The weekend masterclass develops facilitation skills and is aimed at anyone who is involved in training, development and educating others.
Facilitation skills are vital in any event that involves creating a safe space for collaboration where people are interacting and discussing ideas to promote change.
The workshops explore the use of participatory approaches to professional development such as team building, gaining participants’ trust, maximizing engagement and fostering collaboration and personal disclosure.
The workshops are based on the premise that facilitation skills requires ‘presence’ and involves managing the physical, mental and emotional engagement of the participants.
The workshops also explore the use of community forums in personal and professional development. The workshops are adapted from techniques used in Forum Theatre devised by the Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal.
Participants will learn the methodology and practice the techniques so after the programme they can apply these methods in their own contexts. This methodology provides an innovative framework for conducting professional development in institutions. It is participant centered and the issues are real concerns and challenges that participants face, while providing a safe space to frame the reflections and discussions. The methodology generates multi-voiced, multi-perspectival dialogue and is focused on finding solutions to real problems and inspiring action and change.
Led by Daniel Foley, a professional actor, who has performed in 64 countries worldwide; his one-man shows have received critical acclaim and he is the founding member of his current theatre company “Performance Exchange.” The workshop includes techniques used by professional actors to project, modulate and develop their voice.
Daniel Foley is a well-known Shakespearean specialist. His one man show brings alive all areas of Shakespearean Drama, from the tragic and macabre to the comic and historic with scenes from “Romeo and Juliet”, “Macbeth”, “Hamlet”, “The Tempest”, amongst others, with significant aplomb and participation of members of the audience. Highlights include impersonations of Marlon Brando and John Wayne taking on Shakespearean roles and an insight into some of the techniques used in hand and sword fighting on the stage. Daniel also shares his knowledge of Elizabethan theatre and tests the audience’s knowledge through an interactive quiz.
Developing Facilitation Skills for Trainers and Educators
Face to face courses at ITI Istanbul.
The course develops advanced facilitation skills and is aimed at anyone who is involved in training, development and educating others. Facilitation skills are vital in any event that involves creating a safe space for collaboration where people are interacting and discussing ideas to promote change. The workshops explore the use of participatory approaches to professional development such as team building, gaining participants’ trust, maximizing engagement and fostering collaboration and personal disclosure and simultaneously develops a range of many other performative skills. The workshops are structured on tried and proven methodology adapted from the participatory arts and used for training in community settings, care homes, hospitals and many institutions focusing on personal and professional development.
Participants will receive a certificate at the end of the course.
These series of workshops explore the use of community forums in personal and professional development. The workshops are adapted from techniques used in Forum Theatre devised by the Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal.
Participants will learn the methodology and practice the techniques so after the programme they can apply these methods in their own contexts. This methodology provides an innovative framework for conducting professional development in institutions. It is participant (or company) centered (the issues are real concerns and challenges), while providing a safe space to frame the reflections and discussions. The methodology generates multi-voiced, multi-perspectival dialogue and is focused on finding solutions to real problems and inspiring action and change.
This paper is based on a series of diagnostic workshops conducted at a teacher training centre in Istanbul focusing on how participatory methodology can inform ELT Teacher Education. The workshops provided participants experience of participatory methodology and techniques to elicit feedback on their pedagogic value and efficacy in Teacher Education. Through dialogue and reflection, participants identify the facilitation skills they value from the workshops. While participatory methodology has a long and proven track record in Applied Theatre, education and development, it is rarely utilized in teacher development programmes. In particular we explored the use of Community Forums (an adaption of Forum Theatre) in which participants re-enact collectively experienced challenges in order to find solutions. Feedback from the workshops reveals that Community Forums provide participant-led, solution-oriented, multiple voiced opportunities for reflection and dialogue on critical incidents teachers’ face. Additionally, the workshops aim to initiate transformational change by developing participants’ facilitation skills. The research provides the initial diagnostic data to create teacher development programmes incorporating Community Forums and participatory methods.
1 Introduction.
Having just attended a series of professional workshops I am struck by a worrying paradox. Most ELT trainers and educators, while advocating lessons that are personalised, learner-centred and focus on communication and language use; in practice deliver training sessions that are tutor-centred, material driven (invariably structured by power point slides) that appear to aim primarily at the transmission of content. If trainers and educators do not set an example of how to encourage participatory learning, it is hardly surprising then that teachers often pay lip service to the concept of ‘facilitating learning’ while in reality they are stuck in the traditional conception of a teacher as a transmitter of information. We sorely need a framework and structured methodology for participant-led, solution-oriented professional development workshops.
One solution may lie in the methodology provided by the participatory arts. Participatory arts provide a form of expression which enables shared ownership of decision-making processes and aims to generate dialogue, reflection, and community cohesion. Adapting the principles and rationale of Forum Theatre I explored the use of participatory methodology (and Commubnity Forums in particular) for teacher professional development in a series of workshops at a teacher training centre in Istanbul. Community Forums are an adaptation of Forum Theatre which was developed by the Brazilian educator, dramatist, director Augusto Boal in 1973. Rooted in the Brazilian social movements of the 1950s and 1960s and based on Paolo Freire’s model of participatory education, it is designed to represent experiences of social and political oppression in order to stimulate community dialogue and problem-solving. Over 50 years later Forum Theatre has been shown to work successfully across a remarkable range of cultural, political, and social differences and demands. It has been used by peasants and workers, students and teachers, artists, social workers, psychotherapists, and NGOs, among others; in schools, streets, churches, hospitals, theatres, and prisons.
Community Forums can be seen as a methodology for generating both the participants’ understanding of their situation and the actions to improve them so, in other words, it provides both the content (problems) and the methods to interrogate reflection and elicit solutions. The procedure is relatively straight forward and easy for a novice facilitator to follow after basic training. Participants (teachers in our case) are invited to brainstorm and recall crtiical incidents from their experience of challenges / problems they have faced in their work and then share experiences with each other prior to re-enacting the scenarios in groups in order to reflect and diagnose solutions and alternative courses of action. Having investigated and rehearsed a number of scenarios, these then can be scaled up to a wider community by presenting them to an audience and inviting them to discuss and offer alternative solutions. The workshops aim at the education, personal growth and skills development of the participants as well as providing a diagnostic exploration of the efficacy of applying community forums in a professional development setting.
3 Objectives
My specific objectives for the workshops are fourfold.
1. Diagnostic: To provide an opportunity to experience community forums and to elicit participant-led feedback on their efficacy for teacher education.
2. Methodologic: Related to the above, to evaluate whether the methodology is appropriate and effective in teacher education settings (does it do what it claims to do).
3. Pedagogic: To elicit through dialogue and reflection what participants have learned from the workshops.
4. Transformational: To initiate action or change by providing opportunities to develop facilitation skills for participants to utilize in their own settings.
4 Procedure
The workshops were structured according to two components:
A.) Games and participatory activities and B). Community Forum interrogating the challenges of being an ELT teacher and eliciting creative solutions
A. Games and participatory activities.
The activities are designed to build and/or develop most, if not all, of the following:
The workshop structure relies on participation. Firstly, the workshops are built on the participants’ personal narratives and experiences. Sharing personal stories can be a powerful way of promoting teacher development through the sharing of experiences (McCabe 2002). Secondly it is inherently educational as the reflective and interactive processes promote self-aware, critically thinking participants. It encourages a ‘bottom up’ approach to change that is advocated in much literature on educational innovation and change (Fullan 2007).
The three (3 hour) workshops followed this format.
Workshop 1. Tilling the Soil.
Participants warm up to the concept of self-disclosure through activities in pairs and groups. Then we brainstorm the rewards of teaching before relating a story of positive achievement in groups which provides the stimulus for re-enacting the story through image theatre. In the final hour we repeated the cycle but this time brainstorming – challenges, obstacles, difficulties, and concerns of an ELT teacher.
