I would like to invite you to join an ongoing practitioner-led research project within the Performative ELT community. The project explores remembered learning experiences and what they reveal about teaching as an embodied, relational, and performative practice.
Why this Research?
When people reflect on their education, they rarely remember lesson plans, materials, or objectives. What stays with them are moments: a teacher’s tone, a reaction to a mistake, an invitation to speak, or a moment of public exposure or care. These moments shape confidence, identity, and long-term relationships with learning.
What are we researching?
Working with thousands of short learning narratives written by teachers, the research asks: • What teaching moments are remembered most vividly? • What do these memories reveal about teacher presence, authority, and emotional climate? • How do embodied and relational aspects of teaching shape learning experiences?
How the research works
Rather than starting with a predefined framework, members of the Research Circle read and discuss real learning narratives together. Through collective sense-making, recurring patterns begin to emerge. These patterns are then named provisionally and tested against further data.
What is beginning to emerge?
Early discussions suggest that remembered learning experiences are strongly shaped by how teachers use voice, respond to emotion, exercise authority, and create (or restrict) psychological safety. These insights are forming the basis of a provisional Teaching Artistry lens.
Get involved
This research is collaborative, open, and ongoing. You are very welcome to follow the project, join discussions, or take part in future research activities through the Performative ELT community.
Join Performative ELT to: • Read follow-up posts and reflections • Take part in future Research Circle meetings • Contribute to practitioner-led inquiry into teaching as performance
Not all forms of teacher development feel alive. Some feel like information delivery. Others feel like compliance. Very few feel like genuine growth.
Performative pedagogy, and the Community Forum approach that sits within it, offers something different. It reminds us that teacher learning is not linear. It moves in loops. It expands, contracts and grows through repetition, experimentation and shared imagination. It is less about content and more about connection.
More than anything, it is about community.
Over the past few years, I have seen how teachers respond when they are invited to engage with their work in embodied, creative and relational ways. When they move beyond talking about their challenges and begin exploring those challenges through story, image and re-enactment. When they stop performing for an evaluator and start rehearsing for reality alongside peers who understand the same daily pressures.
This approach is not simple, and it is not always comfortable. It asks for a shift in mindset.
It asks us to:
• Move from expert-driven delivery to co-created inquiry • Allow space for vulnerability and emotion in professional settings • Build institutional cultures that support participation rather than passive attendance
But the rewards are unmistakable.
When teachers reflect together, act together and imagine together, several things happen:
• They feel genuinely seen and heard • They regain a sense of agency over their practice • They discover solutions that emerge from the group rather than from a slide deck
These moments of shared insight are not small. They often change how teachers relate to learners, to colleagues and to themselves.
What We Have Learned
Across countless workshops and forums, four principles stand out:
Teaching is embodied, relational and performative. Community Forums make space for the full reality of teaching, not just the cognitive side.
Facilitation matters. Effective facilitators create safety, curiosity and collective ownership rather than directing or correcting.
Stories, images and re-enactments reveal what discussion alone cannot. They allow us to understand our dilemmas at a deeper and more emotional level.
Learning is most powerful when it is social and sustained. A community of practice is not an optional extra. It is the engine of growth.
Looking Ahead
The practices described here are not step-by-step instructions. They are adaptable frameworks that you can reshape for your own context. Whether you work in a school, a training centre, a university or a community space, performative pedagogy invites you to rethink your role.
Instead of transmitting information, you become someone who cultivates dialogue. Instead of delivering answers, you help create the conditions for shared insight. Instead of standing at the front, you help hold a circle.
This work is part of a broader shift in education. A shift toward approaches that honour experience, creativity and human connection. A shift that recognises the emotional reality of teaching. A shift that invites teachers to learn in the same meaningful, embodied ways we hope our learners will.
This is not an ending. It is a beginning.
If this resonates with you, consider this an open invitation. The Performative ELT community is a growing global space where teachers explore embodied approaches, share practice, collaborate on research and learn through the same creative processes described here. It is for teachers who want development that feels meaningful, human and alive.
You are warmly welcome to join us and be part of shaping what comes next.
Most professional development asks teachers to talk about their challenges. A Community Forum asks them to show them.
This final phase of the Community Forum process brings everything together. The trust built earlier in the workshop. The honest disclosures. The embodied images. The moments of shared humour and tension. All of it moves into a collective space where teachers explore not only what is happening in their classrooms, but what could happen instead.
