Errors Are Not Just Errors: They Are Performative Moments

Posted on June 11, 2026 by Tom Godfrey

Error correction is one of the most powerful performative moments in teaching

In language teaching, we often talk about errors as if they are purely linguistic events.

A learner uses the wrong tense.

A word is mispronounced.

A sentence is incomplete.

An article is missing.

A preposition is wrong.

So we correct it. Either through self correction, peer correction or teacher correction.

But in the classroom, an error is never just an error.

It is a moment.

And that moment communicates something.

It may communicate:

“You are learning.”

Or:

“You are failing.”

It may communicate:

“This is safe to try again.”

Or:

“Be careful. You have just been exposed.”

It may communicate:

“Your contribution is worth working with.”

Or:

“Your answer has been rejected.”

This is why error correction is one of the most powerful performative moments in teaching.

Not because correction is bad. It is not.

Learners need feedback. They need support. They need help noticing the gap between what they want to say and what they are able to say. In language classrooms, correction is part of learning.

The question is not whether we correct.

The question is:

What does our correction communicate?

Error and exposure

Language learning is vulnerable because language is personal.

When learners speak, they are not simply displaying knowledge. They are using their voice, accent, identity, intelligence, humour, personality and social self through a language they may not fully control.

This is very different from completing a worksheet silently.

Speaking in another language can feel exposing.

A learner may worry about sounding childish.

They may worry about being laughed at.

They may worry about appearing slow.

They may worry that a mistake will make them look less capable than they really are.

This is why the teacher’s response to error matters so much.

A tiny moment can change the emotional climate of the room.

A raised eyebrow.

A laugh.

An impatient interruption.

A quick “No.”

A correction delivered too publicly.

A teacher moving on before the learner has recovered.

None of these may seem dramatic to the teacher.

But to the learner, the signal may be clear:

Mistakes are dangerous here.

The correction that closes participation

Imagine this moment.

A learner is trying to explain something during feedback. They hesitate, search for a word, and produce an incorrect form.

The teacher immediately says:

“No. We say…”

Then turns to the class and repeats the correct form.

Technically, the correction may be accurate.

But what else has happened?

The learner’s contribution has been interrupted.

The error has become more visible than the idea.

The teacher has taken control of the repair.

The learner has not been given time to self-correct, rethink or try again.

Other learners have received a message too:

Only speak if you are sure.

The danger here is not only shame.

The danger is reduced risk-taking.

Learners may become quieter, safer, more minimal in their responses. They may avoid experimenting with new language. They may wait for the teacher to supply the answer. They may participate only when they feel certain.

The class may still look orderly.

The teacher may still feel efficient.

But the room has changed.

Participation has become more risky.

The correction that keeps dignity intact

Now imagine a different response.

The learner makes the same mistake.

The teacher pauses and says:

“That’s interesting. Let’s work with it.”

Or:

“I understand your idea. Let’s just correct the form.”

Or:

“Nearly. Can you try that again?”

Or:

“Good — the meaning is clear. Now let’s make the sentence more natural.”

In these responses, correction still happens.

Accuracy is still valued.

The teacher is not pretending the error does not matter.

But the signal is different.

The learner’s idea is recognised before the form is corrected.

The mistake becomes material for learning rather than evidence of failure.

The learner is invited into the repair rather than replaced by the teacher.

The moment says:

You are safe.

Your contribution matters.

This error is workable.

You can stay in the conversation.

That is a very different performative message.

Correction as a signal of belief

One of the most important things correction can communicate is belief.

When a teacher corrects with patience, they may be saying:

“I believe you can improve.”

When a teacher gives the learner time to self-repair, they may be saying:

“I trust your thinking.”

When a teacher reformulates without humiliation, they may be saying:

“You belong in this conversation even when your language is incomplete.”

This is not softness.

It is not avoiding standards.

It is not lowering expectations.

In fact, good correction communicates high expectations.

But it does so without making the learner feel smaller.

There is a difference between challenge and threat.

Challenge says:

“You can reach further.”

Threat says:

“You are not safe unless you get it right.”

Language teachers need to know the difference.

The hidden danger of public correction

Public correction is not always wrong.