Workshop 2. ‘Sowing the Seeds’
Participants focus on devising scenes for the community forum scenario. By the end of the workshop we have six scenes and a facilitator/ director allocated to each scene.
Stage 3 ‘Blooming’
Participants focus on developing facilitation skills and rehearsing the forum scenes. The scenarios are pressented to an audience in the Community Forum. The forum aims to stimulate discussion, reflection and debate amongst the audience who are also invited to participate in the search for solutions to the issues raised.
5 Findings and participant feedback
5.1 Real experiences / challenges
The aim of the community forum was to raise awareness and interrogate the challenges that teachers face and to explore solutions. After the first workshop I categorized these challenges into four groups for ease of reference:
1. Internal challenges (self-doubts, moods, energy levels, lack of confidence / knowledge)
2. External challenges (from administration, management, learners, parents and colleagues)
3. Contextual challenges (low pay, large classes, inappropriate methodology and materials)
4. Cultural challenges (poor communication, long hours, cultural differences)
When planning the workshops, I was concerned that the scenarios presented to the audience would lack authenticity. However, these comments suggest otherwise:
‘It shows the challenges of a teacher. It is nice to know you are not alone experiencing these kind of problems’
‘It mirrors real situations and presents them visually’.
Indeed, one audience member embodied the experience:
‘In the beginning I was so tense and I felt I was exactly the same as Asya (the protagonist), I even felt blank in the first 10 seconds after the show was over. Felt frustrated but then I started thinking how I could help her… things changed. I started to feel more confident. I could think outside the box again. I felt relieved.’
At the end of the second workshop one participant recognized that time and iteration are necessary for depth and wrote: ‘I believe this kind of training will be more ‘fruitful’ if done several times. I mean problems to focus on will get more challenging and therefore the issues raised will be more thought provoking.’
5.2 Metaxis / dramatic distance.
Participants noted that re-enacting the fiction provided space for reflection. Boal (1995, p.43) refers to the term metaxis to describe the idea of living in an imaginary world which creates a dialectic between fiction and reality so knowledge acquired in the fictional world is transferable to the real world through imaginative play. The benefits of drama to provide ‘distance’ was mentioned by participants as in these examples: ‘I think they open some doors and give perspective about real life problems. Watching other people and seeing the problems acted provides a distance from the problem. So I can think better to find a solution.’
When dramatizing critical incidents participants experience a condition of in-between-ness, a liminal space between reality and fiction. This duality creates both tension and imaginative possibilities that are crucial elements in a training context. Through imagining what it might be like to be another, at the same time as being themselves, participants experience ‘me/not me’ (Schechner, 1985). Transformative theories of learning (Mezirow, 1997) propose that learning occurs when the participant faces a challenge, either an accumulation of experiences over time or a sudden trauma. The state of disequilibrium triggers reflection and critical assessment.
5.3 Reflection and Dialogue.
When prompted to consider the benefits for professional development two comments from the audience included:
‘Confidence, talking about the issues via fictional characters makes people feel better (a bit of therapy) becoming more aware of what happens in their schools’.
‘Imagined situations may be perceived as less confrontational’
Each scenario in our performance highlighted problematic issues involving our teacher protagonist facing challenges. At the end of the event, we had a feedback discussion in which the audience reflected on the experience.
5.4 Participant-led.
By delegating content creation to the workshop participants, the conventional power discrepancy is overturned allowing for participant centred input. This flexibility in facilitation allows for creation of a zone of proximal development for the participants and shifts the responsibility for learning from the facilitator to the participants (Vygotsky, 1986). The zone of proximal development is a concept introduced by Vygotsky to describe the space between ‘not able to do’ and ‘able to do’. In this space participants seek solutions with support from the audience.
One key objective of the workshops is to assess their pedagogic value. One factor that emerged was that as the content was participant led, this allowed space for creativity. One participant commented: ‘It was lovely watching the things that were crafted by people, from nothing‘.
5.5 Change and transformation
A key aspect of the methodology is the degree of change and transformation of the participants. In the final workshop I invited participants to comment on how the workshops assisted in their professional development. Many comments referred to the methodology itself; ‘Creating alternative solutions, scenarios, paths of experience’; ‘Exploring issues that concern teachers can clarify things and help find solutions;’ Many participants commented on the relationship between challenge and enjoyment: ‘It was scary at first, but then, it was fun’. In terms of learning and development there is a need for challenge, as Sawyer (1999) highlights: ‘Change is always connected to the willingness to take risks in going beyond what is known and familiar’.
5.6 Scalability
One key advantage of community forums in terms of teacher development is that the procedure can be scaled up to involve large numbers of participants in a short time period. Simply by training an initial modest cohort of 12 community forum facilitators, if these facilitators subsequently conduct workshops for a further 12 participants and then present their community forums to audiences of 200 teachers, within a limited period more than 2,500 teachers will have been exposed to the issues and had an opportunity to discuss and generate solutions. The forums can be expanded to include other stakeholders such as School Principals, learners, and parents. In addition the impact of the forums in terms of audience responses and committment to finding solutions is visible. The forum can be filmed and/ or audience feedback obtained to provide tangible evidence of impact to sponsors.
5.7 Limitations
One audience member recognised that a representative range of stakeholders are needed to have a genuine interrogation of the issues: ‘Through these workshops we can actually educate heads of department, principals of schools, managers and even teacher trainers in order to create a healthier working environment.’
When asked whether institutions would be interested in professional development using Community Forums there was a mixed response. ‘The institutions are interested in making money. I think they don’t care for using professional development that needs a lot of time and costs a lot maybe’.
‘Here is the point, sometimes people prefer the old-fashioned techniques (books, homework and old rules) so they are not accepting new things.’
6 Conclusion
Community Forums operate at the facilitative, open end of the teaching / training continuum and therefore are liable to elicit more fervent participant responses, interaction and dialogue. Community Forums epitomise an interactionist, participatory approach to learning espousing the philosophy that the process of meaningful dialogue and interaction and the flow of ideas is where learning occurs.
We can conclude by revisiting our initial objectives for the workshops.
1. Diagnostic.
The workshops generated reflection and discussion that provided valuable information about participants perspectives of Community Forums and its relevance to their development as teachers.
2. Methodology.
Despite some limitations, such as potential lack of acceptance by institutions and other stakeholders, we can conclude that Community Forums provide participant-led, authentic content to generate solution oriented interventions, reflection, and dialogue of lived experience as well as offering a safe, fictional distance to encourage personal disclosure and multiple perspectives.
3. Pedagogic
Participants identified numerous facilitation skills that emerged primarily through the games and activities. The methodology provides participants opportunities to develop facilitation skills of raising their awareness of self, others and reflect on their beliefs, behaviour and feelings. These facilitation skills are rarely addressed in teacher education where the focus is primarily on a cognitive, instrumental orientation rather than towards a performative-humanistic understanding of “teaching and learning with head, heart, hands, and feet” (Schewe, 2013, p. 7).
4. Transformational
My aim in conducting the workshops is to stimulate action and change. The workshops are a pilot project to explore the efficacy of Community Forums and how to develop the skills of facilitators who can then disseminate the methodology. After my initial diagnostic workshops I have created two short courses: 1) A week intensive training to develop facilitator skills; 2) Three (3 hour) workshops leading to a Community Forum (see Appendix A). The overall aim is to introduce teachers to a range of techniques to raise awareness of the participatory arts in general and the us of community forums in particular and reveal a fresh landscape of creative personalised expression, enjoyment and gratification.
Works Cited
Boal, A., 1995. The rainbow of desire: the Boal method of theatre and therapy. Routledge, London; New York.
Freire, P., 1995. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, New York.
Fullan, M., 2007. The new meaning of educational change, 4th ed. ed. Teachers College Press, New York.
Mezirow, J., 1997. Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing , Volume 1997, pp. 5 – 12.
McCabe, A., 2002. A Wellspring for development. IATEFL Publications 82–96.