This article walks you through the final three stages of the process and how they create a powerful form of collaborative learning.
1. Sowing the Seeds
At this point, teachers have already explored their dilemmas through movement, gesture and image theatre. Now they begin shaping these explorations into very short scenes.
In their small groups, they:
• Devise a brief scenario based on a real professional dilemma • Identify the key conflict and the characters involved • Rehearse and refine the scene • Nominate a facilitator or director to guide the presentation
These scenes are simple. Usually two or three minutes long. They are not meant to be polished mini plays. Their purpose is to provoke questions rather than to give answers. They are intentional snapshots of unfinished situations that teachers recognise instantly. A tense parent meeting. A moment of miscommunication with a colleague. A class that suddenly turns against the plan.
These scenes are the seeds. And they are about to bloom.
2. Blooming: The Community Forum Event
The scenes are then shared with a wider audience. This might be peers, colleagues from other departments or invited guests. The session begins with a clear reminder that this is not for entertainment. It is a shared space for inquiry and experimentation.
The Forum unfolds in three steps:
• Each group performs its scene once without interruption • The facilitator invites the audience to reflect • The audience is then invited to participate in the scene
This is where things come alive. A teacher might step into the role of a stressed parent. Another might replace the teacher in the scene and attempt a different response. Others might propose an alternative action that changes the flow of events entirely.
As scenes are replayed, the group begins to see how small behavioural shifts can transform the emotional tone of a difficult moment. The Forum becomes a rehearsal room for real life. Teachers see what happens when someone listens differently, sets a boundary more clearly or responds with curiosity instead of defensiveness.
3. The Facilitator: Holding the Space
The facilitator, or the Joker in Augusto Boal’s original language, ensures that the Forum remains a safe and productive learning space.
They help by:
• Keeping emotional boundaries clear • Reminding everyone of the purpose • Encouraging multiple perspectives • Making sure no single voice dominates
Their role is not to solve the problem. Their role is to help the group explore it with honesty, care and imagination.
The moment the audience begins participating, something shifts. There is no longer a divide between performer and observer. Everyone becomes a spect-actor. Someone who watches, questions and acts. Someone who helps the group see that there are always other ways to respond.
Why This Matters for Teachers
The Community Forum gives teachers a rare opportunity. It lets them examine pressing professional dilemmas with others who truly understand them. It allows them to experiment with responses they might hesitate to try in real life. It builds empathy as teachers step into the shoes of parents, managers, colleagues and learners. And it generates the kind of insight that spoken discussion alone rarely reveals.
Most importantly, the Forum shows teachers that change is possible. Not through a script. Not through a prescribed technique. But through shared creativity and collective intelligence.
And that is the real lesson. The Forum is not the end of the process. It is the beginning. The ideas generated in this space often find their way into classrooms, staff rooms and institutional conversations long after the workshop ends.
When teachers gather not only to talk but to imagine, move, embody and co-create, they discover something important. The challenges they face are real. But so are the possibilities.
Teacher reflection has become a mantra in professional development. But what if reflection just stays trapped in our heads?
Teachers sit in training sessions analysing lessons and discussing what went wrong. They fill out self-evaluation forms, watch their peers, and write action points. Yet the emotional energy that shapes every moment in the classroom often goes untouched.
In reality, change begins not with thinking differently, but with feeling differently.
That’s where Image Theatre and Forum techniques can take us.
I first saw this during a ten-day Theatre for Living workshop led by David Diamond in Cairo. A group of teachers stood in a circle, exploring classroom stories through image and gesture. Within minutes, people who had barely spoken all week were physically expressing power, tension, and empathy without a single word.
They weren’t performing. They were re-feeling their experiences.
Once participants had created still images of real dilemmas, the next step was to animate those images. The moment the frozen picture began to move, everything changed.
The classroom wasn’t an abstract problem anymore. It was right there, breathing in front of us.
Here are six simple but powerful ways to bring this work to life in a classroom or teacher development setting.
1. Stand with a Character
Ask your group: If you have ever felt like one of these people, literally or symbolically, come and stand beside them.
Participants step into the scene, mirroring the pose of the character who resonates most. Then, invite them to speak a single line beginning with:
I want…
I wish…
In seconds, the space fills with quiet truths teachers rarely voice. A participant standing beside a “tired teacher” might whisper, I wish someone saw how hard I try.