Sometimes it is useful. Sometimes it is efficient. Sometimes the whole class benefits from noticing a shared issue.

But public correction always needs care because it changes the audience.

The learner is no longer only interacting with the teacher.

They are being seen by the group.

That makes dignity important.

A useful question is:

Am I correcting the language, or exposing the learner?

Another is:

Can the class learn from this without making one learner carry the embarrassment?

There are many ways to protect dignity:

Use the error anonymously.

Collect examples and discuss them later.

Praise the message before working on the form.

Invite peer rehearsal before public feedback.

Give the learner a chance to self-correct.

Correct the whole class when the issue is common.

Use humour only if it reduces tension, never if it makes the learner the joke.

Correction should open learning, not close participation.

Error-normalising is a skill

Some teachers are naturally calm around mistakes.

Others feel pressure.

They worry about time.

They worry that if they do not correct immediately, learners will fossilise errors.

They worry that the lesson will lose focus.

They worry about being judged as insufficiently rigorous.

So they correct quickly.

Sometimes too quickly.

This is why error-normalising should be treated as a professional skill.

Teachers can practise it.

They can rehearse phrases such as:

“Good attempt — let’s correct it.”

“Can you try again with this word?”

“Talk to your partner for ten seconds and repair it together.”

They can practise pausing before correction.

They can practise giving learners time.

They can practise correcting without taking over.

They can practise using errors as shared learning moments rather than individual failures.

This is what I mean by meta-performative awareness.

It is the teacher’s ability to notice not only the error, but the meaning of the correction.

A simple reflection task

After your next lesson, think about one correction moment.

Choose one.

Then ask yourself:

What did I correct?

How did I correct it?

Did I preserve the learner’s dignity?

Did I recognise the learner’s meaning before focusing on form?

Did I give the learner any agency in the repair?

Did the correction make future participation more or less likely?

What signal did I send about errors?

And perhaps most importantly:

Would I want to be corrected that way in a language I was learning?

That final question can be powerful.

Because most teachers know, from their own learning histories, that correction can stay with us.

We remember the teacher who made mistakes feel normal.

We also remember the teacher who made us feel stupid.

Errors are moments of possibility

Every error creates a choice.

We can use it to control.

We can use it to expose.

We can use it to move on quickly.

Or we can use it to build safety, recognition and agency.

A mistake can become a moment of shame.

But it can also become a moment of trust.

It can show learners that the classroom is a place where imperfect language is welcomed, worked with and developed.

That is what language learning needs.

Not a classroom where mistakes disappear.

A classroom where mistakes are safe enough to learn from.

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

Join here:
https://performativeelt.com/free-community-6779

In the next post, I’ll explore meta-performative awareness as the missing skill in teacher education: how teachers can learn to notice, interpret and adjust the signals they send.

Posted in Teacher Development | Tagged education, ELT, ITI, learning, Meta performative, Performative, Teacher Development, Teacher education, Teacher Training, teachers, teaching, Tom Godfrey, whole person learning, writing | Leave a comment

Every Teacher Action Sends a Signal

Posted on June 9, 2026 by Tom Godfrey

Meta-Performative Awareness

In the previous post, I argued that “good rapport” is not enough as a way of talking about teaching.

Not because rapport is unimportant.

It is extremely important.

But when we say a teacher has “good rapport”, we need to ask:

What exactly is the teacher doing?

What are learners noticing?

What is the teacher’s behaviour communicating?

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

The key idea is simple:

Teachers do not only teach content. They send signals.

A teacher’s voice, pace, gaze, posture, silence, correction, questioning, use of space, response to error, and distribution of attention all communicate meaning.

Sometimes the signal is:

You are safe here.

Sometimes it is:

You are being judged.

Sometimes it is:

Your contribution matters.

Sometimes it is:

I have already moved on.

Sometimes it is:

You have space to think.

Sometimes it is:

Just give me the answer I want.

Of course, teachers cannot fully control how learners interpret them. Learners bring their own histories, cultures, expectations, anxieties, memories and identities into the classroom. The same action may be experienced differently by different learners.

But this does not mean teacher behaviour is neutral.

Far from it.