Schechner, R., 1985. Between theatre and anthropology. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Schewe, M., 2013. Taking stock and looking ahead: Drama pedagogy as a gateway for performative. Scenario: Journal for Performative Teaching, Learning and Research, Volume 8, pp. 5 – 23.
Vygotsky, L., 1986. Thought and language. Cambridge, Massachucetts: MIT.
7. Appendix
Developing Facilitation Skills for Trainers and Educators
These series of workshops explore the use of community forums in personal and professional development. The workshops are adapted from techniques used in Forum Theatre devised by the Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal.
Participants will learn the methodology and practice the techniques so after the programme they can apply these methods in their own contexts. This methodology provides an innovative framework for conducting professional development in institutions. It is participant (or company) centered (the issues are real concerns and challenges), while providing a safe space to frame the reflections and discussions. The methodology generates multi-voiced, multi-perspectival dialogue and is focused on finding solutions to real problems and inspiring action and change.
Identifying Performative and Meta-Performative Skills pertinent to Teacher Development.
This article is based on a series of diagnostic workshops conducted at a teacher training centre in Istanbul focusing on how Performative Pedagogy can inform Teacher Education. Performative Pedagogy provides embodied, participant-led, solution-oriented, multiple voiced opportunities for reflection and dialogue on critical incidents teachers’ face. In addition, participants highlighted a number of performative skills pertaining to developing awareness of self, others and setting that are fundamentally ignored in current competence-based teacher education programmes. Finally participants uncovered meta-performative skills revealing aspects of their identity and reflection on why teachers act in the way that they do.
Background to the workshops
I work in a teacher training centre in Istanbul training pre-service and in-service teachers from a spectrum of cultures and linguistic backgrounds. The environment demands self-aware, reflective teachers who are collaborative, demonstrate inter and intra-personal qualities, adaptable, able to embrace diversity in multi-cultural and multi-linguistic contexts while solving emergent problems, adopting a range of roles and in most cases having to perform in a language which is not their mother tongue. Typically, the teacher education they receive focusses on cognitive, instrumental and propositional knowledge leaving them often feeling ill-equipped, disillusioned and ill-prepared to meet the behavioral challenges of teaching a class in situ. To fill this gap, I have turned to performative pedagogy and to an examination of its applicability to teacher education.
Performative approaches to learning demands skills that combine physical, cognitive and affective domains. Teaching is performative in that it is based on judgements formed through action (heuristic); it is influenced by contingencies that happen in real time and are unpredictable (improvised); it involves physical and emotional engagement (embodied) and learning is created in the process (emergent). “Teachers are taught how to instruct but not how to engage their students emotionally”. (Wahl, 2011, p. 21).
Post pandemic it is opportune to consider the importance of the embodied physical presence of learners and teachers in the learning encounter as this raises fundamental issues as to the nature of teaching and learning. Teachers are rarely trained in skills to assist them to be physically present, emotionally aware and able to improvise creatively to emergent needs. The potential of embodied methodologies and the need to acquire performative skills is ignored in teacher education which remains firmly entrenched in a competence driven paradigm. Metaphorically teacher education provides ‘the map’ (the official version of the journey route) but omits ‘the story’ (the feelings of the journey’s experience).
Research on teacher education has moved somewhat from defining what a teacher is, does or believes to a more ‘bottom up’ perspective of examining how teachers learn (Allwright 2001). Despite a move to more teacher introspection, teacher education is still rooted to the assumption that teachers need core disciplinary knowledge (Yates and Muchisky 2003) and knowledge of pedagogic skills which will be moulded into expertise through classroom experience. In contrast the underlying philosophy behind performative pedagogy is that there is a direct relationship between affective, cognitive and physical domains so we need to ‘feel’ something as well as understand it. Vygotsky refers to ‘perezvanhie’ a Russian term meaning ‘learning through experience’. In other words, we need to experience the state of confusion (liminality), a state of being in limbo between knowing and not knowing, before transformation is possible. Development is conceptualized as participatory, action oriented, holistic and requires a performative-humanistic understanding of ‘teaching and learning with head, heart, hands and feet’ (Schewe, 2013).
Definition of Performative.
The term ‘performative’ was first coined by Austin in 1962 to refer to a limited set of verbs that both describe and require the performance of the act simultaneously: ‘I name this ship Titanic’. The term was picked up 20 years later by Postmodern thinkers (Derrida, Habermas, Bourdieu) who re-defined ‘performativity’ to include any iterative action that involves social interaction and presence (embodied), indeed any action that involves people coming together to communicate meanings and affirm cultural and social values (i.e. protest marches, sports events, political rallies, concerts). Today with the advent of Performance Studies performativity has a wide remit encompassing gender, race and has opened up significant ways for rethinking language and identity.
Features of Performative Pedagogy.
Performance pedagogy has evolved from ‘drama in education’ (pioneered by Heathcote in the 1960s) and is inherently participant centred. The key characteristics are role playing, improvisation, context specific topics and reflection and discussion on the part of the participants. Like Heathcote, the dramatist Augusto Boal’s philosophy (as depicted in his book ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’) involves learning through re-enactment of scenarios but differs in that learning starts with an awareness and analysis of the present context (oppressions) and involves re-enactment and reflection to uncover solutions and promote action/ change. Boal’s methodology is indebted to his mentor the pedagogue Freire who foregrounds the movement of powerless (oppressed) people from being acted upon (objects) to initiating action and becoming subjects of their own lives. For Freire this process of ‘conscientization’ is dependent on replacing the banking system of education (filling learners with the academy’s version of knowledge) with a dialogic approach to learning. So, while Freire broke the hierarchical divide between teacher and student, Boal did so between performer and audience and by extension performative pedagogy conducts a similar dismantling of the positioning of Teacher and Teacher Educator.
The Findings
These workshops, by identifying the performative and meta-performative skills required by teachers contributes to both the participants’ personal development as well as informing Teacher Education in general. No doubt that becoming more aware of who you are and where you are going is key to professional development. Teachers share experiences and commonalities, become more comfortable with personal disclosure, and come to experience and enjoy a new level of articulation and self-efficacy.
Workshop Objectives
1. Diagnostic.
The workshops generated a lot of written data, oral reflection and discussion that provided valuable information about participants perspectives of Performative Pedagogy and how it is relevant to their development as teachers.
2. Methodology.
Performative Pedagogy provides participant-led, authentic content to generate solution oriented, embodied interventions, reflection, and dialogue of lived experience as well as offering a safe dramatic, fictional distance to encourage personal disclosure and multiple perspectives.
3. Pedagogic
Participants identified numerous performative and meta-performative skills that emerged primarily through the workshop activities. The methodology provides participants opportunities to develop performative skills of raising their awareness of self, others and their context and reflect on their beliefs, behaviour and feelings while performing the activities (meta-performative).
4. Transformational
There is a need for training in performative methods and for educational practices to understand the potential of the arts in transforming consciousness, refining the senses, and enlarging the imagination, and requiring teachers with awareness of performative skills. Performative Pedagogy introduces teachers to a range of techniques to raise awareness of the performative and reveal a fresh landscape of creative embodied expression, enjoyment and gratification.
References
Allwright, R, 2001. Three major processes of teacher development and the appropriate design criteria for developing and using them, in: Research and Practice in Language Teacher Education: Voices from the Field. CARLA, Minneapolis, pp. 115–134.
Schewe, M., 2013. Taking Stock and Looking Ahead: Drama Pedagogy as a Gateway to a Performative Teaching and Learning Culture. Scenario 2013.
Yates, R., Muchisky, D., 2003. On Reconceptualizing Teacher Education. TESOL Quarterly 37, 135.
Wahl, S., 2011. Learning to teach by treading the boards. In Key Concepts in Theatre/Drama Education (pp. 19-22).
This is a blog for teachers interested in teacher education, teacher training and development, teaching and learning and related topics. We will be inviting a variety of people to share their experiences on a regular basis – so keep coming back!.
