Why teacher education needs a better language for what teachers communicate.

“You have a great rapport.”

“Create a warmer atmosphere.”

“Try to be more engaging.”

“Encourage more participation.”

“Don’t undermine learner confidence.”

These are all important comments. The problem is not that they are wrong. The problem is that they are often not very useful.

A trainee teacher may hear, “You need to build more rapport,” and genuinely want to improve. But what exactly should they do differently in the next lesson? Smile more? Use learners’ names? Tell a joke? Give more praise? Move around the room? Be more relaxed? Be more themselves?

The feedback identifies a problem, but it does not always show the teacher how to work on it.

This is one of the missing pieces in teacher education.

We talk a lot about rapport, presence, classroom atmosphere and engagement, but we often talk about them as if they are personal qualities. Some teachers “have rapport”. Some teachers are “naturally engaging”. Some teachers have “presence”. Others apparently do not.

That is a dangerous way to think about teaching.

It makes relational teaching sound like personality.

But rapport is not simply a personality trait. Presence is not magic. Engagement is not charisma. These qualities are built through specific behaviours that learners notice, interpret and respond to.

A teacher builds rapport when they listen carefully, remember learner contributions, respond with patience, make mistakes feel survivable, distribute attention fairly, and create space for learners to think and participate.

A teacher damages rapport when they rush learners, ignore contributions, expose mistakes publicly, give unclear instructions, dominate interaction, or communicate impatience when learners struggle.

The difficulty is that these behaviours often happen quickly. A look, a pause, a correction, a gesture, a tone of voice, a decision to move on or wait — these small moments can shape how learners experience the classroom.

For learners, teaching is not experienced only as method, task design or language input. It is experienced as a stream of signals.

Am I safe here?

Does my contribution matter?

Can I make a mistake without losing face?

Does the teacher believe I can do this?

Am I being invited to participate, or simply required to comply?

This is especially important in language teaching. Language learners are often asked to perform before they feel ready. They speak with incomplete resources. They make visible mistakes. They risk sounding less intelligent, less fluent, less adult, or less themselves than they want to be.

That makes the language classroom a vulnerable space.

In that space, teacher behaviour matters enormously.

Correction is not just correction. It can communicate, “You are learning,” or it can communicate, “You are failing.”

A question is not just a question. It can communicate, “Your thinking matters,” or it can communicate, “I am testing you publicly.”

Silence is not just silence. It can be thinking time, or it can feel like exposure.

Instructions are not just instructions. Clear instructions can communicate care and fairness. Vague instructions can make learners feel anxious, confused or set up to fail.

This is why teacher education needs a better vocabulary.

Instead of saying, “Build more rapport,” we might ask:

What did your response to that learner’s hesitation communicate?

When did learners seem safe enough to take risks?

Whose contributions were recognised?

Where did learners have genuine space to think or choose?

Did your correction preserve dignity?

Did your instructions make success feel manageable?

These questions are more useful because they move feedback away from personality and towards practice.

They help teachers see that rapport is not something they either have or do not have. It is something they enact.

This does not mean reducing teaching to a checklist. Classrooms are too complex for that. Culture, context, learner history and group dynamics all shape how teacher behaviour is interpreted. The same action may be experienced differently by different learners.

But teachers can still become more aware of the signals they send.

They can learn to notice when their behaviour creates safety or threat.

They can learn to recognise who feels seen and who disappears.

They can learn to balance structure with learner agency.

They can learn to respond to error in ways that protect dignity and encourage risk-taking.

They can learn to make their presence more intentional.

This is what I call meta-performative awareness: the teacher’s ability to recognise what their behaviour may be communicating to learners and to adjust that behaviour in ways that support confidence, safety, agency and identity.

It is a skill teacher education needs to take seriously.

The question is not only:

“What did the teacher do?”

The deeper question is:

“What did the teacher’s behaviour communicate?”

And sometimes that is what learners remember most.

If these questions interest you, I’d love to invite you to join the free Performative ELT community — a space for teachers, teacher educators and trainers interested in presence, rapport, embodied learning, drama, facilitation skills and the performative dimensions of teaching.

You can join here:
https://performativeelt.com/free-community-6779

In the next post, I’ll explore three simple performative lenses teachers can use to understand what their classroom behaviour may be communicating: safety, recognition and agency.