Teaching Presence in the Age of AI: Developing Performative Skills in Teacher Education

Over the last couple of years, many conversations about AI and education have focused on what AI can do.

It can generate lesson plans.
It can produce explanations.
It can write comprehension questions.
It can suggest feedback.
It can create role cards, discussion prompts, grammar practice, vocabulary quizzes and course outlines.

For teachers and teacher educators, this is both exciting and unsettling. If AI can produce so much of the visible “content” of teaching, then what remains for the teacher? What is distinctively human about teaching? And what kinds of teacher ability should we now be paying more attention to?

These questions have led me back to something I have been researching and working with for many years: the performative dimension of teaching.

By “performative”, I do not mean theatrical in the sense of artificial, exaggerated or entertaining. I mean the embodied, relational and responsive work teachers do when they are physically and emotionally present with learners. Teaching is not simply the delivery of information. It is a live human event.

A teacher notices.

A teacher feels the energy in the room.

A teacher senses when learners are confused, anxious, playful, resistant, tired or ready.

A teacher adjusts timing, voice, space, gesture, silence and pace.

A teacher creates trust.

A teacher invites participation.

A teacher holds attention.

A teacher repairs moments of uncertainty.

A teacher responds to what is happening between people.

These things are easy to overlook because they are often not written down in lesson plans. They are not always assessed explicitly on teacher-training courses. They do not fit neatly into categories such as aims, procedures, interaction patterns or anticipated problems. Yet they often determine whether a lesson feels alive or flat, safe or tense, mechanical or meaningful.

When we remember teachers who had an impact on us, we do not usually remember their worksheets. We remember how they made us feel. We remember their presence, their humour, their attention, their patience, their confidence, their way of inviting us into the learning. We remember moments when they saw us, challenged us, encouraged us or created a classroom atmosphere in which something became possible.

This is where the AI question becomes useful. AI may be able to produce impressive educational content, but it cannot fully enter the shared embodied space of a classroom. It cannot feel the hesitation before a learner speaks. It cannot sense the fragile moment when a group begins to trust each other. It cannot use silence, eye contact, proximity, humour or vulnerability in the way a human teacher can. It cannot participate in the emotional life of the room.

Of course, this does not mean AI has no place in education. It may become a powerful tool for planning, materials design, language support, feedback and reflection. But the rise of AI should make us more interested, not less interested, in the human dimensions of teaching.

The danger is that we respond to AI by becoming more mechanical ourselves: more efficient, more content-driven, more output-focused. The opportunity is different. We can use this moment to ask what teaching really is when it is not reduced to information transfer.

This is where I think performative pedagogy has something important to offer teacher education.

It gives us a language for talking about the teacher as an embodied presence. It helps us notice the role of voice, body, timing, rhythm, space, gesture, attention, imagination, emotional attunement and relationship. It reminds us that learning is not only cognitive; it is social, affective, physical and aesthetic.

Most importantly, it suggests that these human skills are not simply personal qualities. They are not mysterious gifts possessed only by naturally charismatic teachers. They can be identified. They can be practised. They can be developed.

If AI is forcing us to ask what human teachers are for, then one possible answer is this:

Human teachers create the conditions in which learning becomes a shared, embodied and meaningful experience.

That is not a small thing. It may be the heart of the work.