The latest post is by Galina an ITI DELTA student working in Samara, Russia. She describes the three-day ITI Master Classes held at her University. Liz and I had a wonderful time and thank Galina for inviting us and also writing it up for our blog.
I have written the first two posts to get the ball rolling. My first post is about ‘whole person learning’ and explains my personal philosophy that learning should utilise the whole person in terms of stimulating the mind, body and emotions.
My second post is also personal and describes my experiences over the last two years facing cancer. Like staring down from a precipice, confronting our fragile mortality is terrifying, and yet, at the same time by confronting the inevitable, it provides a unique opportunity to perceive from a new and sharper perspective and to learn valuable lessons about the nature of learning and life.
If we can assess rapport, presence and engagement, we should also be able to help teachers develop them.
This may sound obvious. But in teacher education, these qualities are often easier to recognise than to teach.
We know when a teacher creates a positive atmosphere. We know when learners feel safe enough to participate. We know when a class feels alive, focused and responsive. We also know when something is missing.
But when we try to describe what is happening, our language often becomes vague.
“She needs to build more rapport.”
“He needs to be more present.”
“They need to engage the learners more.”
These comments may be true, but they do not always show teachers a way forward. They name the outcome, but not the skills behind it.
This is why I believe ELT needs a more explicit performative framework.
Not to replace methodology. Not to turn teaching into acting. Not to reduce classroom presence to a formula.
But to help us understand how teachers shape the lived experience of learning through body, voice, timing, attention, judgement and response.
Presence cannot be reduced to a checklist
The first danger is to turn performative skills into another tick-box list.
Use more eye contact. Move around the room. Smile more. Pause after questions. Vary your voice.
These may all be useful suggestions in the right context, but they are not universal rules.
A smile can reassure one learner and feel dismissive to another. Moving closer can communicate support, or it can feel intrusive. Silence can create thinking space, or it can increase anxiety. A lively voice can energise a group, or it can overwhelm them.
Performative skills are not simply behaviours.
They are context-sensitive choices.
The skill lies in reading the room, judging the moment and understanding how an action may be interpreted by learners.
So a performative framework should not ask, “Did the teacher use eye contact?”
It should ask:
What did the teacher’s eye contact do in that moment? Did it invite participation? Did it increase pressure? Did it recognise a learner? Did it expose them?
This is the shift we need.
From behaviour to meaning. From technique to interpretation. From performance to pedagogy.
Four principles of a performative framework
A performative framework for ELT could begin with four principles.
1. Teaching is embodied action
Teaching does not happen only through lesson plans, tasks and materials.
It happens through bodies in space.
The teacher’s voice, posture, gesture, facial expression, movement, pacing and use of silence all contribute to the learning experience.
A teacher can give clear instructions, but sound rushed. A teacher can ask a thoughtful question, but allow no thinking time. A teacher can design a communicative task, but stand in a way that makes learners feel watched rather than trusted.
The body is not separate from the lesson.
It is one of the ways the lesson is communicated.
This is particularly important in language teaching, where learners are often being asked to take social and emotional risks. Speaking in another language can feel exposing. The teacher’s embodied presence can either make that risk feel manageable or intensify it.
2. Teaching is interpretive action
Teachers do not simply act.
Learners interpret.
A teacher may intend to be efficient, but learners may feel rushed. A teacher may intend to be relaxed, but learners may feel unsupported. A teacher may intend to correct helpfully, but a learner may experience public failure. A teacher may intend to give autonomy, but learners may feel abandoned.
This does not mean teachers are responsible for every possible interpretation. Classrooms are complex, and learners bring different histories, expectations and sensitivities.
But it does mean that teacher education needs to help teachers ask a deeper question:
What might my action have signalled?
This question takes us beyond procedure.
It invites teachers to consider the emotional and relational meanings created by their classroom behaviour.
3. Teaching is identity-relevant action
Teachers do not only influence what learners know.
They also influence how learners experience themselves as learners.
A classroom interaction may leave a learner thinking:
I can do this. My voice matters. It is safe to try. The teacher sees me. I belong here.
Or it may leave them thinking:
I am not good at this. I should stay quiet. Mistakes are dangerous. My contribution does not matter. This room is not for me.
These identity messages are not always dramatic. They are often small, repeated and cumulative.
The way a teacher responds to hesitation. The way an answer is acknowledged. The way an error is handled. The way quieter learners are invited in. The way confident learners are contained without being shut down.
Over time, these moments shape participation, confidence and learner identity.
This is why performative skills matter. They are not simply about making lessons more engaging. They are about the learner’s experience of agency, safety, recognition and possibility.
4. Teaching is rehearseable practice
If performative skills are part of professional competence, they should be practised.
This is perhaps the most important principle.
We cannot keep telling teachers to “be more confident”, “build rapport” or “create a better atmosphere” if we do not provide ways to develop these capacities.
Presence can be explored. Voice can be developed. Timing can be rehearsed. Silence can be practised. Responses to learner error can be tested. Difficult classroom moments can be replayed.
This does not mean teachers become artificial or scripted.
It means they expand their range.
Actors rehearse not so they can become fake, but so they can become more available, responsive and intentional in the moment. Teachers can benefit from the same kind of embodied preparation.
Implications for observation and feedback
A performative framework would change how we observe lessons.
Instead of only asking whether the teacher established rapport, we might look at the specific moments where rapport was created, strengthened or weakened.
For example:
How did the teacher greet learners? How were learner contributions acknowledged? What happened when someone hesitated? How were errors received? Who was invited into the interaction? Who remained outside it? How did the teacher’s positioning affect participation? How did the teacher’s tone influence the emotional climate? When did intervention support learning, and when did it close something down?
This would make feedback more precise.
Instead of saying:
“You need to involve the learners more.”
We might say:
“When learners gave short answers, you moved on quickly. Try holding the moment a little longer: pause, show interest, and invite the learner or a peer to expand. This may help contributions feel more valued.”
Instead of saying:
“You need better presence.”
We might say:
“Your instructions were clear, but your pace and movement made the room feel slightly hurried. Try giving the instruction, pausing, checking visually that learners are with you, and then setting the task.”
This kind of feedback gives teachers something they can actually work with.
It turns presence into practice.
Rehearsing the human dimension of teaching
If performative skills are developable, teacher education needs spaces where they can be rehearsed safely.
This could include:
Micro-teaching, where teachers practise short classroom moments such as setting up a task, responding to an error or inviting quieter learners into discussion.
Role-play, where teachers explore difficult moments from different perspectives: teacher, learner, observer.
Video analysis, where teachers watch themselves not only for procedure, but for voice, gesture, pace, positioning, silence and response.
Drama-based techniques, where teachers experiment with status, energy, physical presence, listening, improvisation and relational awareness.
Peer observation, where colleagues focus on specific performative questions: How was risk managed? How was participation invited? How did the teacher use space? What signals were learners receiving?
The point is not to create a single ideal teaching persona.
The point is to help teachers become more aware, flexible and intentional.
A quiet teacher does not need to become loud. An energetic teacher does not need to become restrained. An introverted teacher does not need to become theatrical.
But all teachers can expand their choices.
Why this matters in the age of AI
This issue feels even more urgent now.
AI can generate lesson plans. AI can produce explanations. AI can design activities. AI can suggest feedback. AI can create worksheets, quizzes and texts in seconds.
As these tools become more powerful, it may be tempting to define teaching increasingly in terms of content, efficiency and design.
But the more technology can do, the more important it becomes to understand what remains distinctively human about teaching.
Learners do not only need information.
They need recognition. They need trust. They need challenge that does not become threat. They need correction that does not become humiliation. They need space to try, fail, think, speak and grow.
AI may support the work of teaching.
But it cannot fully replace the human experience of being held in a learning relationship.
This is why performative skills matter. They help us understand the teacher’s human contribution not as vague charisma, but as professional craft.
A final thought
Presence is not magic.
Rapport is not chemistry.