In language classrooms, small teacher actions can carry enormous meaning because learners are often performing with incomplete resources. They are trying to speak, write, read aloud, interact, pronounce, improvise and make meaning in a language they do not fully control.

That makes participation vulnerable.

And in vulnerable spaces, every teacher action sends a signal.

The safety signal

The first question teachers can ask is:

Does my behaviour make participation feel safer or riskier?

Language learning involves risk. Learners have to try out words and structures before they are fully secure. They may mispronounce something. They may forget a word. They may misunderstand a question. They may sound less fluent, less intelligent, or less adult than they want to sound.

This is why the teacher’s response to error matters so much.

Imagine a learner gives an incorrect answer during feedback.

The teacher says quickly:

“No, not that. Anyone else?”

The lesson continues. Nothing dramatic happens. The teacher may think they have simply corrected efficiently.

But what signal has been sent?

Possibly:

Your answer was not worth working with.

Mistakes interrupt the lesson.

It is safer not to try unless you are sure.

Now imagine a different response:

“Good, that’s a useful mistake. Let’s look at why.”

Or:

“Nearly. Can you try that again with your partner for ten seconds?”

Or:

“That word is tricky. Let’s practise it together.”

The correction still happens. Accuracy is still valued. But the signal changes.

Mistakes become workable.

Participation becomes survivable.

The learner is not exposed as the problem; the error becomes material for learning.

This is one of the most important performative skills in teaching: making error feel safe enough to learn from.

The recognition signal

The second question is:

Who feels seen, heard and taken seriously?

Recognition is not the same as praise.

Praise can be quick, automatic and even empty.

“Good.”

“Excellent.”

“Well done.”

These responses may be positive, but they do not always communicate real recognition.

Recognition happens when the teacher shows that the learner’s contribution has actually been received.

For example:

“That’s an interesting example.”

“Can you say more about that?”

“Let’s use Maria’s sentence on the board.”

“You’ve noticed something important there.”

“Ahmed’s point connects to what we were discussing earlier.”

These responses communicate:

Your thinking matters.

Your contribution has value.

You are not just filling a slot in my lesson plan.

The opposite of recognition is not always criticism. Often, it is simply being missed.

A learner answers, and the teacher moves on too quickly.

A quieter student offers an idea, but it is not taken up.

The same confident learners are nominated again and again.

A learner’s effort is acknowledged only superficially.

Over time, these small moments communicate something powerful:

Some voices matter more than others.

My contribution does not change anything.

I am present, but not really seen.

This is why rapport cannot be separated from attention. Learners notice where teacher attention goes. They notice whose answers are developed, whose ideas are remembered, and whose hesitation receives patience.

Recognition is performed through the quality of teacher attention.

The agency signal

The third question is:

Am I positioning learners as active participants or compliant recipients?

All teaching involves structure. Teachers need to manage time, frame tasks, give instructions, clarify language, support learners and make decisions.

Agency does not mean abandoning structure.

It means using structure to create space for learners to think, choose, contribute and take ownership.

For example, compare these two versions of a vocabulary task.

Version 1:

The teacher explains all the words, gives definitions, asks checking questions, confirms the answers, and moves on.

Version 2:

The teacher gives learners examples, asks them to infer meaning in pairs, invites them to justify their choices, responds to their hypotheses, and then clarifies where necessary.

Both lessons may cover the same vocabulary.

But they send different signals.

The first may communicate:

I have the knowledge. Your role is to receive it.

The second may communicate:

Your thinking is part of the learning process.

This matters because learners are not only learning language. They are also learning what kind of participant they are allowed to become.

Are they allowed to explore?

Are they allowed to question?

Are they allowed to shape examples?

Are they allowed to test ideas?

Are they allowed to contribute meaningfully?

Or are they mainly expected to comply?

Teacher talk, task design, nomination, feedback and classroom management all communicate something about agency.

A teacher may say they want learner-centred lessons, but if they answer every question themselves, fill every silence, control every response and rescue learners before they have time to think, the performative signal may still be:

I do not really trust you to do this.

The same technique can send different signals

This is why teaching is so complex.

No technique is automatically good or bad.

Correction can be supportive or humiliating.

Silence can be thinking time or public exposure.

Teacher talk can clarify or dominate.

