is also growing attention to teacher identity, emotion, and wellbeing.

These are all important developments.

But there is still less systematic attention to a crucial question:

How is teaching experienced by learners in real time?

In other words, how do learners interpret what the teacher is doing, not just technically, but relationally and emotionally?

When a teacher speaks, responds, waits, moves, encourages, corrects, or overlooks something, learners do not experience these actions as neutral. They interpret them. They attach meaning to them.

A teacher’s tone may be heard as reassuring or dismissive.
A correction may feel supportive or exposing.
A smile may communicate warmth, or it may feel performative and detached.
A pause may create thinking time, or it may create anxiety.
A fast pace may feel energising to one learner and excluding to another.

This is why teaching cannot be understood only as the delivery of method. Teaching is also an embodied, relational, and interpretive act.

Learners respond to meanings, not just methods

Learners respond not only to what teachers teach, but to the meanings they attach to teacher behaviour.

The teacher’s presence, tone, gesture, attention, pacing, and responsiveness all shape the classroom experience. They influence participation, confidence, belonging, risk-taking, and the learner’s sense of what is possible for them.

These dimensions matter because they affect more than immediate classroom mood. They shape classroom climate. They shape how safe learners feel. They shape whether learners speak or withdraw. And over time, they can shape identity: whether learners come to see themselves as capable, visible, valued, or silenced.

Teacher education needs a stronger language for talking about this.

At present, ideas connected to these dimensions are dispersed across different fields: reflection, affect, embodiment, relational pedagogy, identity, classroom climate, and wellbeing. Each of these offers valuable insights, but they often remain disconnected in practice.

What is missing is a more coherent developmental framework for understanding the performative dimensions of teaching.

Why a performative framework matters

By a performative framework, I mean a way of understanding how teacher behaviour is experienced and interpreted by learners in lived classroom moments.

Such a framework would not replace methodology or subject knowledge. Nor would it reduce teaching to style or charisma. Instead, it would help make visible a dimension of practice that is already central but too often left implicit.

It would help us ask better questions:

What signals does the teacher send through voice, movement, pacing, and response?
How are these signals likely to be interpreted by learners?
How do they shape emotional climate, participation, and confidence?
What kinds of teacher behaviours expand learners’ sense of agency, and what kinds diminish it?

A performative framework would allow teacher educators, mentors, and facilitators to move beyond vague praise or vague criticism. Instead of saying “build better rapport” or “engage learners more,” we could begin to name the specific relational and embodied practices that contribute to those outcomes.

That would make this dimension of teaching more visible, more discussable, and more developable.

Making the intangible discussable

One reason these aspects of teaching are so often neglected is that they can seem intangible. They are felt more easily than they are described. Experienced teachers may recognise them instinctively, but trainee teachers often struggle to grasp what they are being asked to improve.

This is where teacher education needs to evolve.

If we believe that teaching is more than planning and procedure, then our developmental language must reflect that. We need ways of helping teachers notice not only what they do, but how their behaviour may be landing with learners. We need to support reflection not only on lesson design, but on presence, responsiveness, atmosphere, and the meanings created through interaction.

Scholars need clearer frameworks for examining these dimensions. Teacher educators need better ways to mentor them. Teachers themselves need a language that allows them to work on this part of practice without feeling that it is mysterious, innate, or beyond development.

Because it is not beyond development.

The performative dimension of teaching is not an optional extra. It is not simply charisma. It is not a soft category to be vaguely praised when everything else goes wrong.

It is a core part of how teaching works.

And until we name it more clearly, we will continue to underestimate its power.