Engagement is not only task design.
These are part of the craft of teaching — and craft can be developed.
If we want teacher education to take the human dimension of teaching seriously, we need to move beyond vague labels. We need to name the skills. We need to observe them carefully. We need to rehearse them. We need to reflect on the meanings they create for learners.
A performative framework does not give us all the answers.
But it does give us a better set of questions.
How is teaching being embodied? How is it being interpreted? How is it shaping learner identity? How can it be practised more intentionally?
Because teaching is not only what happens when a plan is delivered.
It is what happens when that plan meets the living, breathing, emotionally complex reality of the classroom.
By performative skills, I do not mean turning teachers into performers.
I do not mean entertainment, theatrical display, exaggerated confidence, or “putting on a show”.
This is often the first misunderstanding.
Teaching is already performative because it is enacted in front of, with, and in response to other people. It happens through voice, body, space, timing, attention, emotion, judgement and interaction.
A lesson is not simply delivered.
It is lived.
It is felt.
It is interpreted.
And this is why performative skills matter.
What are performative skills?
Performative skills are the embodied, relational and interactional skills through which teachers shape how learning is experienced in real time.
They are the skills through which a class feels:
held, but not controlled; challenged, but not threatened; visible, but not exposed; energised, but not overwhelmed; supported, but not dependent.
They include the teacher’s use of voice, gesture, movement, eye contact, facial expression, silence, proximity, posture, pacing and response.
But they are not just physical skills. They are also skills of judgement.
What does this moment need?
Do I step in or stand back? Do I speak or wait? Do I correct now or later? Do I increase the energy or calm things down? Do I hold the group’s attention or allow space to emerge?
These decisions happen constantly in classrooms, often in seconds. They are part of the craft of teaching, but we do not always name them clearly enough.
Performative skills are not charisma
Performative skills are not about having a “big” personality.
They are not about being funny, dramatic, extroverted or endlessly energetic.
In fact, some of the most powerful teacher presence is quiet.
A calm pause before responding to a learner. A warm look that says, “Take your time.” A slight shift in position that gives a pair more independence. A lowered voice that settles the room. A moment of silence that allows thinking to happen.
A teacher does not need to perform at learners.
The teacher needs to be aware of how their presence is functioning with learners.
That is a very different thing.
Voice, gesture and silence are part of pedagogy
In teacher education, we often focus on visible procedures.
Was the task set up clearly? Were the instructions effective? Was the language analysed accurately? Was feedback managed appropriately?
These are important questions. But they are not the whole story.
How the teacher gives the instruction matters.
A teacher can ask the same question in a way that invites thought or demands performance.
A teacher can correct the same error in a way that protects dignity or increases anxiety.
A teacher can stand in the same room in a way that opens participation or closes it down.
Voice matters.
Gesture matters.
Timing matters.
Silence matters.
Movement matters.
Facial expression matters.
Response matters.
These are not decorative additions to teaching. They are part of how teaching works.
Learners read the signals
Learners do not experience teaching only through content.
They experience it through human signals.
Am I safe here? Am I being judged? Does the teacher want to hear from me? Is it okay to be wrong? Will I be rushed? Does my contribution matter?
These questions shape what learners are willing to do.
A learner who feels safe may risk an answer.
A learner who feels exposed may withdraw.
A learner who feels recognised may participate more fully.
A learner who feels dismissed may stop trying.
This is especially important in language classrooms, where participation often involves vulnerability. Speaking another language in front of others is not a neutral act. It can involve embarrassment, uncertainty and fear of failure.
The teacher may think they are simply managing a task.
But the learner may be experiencing something much deeper:
I am capable.
I should stay quiet.
My voice matters.
I do not belong here.
This teacher believes in me.
Performative skills matter because teacher behaviour can influence these interpretations.
From “What did I do?” to “What did my action signal?”
Teachers are often encouraged to reflect by asking:
What went well? What did not go well? What would I change next time?
These are useful questions. But for performative development, they are not enough.
We also need to ask:
What did my behaviour signal?
A teacher may say:
“I corrected the learner quickly because I wanted to help.”
But what did the correction signal?
It may have signalled attentiveness and support.
Or it may have signalled that errors are dangerous, speed matters more than thought, or the learner’s attempt was not valued.
The same action can be interpreted differently depending on tone, timing, relationship and context.
This does not mean teachers should become anxious about every gesture or word. That would be impossible.
But it does mean teachers need to become more curious about the meanings their actions may produce.
Meta-performative awareness
This is where meta-performative awareness becomes important.
Meta-performative awareness is the teacher’s ability to notice and reflect on the meanings their behaviour may be producing in the classroom.
It is the awareness that teaching actions do not simply carry out procedures. They also send relational and emotional messages.
A teacher who constantly fills silence may intend to maintain pace, but learners may receive the signal that thinking time is not allowed.
A teacher who praises only quick answers may intend to encourage participation, but learners may receive the signal that speed is valued over depth.
A teacher who stands over a group to monitor may intend to support, but learners may feel inspected.
A teacher who corrects publicly may intend to help everyone learn, but one learner may experience shame.
Meta-performative awareness asks teachers to look beneath the surface of classroom management and consider how their actions are being interpreted.
Who felt invited in?
Who may have felt overlooked?
Where did my support become control?
Where did my energy become pressure?
Where did my silence help?
Where did my intervention close something down?
These are not easy questions, but they are essential ones.
Why teacher education needs this language
Without a language of performative skills, teacher education often falls back on vague comments.
“Build rapport.”
“Be more engaging.”
“Use your presence.”
“Create a better atmosphere.”
“Respond more naturally.”
But these comments can leave teachers asking: how?
A performative lens helps us become more specific.
Instead of saying, “Build rapport,” we might ask:
How did you acknowledge learner contributions? How did you show you were listening? How did your facial expression respond to uncertainty? How did you make risk feel manageable?
Instead of saying, “Be more confident,” we might ask:
How did your voice carry? Did your pacing support the room? Were your gestures purposeful? Did you allow yourself to pause?
This is much more useful than treating presence as personality.
It gives teachers something to notice, practise and develop.
The teacher is part of the method
In ELT, we often talk about methods, approaches, techniques, tasks and materials.
But the teacher is not simply the person who delivers the method.
The teacher is part of how the method is experienced.
A communicative activity can feel liberating or threatening.
A correction stage can feel supportive or humiliating.
A discussion task can feel energising or exposing.
A learner-centred classroom can feel genuinely empowering — or strangely abandoned.
The difference often lies in the teacher’s performative judgement.
How is the task framed?
How is risk managed?
How is participation invited?
How is error handled?
How is silence held?
How are learners recognised?
This is why performative skills are not an optional extra.
They are central to the lived experience of learning.
A final thought
The teacher’s body, voice and presence are not separate from pedagogy.
They are not soft extras.
They are not personality traits.
They are not magic.
They are part of how pedagogy happens.
And if we want teacher education to take the human dimension of teaching seriously, we need to bring these skills into view.
We need to name them.
We need to observe them.
We need to rehearse them.
We need to reflect on them.
Because teaching is not only what we plan.
It is what learners experience when our plans meet the living reality of the classroom.
When we mystify presence, we make teacher development less accessible
A lesson can be well planned, well staged and well resourced — and still fall apart.
Every teacher educator will recognise the moment when…
The trainee teacher stands in front of the class. The aims are clear. The materials are appropriate. The procedure looks sound on paper. Nothing in the lesson plan raises major alarm bells.
But once the lesson begins, something shifts.
A learner hesitates and is corrected too quickly. She withdraws. Another learner offers an idea, but the teacher misses it. The teacher pushes on with the plan, but the atmosphere has changed. The class becomes restless, or quiet, or compliant in that flat way teachers recognise immediately.
No major methodological principle has been broken.
And yet the lesson begins to unravel.
Afterwards, the teacher educator faces a familiar difficulty: what do we actually say?