Praise can recognise or patronise.

Pair work can create agency or hide confusion.

Instructions can support learners or control them.

The meaning lies not only in the technique itself, but in how it is enacted.

Tone matters.

Timing matters.

Body language matters.

Relationship matters.

Learner history matters.

Classroom culture matters.

This is why I prefer to think in terms of performative lenses rather than fixed rules.

The three lenses are:

Safety
Does this moment make participation feel safer or riskier?

Recognition
Who is being seen, heard and taken seriously?

Agency
Are learners being positioned as compliant recipients or active participants?

These lenses help us look again at ordinary classroom moments.

They help us move from vague feedback to more useful questions.

Instead of saying:

“You had good rapport.”

We might say:

“You took up learners’ ideas and built them into the lesson.”

“You gave learners space to think before supplying the answer.”

Instead of saying:

“The atmosphere felt tense.”

We might ask:

“When did participation start to feel risky?”

“Who stopped contributing?”

“How did the response to error affect the room?”

“Where did learners lose agency?”

This makes teacher development more practical.

Because once we can see the signal, we can rehearse a different one.

A simple reflection task

After your next lesson, choose one moment.

Not the whole lesson.

Just one moment.

Perhaps a correction.

A silence.

A learner question.

A failed instruction.

A moment when learners laughed.

A moment when someone hesitated.

A moment when you moved on quickly.

Then ask yourself:

What did I intend?

What might learners have interpreted?

Did the moment communicate safety or threat?

Did it communicate recognition or dismissal?

Did it support agency or restrict it?

What could I try differently next time?

This is not about becoming self-conscious about every word or gesture.

Teaching is too alive for that.

It is about becoming more aware of the human meanings our teaching creates.

Because learners may forget the worksheet.

They may forget the grammar rule.

They may forget the exact activity.

But they often remember how participation felt.

Safe or risky.

Recognised or ignored.

Possible or impossible.

And very often, those feelings begin with the signals we send.

Join here:
Join Performative ELT

In the next post, I’ll look more closely at error correction and why mistakes are not just linguistic events, but performative moments that can either protect or damage learner confidence.

Posted in Teacher Development | Tagged drama, education, ELT, ITI, learning, meta-performative, Performative, Teacher Development, Teacher education, Teacher Training, teachers, teaching, Tom Godfrey, whole person learning, writing | Leave a comment

Good Rapport Is Not Enough

Posted on May 29, 2026 by Tom Godfrey

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

“You have a great rapport.”

“Create a warmer atmosphere.”

“Try to be more engaging.”

“Encourage more participation.”

“Don’t undermine learner confidence.”

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

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

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

This is one of the missing pieces in teacher education.

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

That is a dangerous way to think about teaching.

It makes relational teaching sound like personality.

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

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

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

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

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

Am I safe here?

Does my contribution matter?

Can I make a mistake without losing face?

Does the teacher believe I can do this?

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

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

That makes the language classroom a vulnerable space.

In that space, teacher behaviour matters enormously.

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

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

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

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

This is why teacher education needs a better vocabulary.

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

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

When did learners seem safe enough to take risks?

Whose contributions were recognised?

Where did learners have genuine space to think or choose?

Did your correction preserve dignity?

Did your instructions make success feel manageable?

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

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

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

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

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

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

They can learn to balance structure with learner agency.

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

They can learn to make their presence more intentional.

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

It is a skill teacher education needs to take seriously.

The question is not only:

“What did the teacher do?”

The deeper question is:

“What did the teacher’s behaviour communicate?”

And sometimes that is what learners remember most.

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

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

Posted in Teacher Development, Whole Person Learning | Tagged education, ELT, ITI, learning, Meta performative, Performative skills, Teacher Development, Teacher education, Teacher Training, teachers, teaching, Tom Godfrey, whole person learning, writing | Leave a comment

Can Presence Be Taught?

Posted on May 12, 2026 by Tom Godfrey

Towards a Performative Framework for ELT

High school students in a classroom raising hands and engaging with their teacher during a biology lesson on ecosystems. — Teaching Artistry.

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.