This simple shift from observer to participant allows empathy to grow in the room.
2. The Wide Shot
Ask the group to imagine the scene as a film still. Who else should be here?
If someone says, “The parent who always complains,” or “The administrator who pressures us,” invite them to enter the image as that person.
The scene expands. The social context appears. We stop seeing a single frustrated teacher and start seeing the system that surrounds them.
3. Orchestra of Emotion
Each participant embodies the feeling of their character and finds a breath-based sound to match it.
The facilitator moves through the image, tapping one person at a time. A sigh, a hum, a growl, a whisper emerge and begin to layer.
The room becomes a living soundscape of emotion. It’s raw, sometimes uncomfortable, always revealing.
As the facilitator sequences these voices, a dialogue forms that no discussion could capture.
4. The Ideal Image
Invite an observer to reshape the frozen image into a new one that feels healthier, fairer, or more hopeful.
No one speaks. They simply move bodies. A bowed head is lifted. A student once ignored now faces the teacher.
Then, step back. Ask how it feels. Did every character make it to the ideal? Who resisted? Why?
Through the physical act of rearranging the image, participants see that change is not theoretical. It’s embodied.
5. Stepping into the Future or Past
Ask the group to move forward or backward in time. Each step, marked by a clap, becomes a new frozen picture.
They might discover how a conflict began. Or they might glimpse what happens if nothing changes.
This sequence allows teachers to explore cause, consequence, and choice in a way that written reflection never can.
6. Secret Thought
While the image holds still, touch each character on the shoulder. Ask them to speak their secret thought—the one thing they feel but would never say aloud.
A teacher might murmur, I’m afraid they don’t respect me. A student might confess, I stopped trying weeks ago.
These moments strip away the surface story and reveal what really drives behaviour in classrooms.
Each of these techniques opens a new door into understanding. They give voice to emotion, body to thought, and perspective to struggle. Most importantly, they remind us that teaching is not linear or tidy. It’s complex, human, and constantly shifting.
When a group of teachers works through these images together, something subtle happens. The old separation between “me” and “them” begins to fade. The classroom stops being a private battlefield and becomes a shared landscape of possibility.
Through these explorations, teachers don’t just analyse what happened. They rehearse what could happen next. They rehearse empathy. They rehearse courage. They rehearse transformation.
Forum Theatre doesn’t offer easy answers. It offers movement.
And in that movement, understanding begins.
If you’d like to explore these methods and see how they can deepen reflection, join our growing community of creative educators at Performative ELT. Together, we’re learning to feel, not just to reflect.
How do we move from talking about our challenges as teachers to seeing and feeling them in new ways?
In my Performative Pedagogy workshops, this shift happens through Image Theatre—a form of collaborative exploration where teachers bring their professional stories to life through body, space, and gesture. What begins as a personal reflection becomes a shared performance of understanding.
After participants have surfaced key emotional moments in their teaching lives, the group moves into what I call the Community Forum phase—a space for collective meaning-making. Here, shared experiences take shape as living scenes.
In small groups, teachers retell their individual challenges—moments of frustration, conflict, or doubt—while others listen with full attention and without judgment. The group then selects one story to explore more deeply. Crucially, the original storyteller steps back and becomes the facilitator, not the main actor. This small shift creates dramatic distance, allowing others to step into the story and reveal new perspectives.
The process begins with the group creating a frozen image that captures the emotional essence of the chosen story. These still images become powerful visual metaphors. They allow participants to notice posture, power, emotion, and relationships—what is spoken and unspoken in the classroom.
From there, the image gradually comes to life through short improvised scenes. A few simple techniques guide the process:
Touch and Tell – The facilitator touches a character in the frozen image; the character speaks one sentence in role.
Rewind and Play – The group re-enacts what led up to the frozen image.
Fast Forward – They improvise what might happen next.
Through these steps, teachers explore common yet deeply human themes: the unteachable class, the critical parent, the disappointing observation, the moment of burnout, the institutional roadblock.
The goal is not to find easy solutions but to uncover insight. Participants witness their stories from new angles. They see how small shifts in gesture, tone, or intention can transform a moment of tension into one of possibility.
In Image Theatre, re-enactment becomes rehearsal—a rehearsal for empathy, for courage, and for change. Teachers begin to realise that what happens in their classrooms and institutions is not fixed. It can be understood, reshaped, and even reimagined.