We may write comments such as:
“Build more rapport.”
“Create a warmer atmosphere.”
“Involve the learners more.”
“Respond more naturally.”
“Be more confident.”
“Manage the group more sensitively.”
These comments may all be true. But they are also frustratingly vague.
What exactly does the teacher need to do differently?
The problem with vague feedback
Teacher education is very good at helping teachers think about what to do.
We train teachers to plan lessons, stage activities, analyse language, give instructions, monitor, correct errors, manage feedback and design tasks. These are essential professional skills.
But teaching is not experienced by learners as a sequence of procedures.
It is experienced through interaction.
Learners respond not only to the teacher’s explanation or the activity on the worksheet. They respond to tone, timing, eye contact, facial expression, movement, silence, hesitation, warmth, firmness and responsiveness.
They are constantly reading the human signals in the room.
Am I safe here?
Am I seen?
Can I risk an answer?
Will I be embarrassed if I get it wrong?
Does this teacher believe I am capable?
These questions may never be spoken aloud, but they shape participation, confidence and learning.
And yet this performative dimension of teaching is the hardest to unpack.
We assess it, but do we teach it?
Teacher education does not ignore classroom relationships. Of course it doesn’t.
Observation criteria often refer to rapport, atmosphere, learner involvement, sensitive correction, clear instructions, monitoring, responsiveness and knowing when to intervene or stand back.
But these qualities are often described broadly. They identify desirable outcomes, but not always the specific real-time behaviours that create or weaken those outcomes.
We can say:
“The teacher established good rapport.”
But what created that rapport?
We can say:
“The learners were not fully engaged.”
But how did the teacher’s pacing, positioning, gesture, tone or response to uncertainty contribute to that?
We can say:
“The teacher needs to be more confident.”
But confidence is not a very helpful development target unless we can break it down into observable choices.
Did the teacher speak too quickly?
Did they fill every silence?
Did they over-explain?
Did they avoid eye contact?
Did they miss learner contributions?
Did they move nervously around the room?
Did they correct in a way that closed participation down?
Without this level of detail, feedback can begin to sound less like professional guidance and more like a judgement on personality.
The danger of “natural presence”
This is where teacher education can unintentionally become unfair.
Some teachers are described as “naturals”.
Some teachers “have presence”.
Some teachers “command the room”.
Some teachers “just connect”.
There may be truth in these descriptions, but they are not enough.
When we talk like this, we risk turning teachable skills into mysterious personal qualities. We make presence sound like something you either have or do not have.
This is a problem.
It praises some teachers without explaining what they are doing.
It leaves others feeling that the issue is who they are, rather than what they can learn to do.
And it allows teacher education to assess something it has not fully learned how to develop.
Presence is not simply charisma.
Rapport is not simply chemistry.
Engagement is not only a matter of activity design.
These are partly created through skilled, embodied, relational action.
Towards a more precise language
What we need is not a new checklist of teacher behaviours.
Teaching is too complex for that. Learners interpret teachers differently. Classrooms are shaped by culture, context, history, identity and emotion. A gesture that feels warm to one learner may feel intrusive to another. Silence may create thinking space in one moment and anxiety in another.
But complexity should not make us abandon this area to intuition.
If rapport matters, we need to ask what creates it.
If engagement matters, we need to ask how teachers invite it, protect it or unintentionally close it down.
If atmosphere matters, we need to look at the teacher behaviours that shape the emotional climate of the room.
We need a more precise language for the lived, relational and embodied dimension of teaching.
This is where the idea of performative skills becomes useful.
Not performance in the sense of acting.
Not entertainment.
Not theatrical display.
But performance in the sense that teaching is enacted. It happens through voice, body, timing, space, attention, responsiveness and presence.
Teaching is not only planned.
It is performed into being.
Why this matters
The issue is not whether rapport, presence and engagement matter. Teacher educators already know they do.
The real question is whether we are willing to treat them as developable professional skills.
Because if we continue to describe this dimension of teaching through vague labels, we leave too much to chance.
We tell teachers to be warmer, more confident, more responsive or more engaging, but we do not always show them how.
We assess the atmosphere they create, but we do not always help them understand how they created it.
We praise presence when we see it, but we too often mystify it.
And when we mystify presence, we make teacher development less accessible.
Perhaps some teachers do not simply “have presence”.
Perhaps they have developed skills we have not yet properly named.
If these questions interest you, you are warmly invited to join the free Performative ELT Community, where we explore the embodied, relational and performative dimensions of teaching in more depth. The community is a space for teachers, teacher educators and researchers who want to think beyond technique and ask how teaching is actually experienced by learners. You can join here: Performative ELT Community
And perhaps one of the unfinished tasks of teacher education is to bring those skills into view.
Meta – Performative Awareness in Teacher Education
Teacher education talks endlessly about methods, planning, aims, staging, outcomes, materials, and technique.
But some of the most powerful things teachers do are still described in frustratingly vague terms: good rapport positive atmosphere strong presence supportive manner
What do these actually mean in practice?
Because learners do not only remember what teachers taught. They remember what teacher behaviour seemed to communicate.
They remember the teacher who made mistakes feel dangerous. The teacher who made them feel seen. The teacher who rushed them, exposed them, ignored them, believed in them, calmed them, or made them want to try.
And that is where I think teacher education still has a serious blind spot.
We often know that classroom relationships matter. We often know that confidence, safety, and recognition affect learning. But we still do not have a precise enough professional language for identifying the behaviours through which those effects are created.
What do teachers actually do that learners experience as expansive — and what do they do that constricts them?
The answers are more concrete than we often admit.
Expansive behaviours include things like:
welcoming mistakes
responding calmly to difficulty
listening attentively
giving learners time
making expectations clear
creating space for contribution
signalling warmth, trust, and belief
Constrictive behaviours include:
harsh criticism
vague instructions followed by blame
public shaming
threat-based control
rigid domination of classroom space
ignoring learner contributions
pushing learners before they are ready
These are not small details. They are not “soft skills.” They are not decorative extras added to “real teaching.”
They are often the real teaching as learners experience it.
Because a teacher’s behaviour is always saying something.
A calm response to error says: You are safe to try.
A dismissive response says: Your contribution doesn’t matter.
A clear explanation says: I want you to succeed.
A humiliating correction says: This is not a safe place to fail.
That is why I’ve become increasingly interested in what I’m calling meta-performative awareness: a teacher’s ability to reflect on what their behaviour may be communicating, not just what they intended.
That means asking harder questions in teacher development:
Not just: Did the activity work?
But: What did my behaviour communicate in that moment? Did I create safety or threat? Did I invite agency or shut it down? Did I signal recognition, or dismissal?
I think this matters enormously.
Because if teacher education cannot name these things clearly, it cannot help teachers develop them deliberately.
And if we keep hiding behind vague language like rapport and presence, we will keep missing some of the most identity-shaping dimensions of classroom life.
If this line of thinking speaks to you, join us in the Performative ELT Community, where we explore embodied, relational, and performative approaches to teaching and teacher development.
Why teaching is not only about what teachers do, but what learners carry forward
As a teacher educator, I have spent many waking hours circling back to the same question:
What difference does a teacher really make?
In contemporary teacher education, we often place strong emphasis on the teacher as a facilitator. Teaching is frequently discussed in relation to learning outcomes, task design, interaction patterns, lesson staging, and learner autonomy. All of this matters, of course. Good teachers need to plan carefully, analyse language, manage classroom interaction, and design meaningful learning experiences.
And yet, I have long felt that something important is missing.
At an intuitive level, most of us know that the influence of a teacher can be profoundly life-giving or deeply diminishing. A teacher can open a door in a learner’s life, or quietly close one. They can make learners feel more capable, more visible, more willing to take risks. They can also leave learners feeling exposed, inadequate, silenced, or disillusioned.
This influence often reaches far beyond the immediate lesson.
The starting point for this article came when I realised that, in one sense, I had been holding part of the answer for years. Over four decades, across a wide range of international contexts, applicants to teacher-training courses had written retrospective accounts of significant learning experiences. These accounts left behind a database of more than 15,301 learner narratives.
What this archive offered was not evidence of actual classroom practice. It did not show what teachers intended, planned, or believed they were doing. Instead, it offered something different and, in some ways, more revealing:
a record of what remains in the learner when the lesson is over.
These were high-impact learning memories. They opened up a distinctive lens on teaching, not primarily through methodology or classroom procedure, but through memory, emotion, interpretation, and identity.
This article argues that the teacher should be understood not only as a facilitator of learning, but also as a central shaper of learner identity.
Teacher education trains teachers in what to do
Over the last few decades, ELT teacher education has developed increasingly sophisticated ways of helping teachers plan, sequence, and evaluate learning. Trainees are introduced to lesson staging, language analysis, task design, classroom management, communicative methodology, interaction patterns, and feedback techniques.
These remain essential parts of professional preparation.
No serious argument for a more relational or performative understanding of teaching should dismiss the importance of planning, clarity, technique, or methodological knowledge. Teachers need these tools. They provide structure, confidence, and professional discipline.
However, a persistent gap remains at the heart of teacher education.
Teachers are trained extensively in what to do, but far less explicitly in how their teaching is lived, felt, and interpreted by learners.
This gap matters because classroom life is not experienced by learners as a neat sequence of techniques. It is experienced through interaction.
Learners do not respond only to the content of an explanation or the logic of a task. They also respond to the teacher’s tone, timing, gaze, pace, manner of correction, distribution of attention, and the emotional climate these create.
In other words, learners are continually interpreting the teacher’s behaviour as meaningful.
They are asking, often silently:
Am I safe here? Am I seen? Am I capable? Do I belong? Is this classroom a place of possibility or risk?
These interpretations shape not only immediate engagement, but also learners’ developing sense of themselves.
Why technique is not enough
This helps explain a common but under-theorised phenomenon in teacher education: two teachers may use very similar procedures and yet produce very different classroom experiences.
Both teachers may set up a pair-work task. Both may use guided discovery. Both may give feedback after a speaking activity. Both may nominate students, monitor, correct errors, and close the lesson with a reflection task.
Yet one teacher may be experienced as encouraging, authoritative, and energising. The other may be experienced as cold, controlling, or discouraging.
The difference cannot be explained by technique alone.
It lies in the performative dimension of teaching: the embodied and relational manner in which pedagogic action is enacted and interpreted.
This is not performance in the superficial sense of entertainment. It is not about being theatrical, extroverted, charismatic, or constantly energetic. Rather, it refers to the way teaching is made present through the body, voice, attention, timing, spatial awareness, emotional responsiveness, and relational sensitivity.
It is the difference between asking a question in a way that invites thought and asking the same question in a way that creates fear. It is the difference between correcting an error in a way that preserves dignity and correcting it in a way that confirms inadequacy. It is the difference between silence that gives learners space and silence that leaves them exposed.
In each case, the technique may look similar from the outside. But the learner’s experience may be entirely different.
The relational life of the classroom
Senior argues that language teaching is not merely the delivery of pedagogic plans, but an intensely lived classroom experience shaped by relationships, rhythm, and presence. Johnson and Golombek likewise place teacher learning within socially mediated activity rather than abstract method alone.
These perspectives are important because they remind us that teaching is not simply implemented. It is enacted.
A lesson plan does not walk into a room. A methodology does not make eye contact. A task does not notice hesitation, embarrassment, curiosity, resistance, or delight.
The teacher does.
And this is where the missing dimension becomes visible.
Within many ELT teacher education programmes, performative and relational competence still tends to remain implicit. Trainees are often told that they need to be more engaging, more approachable, more dynamic, or more confident. But such comments are frequently left at the level of impression.
What exactly is being enacted? How is it being read by learners? What signals are being sent? How do these signals shape learner participation, confidence, and identity? And how might this dimension of teaching be developed deliberately rather than left to personality?
These questions need to move closer to the centre of teacher education.
From teacher behaviour to learner identity
The narratives in the archive suggest that learners often remember teachers not because of a particular method or activity, but because of how the teacher made learning feel.
Some teachers were remembered as opening up a new sense of possibility. They recognised potential, created safety, showed belief, made the learner feel capable, or transformed a subject from something frightening into something accessible.
Others were remembered because their behaviour had the opposite effect. A humiliating correction, a dismissive comment, a harsh comparison, or a pattern of neglect could stay with learners for years.
These moments were not always dramatic from the teacher’s perspective. In some cases, they may have been small, fleeting interactions. But in the learner’s memory, they carried emotional and identity-forming weight.
This suggests that teacher behaviour often operates as a kind of signal. Learners interpret these signals and attach meaning to them:
This teacher believes in me. This teacher does not see me. Mistakes are safe here. I should stay quiet. I can do this. This subject is not for people like me.
Such interpretations may not be fully conscious, but they matter. They influence how learners participate, how they take risks, how they recover from difficulty, and how they imagine themselves as language users.
From this perspective, teaching is not only instructional. It is identity-shaping.
Towards a performative understanding of teacher education
If this is true, then teacher education needs a richer language for describing the lived impact of teaching.
We need to move beyond vague comments such as “good rapport” or “engaging presence” and begin to identify the specific behaviours through which teachers create safety, agency, recognition, energy, trust, and possibility.
This does not mean replacing methodology with personality. Nor does it mean suggesting that teachers should all perform in the same way.
Quite the opposite.
A performative understanding of teaching helps teachers become more aware of how their own presence, choices, habits, and interactions are interpreted by learners. It invites teachers to ask:
What signals am I sending? How might learners be interpreting my behaviour? Who feels recognised in this classroom? Who feels invisible? Where am I creating agency? Where might I be creating unnecessary threat or dependence?
These are not soft questions. They are central pedagogic questions.
They concern the conditions under which learners are able to participate, experiment, speak, fail, recover, and grow.
The teacher as a shaper of possibility
The missing dimension in ELT teacher education is not simply affect, rapport, or classroom atmosphere, although all of these are involved.
It is the recognition that teaching is a performative, relational, and identity-shaping act.
Teachers do not only deliver lessons. They create experiences through which learners come to understand something about the language, the classroom, the teacher, and themselves.
This is why the teacher still matters profoundly.
Not as the centre of all knowledge. Not as the performer who dominates the room. Not as the charismatic exception.
But as the person whose presence, attention, and behaviour continually shape what learning feels like and what learners believe may be possible for them.
In ELT teacher education, we have become very good at helping teachers think about aims, stages, tasks, and outcomes. The next step is to help them think with equal care about presence, interpretation, emotional climate, and identity.
Because when the lesson is over, learners may forget the stages of the task.
But they often remember how the teacher made them feel about learning.
And sometimes, they remember how the teacher made them feel about themselves.
Join the conversation
If these ideas resonate with you, I’d love to invite you to join our free Performative ELT community.
It’s a space for teachers, teacher educators, trainers, and researchers interested in the human, relational, embodied, and performative dimensions of language teaching. We share ideas, resources, reflections, webinars, and practical approaches for bringing more presence, creativity, and awareness into ELT teacher education and classroom practice.
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.
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.
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.
The 10-Minute Exercise That Turns Strangers into Storytellers
In my Teaching Artistry workshops, I sometimes say something unusual to the group:
“Find a partner. You’re about to take them on a journey.”
There are no slides. No handouts. No theory.
Just imagination.
Within minutes, the room transforms.
People begin walking slowly across the space, describing places that only they can see.
A childhood garden. A beach they visited years ago. A street where they once played.
Their partner listens carefully, asking questions, stepping into the imagined world.
What begins as a simple activity quickly becomes something much deeper.
A Tour of an Invisible World
One participant becomes the guide.
The other becomes the guest.
The guide takes their partner on an imaginary tour of a place they know well—somewhere meaningful, often connected with positive memories.