If this kind of embodied reflection speaks to you, join our growing community at Performative ELT—a space where teachers explore creative and performative approaches to teaching, share classroom experiments, and learn from one another. Together, we’re reimagining what it means to teach with presence, empathy, and artistry.
When teachers talk about the challenges they face, the conversation often stays in the realm of ideas — analysing what went wrong, what could have been better, or what strategies might help next time.
But what if, instead of talking about our experiences, we could embody them?
That’s the invitation at the heart of performative pedagogy — to move from analysis to embodiment, from thinking to feeling, from story to shape and sound.
The Power of Embodiment
In my workshops with teachers, we explore how emotion lives not just in our words, but in our gestures, posture, and breath. This isn’t about acting or performance in the theatrical sense. It’s about accessing a different kind of knowing — one that lives in the body and connects us to others on a deeper level.
When we let our bodies speak, they often tell truths our words have learned to censor.
The Circle Turn
One of my favourite activities to begin this process is something I call Circle Turn.
Step 1: Image Version
Participants stand in a circle and recall a significant emotional moment from their teaching life.
On the facilitator’s count, everyone turns inward and freezes in a pose that expresses that emotion.
They observe one another’s images and find others whose postures seem to express something similar.
Small groups form to share the stories behind those embodied images.
Reflect:
What did you notice about how your body held that emotion?
Did someone else’s shape resonate with your own story?
How did it feel to show rather than say what you felt?
The Sound of Emotion
The activity can then evolve from shape to sound.
Participants recall the same moment, but this time express it as a sound — using only the breath, not words.
On a shared count, everyone turns inward and lets that sound emerge.
The room fills with raw, human resonance — laughter, sighs, hums, even silence.
It’s extraordinary how quickly participants begin to connect. There’s recognition without explanation, empathy without analysis.
Why It Works
These embodied activities work because they bypass our intellectual filters. They allow emotion and meaning to surface from a deeper, more intuitive place. What emerges is not only personal awareness but also collective understanding.
When teachers share space in this way — physically, vocally, emotionally — something powerful happens:
Trust builds.
Awareness deepens.
The group begins to function as a community.
And that’s where transformation begins.
Beyond the Workshop
From these initial activities, we move towards Image Theatre and Community Forums, where individual experiences grow into collective stories of change. Teachers begin to see that they are more than minds managing lessons — they are whole people, with stories that live in their bodies.
When those stories are shared — visually, vocally, and collectively — a new kind of professional development becomes possible. One rooted not just in reflection, but in embodiment.
If this approach resonates with you, I invite you to join our free community Performative ELT — a space where educators explore embodied, creative, and performative ways of teaching and learning.
🟣 Join Performative ELT Discover workshops, discussions, and online courses designed to bring teaching to life — through story, image, sound, and movement.
At ITI Istanbul, we’re excited to announce the launch of our very first Hybrid CELTA course. This course is designed to give you the flexibility of online learning. It also combines the in-person energy of classroom teaching practice in beautiful Istanbul.
For many aspiring English language teachers, choosing between an online CELTA and a face-to-face CELTA is challenging. Online courses offer convenience and flexibility, while in-person courses provide an immersive experience and direct classroom interaction. Our new hybrid format gives you the best of both worlds.
How it works
Weeks 1–3: Online learning and teaching practice Start your CELTA journey from the comfort of your own home. You’ll engage in live interactive input sessions. You will collaborate with your peers. You will gain your first teaching experience online. All of this comes with the expert support of ITI’s internationally recognised CELTA tutors.
Weeks 4–5: Face-to-face immersion in Istanbul Then, it’s time to put your skills into practice in a real classroom environment. You’ll complete the final two weeks of your CELTA at our training centre in the heart of Istanbul, teaching real learners of English and developing your classroom presence with hands-on support from our experienced team.
Why choose the Hybrid CELTA?
Flexibility & Accessibility – Begin your training online, saving on travel and accommodation costs for the first three weeks.
Immersive Classroom Experience – Gain the essential on-line teaching skills and face-to-face teaching practice demonstrating to employers your added value.
Supportive Learning Community – Stay connected with your tutors and fellow trainees throughout the course – online and on-site.
Explore Istanbul – Combine your CELTA with the chance to experience one of the world’s most vibrant, historic, and multicultural cities.
Who is it for?
Whether you are starting your teaching career, looking for a professional qualification to open doors worldwide, or seeking to refresh your classroom skills, the Hybrid CELTA gives you the perfect balance of online flexibility and in-person experience.