Perhaps:
the playground where they spent hours as a child
a favourite park or street
a family home or back garden
As they speak, the pair move through the room as if they are actually there.
“Over here is the old oak tree.” “This is where we used to sit.” “Careful—there’s a small stream just ahead.”
The guest listens, asks questions, and follows.
Not judging. Not analysing.
Just entering the story.
After ten or fifteen minutes, they swap roles.
Another journey begins.
What Makes This So Powerful
On the surface, this exercise is about imagination and storytelling.
But something else happens too.
Participants start discovering unexpected things about each other:
memories that shaped them
landscapes connected to joy or belonging
details that reveal personality and history
Within half an hour, the group feels different.
Strangers become people with stories.
And the room becomes full of invisible places.
The Skills Beneath the Activity
Exercises like this quietly develop important abilities for teachers:
attentive listening
clear communication
improvisation
empathy
imagination
When guiding the tour, participants must keep the story alive.
They describe spaces, objects, sounds, and feelings.
When listening, they must stay curious and present.
They learn that communication is not just about speaking clearly—it’s about inviting someone into your world.
The Questions That Follow
After the journeys end, we reflect together.
Participants often share surprising insights:
What did it feel like to guide someone through your memories?
What was it like to follow someone else’s story?
Could you clearly picture the places described?
What emotions surfaced while telling or hearing the story?
And perhaps the most interesting question:
What made some journeys feel vivid and alive?
The answers almost always involve attention, imagination, and trust.
The same qualities that make great teaching possible.
Why This Matters for Teachers
Teaching is often framed as delivering knowledge.
But much of it is actually about guiding people through experiences.
We invite learners to imagine new possibilities. To explore unfamiliar ideas. To step into worlds they cannot yet see.
In many ways, every lesson is a journey.
And teachers are its guides.
Exercises like Take Me on a Journey help educators rediscover this fundamental truth.
This Is the Kind of Work We Explore
In the Performative ELT community, we explore many activities like this—simple, embodied exercises that reveal deeper insights about teaching, communication, and human connection.
They are not just warm-ups.
They are mirrors.
They help teachers reflect on:
how they communicate
how they listen
how they invite others into learning
If that resonates with you, you’re warmly invited to join us.
The community is free, and full of educators exploring creative and performative approaches to teaching.
An embodied reflection on identity, presence, and the journeys that shape how we teach.
The Simple Workshop Exercise That Reveals a Teacher’s Journey
In my Teaching Artistry workshops, I sometimes ask teachers to do something unusual.
I tell them to imagine a giant map of the world spread across the floor.
North. South. East. West.
Then I say:
“Place yourself on the map where you were born.”
And suddenly the room begins to move.
People walk slowly across the floor. Some hesitate. Some look around for others from nearby places. Some smile with recognition.
What starts as a simple movement exercise quickly becomes something much deeper.
The Map Appears on the Floor
I explain that where I’m standing might represent one country.
Across the room might be another.
Someone stands in “South America.” Someone else moves toward “Europe.” Another drifts quietly toward “Asia.”
There’s always a moment of uncertainty.
“This isn’t a geography test,” I reassure them.
“If you’re not sure where you are, someone will help.”
Gradually, the map fills with people.
Not as teachers.
As stories.
When Geography Becomes Biography
Once everyone is standing somewhere on the map, I ask participants to look around.
Who is near you?
Who grew up close to where you did?
Who travelled the furthest to get here?
Conversations begin.
Participants explain:
where they were born
where their families come from
where they feel most at home
Within minutes, the room changes.
The group is no longer anonymous.
It becomes a community of journeys.
The Question Beneath the Map
After people have shared a little about where they come from, I ask a few reflective questions:
How do you feel about the place where you were born?
Where do you feel most at home?
How has your birthplace influenced your life path?
Sometimes the answers are light.
Sometimes they are surprisingly profound.
Because where we start shapes more than our passport.
It shapes our language, identity, confidence, belonging, and opportunity.
Why This Matters in Teacher Development
On the surface, Map of the Floor is a simple icebreaker.
But in practice, it does something much more powerful.
It invites:
personal disclosure
empathy
curiosity
awareness of difference and connection
And it reminds us that every teacher in the room carries a unique journey.
Behind every professional role is a story.
Behind every method is a human being shaped by experience.
When the Map Needs to Change
In some groups, asking about birthplace can feel too sensitive.
If that’s the case, the exercise shifts slightly.
Instead of “Where were you born?”, I ask:
Where would you love to visit?
Where would you go on your dream holiday?
The map still fills with movement.
The stories still emerge.
And the group still discovers something about itself.
Why Embodied Activities Matter
Teacher development often happens sitting down.
Talking about theory.
Looking at slides.
But teaching itself is embodied.
It happens in space.
Through movement, presence, and relationships.
Exercises like this help participants experience ideas physically, not just intellectually.
They create the conditions for connection, reflection, and participation.
This Is the Kind of Work We Explore
Activities like Map of the Floor are not just warm-ups.
They are windows into identity, experience, and community.
Inside the Performative ELT community, we explore many activities like this — practical, embodied exercises that help teachers reflect on who they are, how they teach, and how they connect with others.
If that resonates with you, you’re warmly invited to join us.
The Game of Tag That Becomes a Mirror for Teachers
How a simple running game exposes burnout, ambition, and the hidden pressures shaping your teaching.
In my Teaching Artistry workshops, I sometimes begin with a game.
A running game.
Arms linked. Laughter. Energy rising.
It looks like something from a primary school playground.
It isn’t.
Within minutes, it becomes a metaphor for life, leadership, and why we became teachers in the first place.
The Game: Cat and Mouse
Participants link arms in pairs, forming a human chain.
One person is the cat (the chaser). One person is the mouse (the chased).
The cat runs. The mouse escapes.
The mouse is safe if they hook onto a linked pair. That releases someone else — who instantly becomes the new mouse.
Chaos. Speed. Laughter. Adrenaline.
And then the shift.
The Question That Changes Everything
After 10–15 minutes, breathless and smiling, I ask:
How did it feel to be chased?
How did it feel to chase?
Which role did you prefer?
What thoughts ran through your head?
Then the deeper question:
In your life, are you chasing — or being chased?
The room gets quieter.
Because suddenly it’s not a game anymore.
What It Reveals
This simple activity surfaces powerful dynamics:
urgency
fear
competitiveness
avoidance
collaboration
reliance on others
Some teachers love the thrill of chasing.
Others feel uncomfortable being pursued.
Some desperately look for safety. Some hesitate to join a pair.
It becomes a live metaphor for:
ambition
burnout
purpose
escape
belonging
What are you running towards? What are you running away from?
And how does that relate to why you’re here?
Variations That Deepen the Mirror
We sometimes play Stuck in the Mud.
When tagged, you freeze — legs apart — until someone crawls through to free you.
Suddenly the focus shifts:
Who helps? Who notices? Who leaves others stuck?
Or Linked Arms Tag.
When tagged, you link arms with “it.”
The chain grows.
Eventually, everyone is connected.
It stops being about speed.
It becomes about unity.
Why This Matters for Teachers
These are not icebreakers.
They are diagnostics.
They reveal:
how we relate to pressure
how we respond to being pursued
how we support others
how we seek safety
how we experience competition
Teaching is often described as intellectual work.
But it’s also embodied.
We chase targets. We feel chased by deadlines. We look for safety in institutions. We link arms with colleagues — or we don’t.
Sometimes it takes a “children’s game” to surface what we’re really feeling.
This Is the Kind of Work We Explore
In the Performative ELT community, we explore activities like this — not as entertainment, but as reflection.
We ask:
What does this reveal about who I am as a teacher? What patterns am I repeating? Where am I running — and why?
If you’re interested in embodied, experiential approaches to teacher development — the kind that go beyond methodology and into identity — you’re warmly invited to join us.
Teaching Artistry 