Highly experienced team of Cambridge-approved trainers
A welcoming international learning community
The chance to join our global network of ITI alumni teaching across the world
The CELTA opens doors. The Hybrid CELTA opens them wider. Join us for this exciting new format and discover the best way to launch – or relaunch – your teaching career.
📅 Next course starts: 5th January online (26th January – 5th February in Istanbul) 📍 Location: Online + ITI Istanbul
I’ve run countless workshops for teachers over the years. Most of them go well—laughter, lively discussions, positive feedback. But there’s one exchange that stays with me:
Me:Did you enjoy the workshop?Participant:Oh yes, it was a lot of fun.Me:Would you use any of these activities in your classroom?Participant:(pause)Umm… no, I don’t think so.
This response isn’t rare. In fact, it’s remarkably common.
Teachers cite all sorts of reasons: 🕒 No time. 📘 Pressure to finish the syllabus. 👥 Classroom management issues. 🏫 Institutional expectations. 😕 Or simply, “It’s not really my style.”
But what matters most isn’t the reasons—it’s what they reveal: The workshop was enjoyable, but not applicable. It didn’t lead to change.
And that’s the paradox at the heart of so many traditional training sessions: We engage teachers in professional development that doesn’t meet them where they are.
It’s time we stop treating teachers as passive consumers of ready-made solutions. They are co-creators. And their professional learning should reflect that.
🎭 Facilitation as Expression and Empowerment
Facilitation isn’t just about keeping time or managing discussions. It’s an expressive craft. A skilled facilitator creates space for teachers to share openly, sit with uncertainty, and explore challenges without fear of judgement.
In Community Forums, facilitation becomes the engine of transformation. It’s not about giving answers—it’s about creating conditions where new insights can emerge. It’s about shared ownership, not top-down delivery.
🔄 From Trainer to Facilitator: A Brave Shift
Facilitating means stepping back. It means trusting participants to surface the issues that matter to them, and to make meaning together.
This takes courage—and it takes skill. That’s why Community Forums focus on building facilitation as a performative skillset:
🎧 Listening with presence ❤️ Responding with empathy 🌀 Guiding without directing 🌱 Holding space for growth
When we move from delivering content to co-creating experience, something powerful happens: Teacher development becomes real. Relevant. Human.
And that’s what it should be.
🌍 Want to explore this approach with like-minded educators?
Join my free online community: Performative ELT — a space for teachers, trainers, and teaching artists interested in embodied learning, facilitation, and drama-based approaches to professional development.
✨ Share your ideas ✨ Try out new techniques ✨ Be part of a movement redefining teacher education
👉 Join here and help us reimagine what teacher development can be.
What if professional development wasn’t something done to teachers—but something created by them?
That’s the idea behind Community Forums. It’s a powerful, participatory model. Educators come together to share experiences, reflect deeply, and explore solutions through performance.
A Different Workshop
Unlike traditional PD sessions that deliver top-down content, Community Forums are teacher-led, dialogic, and grounded in lived classroom experience. Inspired by the work of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire, these forums blend embodied learning with critical reflection.
In a Community Forum, we don’t just talk about teaching—we perform it.
Here’s how it works:
✅ Teachers bring their own stories—especially moments of tension or uncertainty. ✅ These “critical incidents” are re-enacted using movement, gesture, and improvisation. ✅ Participants step into each other’s roles, experiment with alternative actions, and uncover new perspectives.
This shift from talking to doing unlocks a deeper insight—one that’s felt, not just thought.
Why it matters:
🌀 It’s participant-led – Teachers shape the content.
🔍 It’s solution-focused – The goal is transformation, not just reflection.
🔁 It’s multi-voiced – All perspectives matter.
🎭 It’s embodied – We engage not just minds, but bodies and emotions too.
At its core, a Community Forum is a collective act of inquiry—and a space where teachers feel seen, heard, and empowered.
Not a Quick Fix—But a Real One
This isn’t a pre-packaged PD session. It takes time, vulnerability, and trust. But the rewards are immense: 💬 Stronger community 💡 Deeper insights 🔥 Renewed energy for the classroom
Curious to see what performative, teacher-led development can look like?
Let’s keep this conversation going.
🔗 Visit www.tom-godfrey.com for resources, videos, and upcoming workshops on Performative Pedagogy.
Teaching Artistry 