Posted in Teacher Development | Tagged ELT, Embodied, ITI, Performative, performative pedagogy, Performative skills, Teacher Development, Teacher education, Teacher Training, Tom Godfrey | Leave a comment

What Are Performative Skills — and Why Do Teachers Need Them?

Posted on May 5, 2026 by Tom Godfrey

Teachers are part of the method.

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.

Posted in Teacher Development, Uncategorized | Tagged education, ELT, ITI, learning, Performative skills, Teacher Development, Teacher education, Teacher Training, teachers, teaching, Tom Godfrey, whole person learning | Leave a comment

Presence Is Not Personality: The Missing Language in Teacher Education

Posted on May 3, 2026 by Tom Godfrey

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.

Posted in Teacher Development | Tagged ELT, ITI, Performative skills, Teacher Development, Teacher education, Tom Godfrey, whole person learning | Leave a comment

We Don’t Yet Have the Language to Talk About What Teachers Do to Learners

Posted on April 28, 2026 by Tom Godfrey

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.

Join the Performative ELT Community: https://performativeelt.com/free-community-6779

Posted in Teacher Development | Tagged ELT, ITI, meta-performative, performtive, Teacher Development, Teacher education, Teacher Training, Tom Godfrey, whole person learning | Leave a comment

The Missing Dimension in ELT Teacher Education

Posted on April 18, 2026 by Tom Godfrey

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.

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

Posted in Teacher Development | Tagged #PerformativePedagogy #TeachingIdentity #ReflectiveTeaching #DramaInEducation #TeacherDevelopment #CulturalIdentity #TeachingArtistry, ELT, ITI, performative pedagogy, Performative skills, Teacher Development, Teacher education, Teacher Training, Tom Godfrey | Leave a comment

Why Teacher Education Needs a Performative Framework

Posted on April 14, 2026 by Tom Godfrey

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.

Posted in Teacher Development | Tagged drama, education, ELT, ITI, learning, pedagogy, Performative, Teacher Development, Teacher education, teachers, teaching, technology, Tom Godfrey | Leave a comment

From Performative Skills to Meta-Performative Awareness

Posted on April 7, 2026 by Tom Godfrey

A New Way of Thinking About Teacher Development

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.

So the chain is not simply:

teacher behaviour → learning outcome

It is more like:

teacher behaviour → signal → learner interpretation → emotional response → identity impact

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.

Posted in Teacher Development | Tagged education, ELT, ITI, learning, Performative, Performative skills, Teacher Development, Teacher education, Teacher Training, teachers, teaching, technology, Tom Godfrey, whole person learning | Leave a comment

Error correction is one of the most powerful performative moments in teaching

Error and exposure

The correction that closes participation

The correction that keeps dignity intact

Correction as a signal of belief

The hidden danger of public correction

Error-normalising is a skill

A simple reflection task

Errors are moments of possibility

Meta-Performative Awareness

The safety signal

The recognition signal

The agency signal

The same technique can send different signals

A simple reflection task

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

Towards a Performative Framework for ELT

Presence cannot be reduced to a checklist

Four principles of a performative framework

1. Teaching is embodied action

2. Teaching is interpretive action

3. Teaching is identity-relevant action

4. Teaching is rehearseable practice

Implications for observation and feedback

Rehearsing the human dimension of teaching

Why this matters in the age of AI

A final thought

Teachers are part of the method.

What are performative skills?

Performative skills are not charisma

Voice, gesture and silence are part of pedagogy

Learners read the signals

From “What did I do?” to “What did my action signal?”

Meta-performative awareness

Why teacher education needs this language

The teacher is part of the method

A final thought

When we mystify presence, we make teacher development less accessible

The problem with vague feedback

We assess it, but do we teach it?

The danger of “natural presence”

Towards a more precise language

Why this matters

Meta – Performative Awareness in Teacher Education

Why teaching is not only about what teachers do, but what learners carry forward

Teacher education trains teachers in what to do

Why technique is not enough

The relational life of the classroom

From teacher behaviour to learner identity

Towards a performative understanding of teacher education

The teacher as a shaper of possibility

Join the conversation

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

What are we really judging?

Rapport is not a magic quality

The gap in teacher education

Learners respond to meanings, not just methods

Why a performative framework matters

Making the intangible discussable

A New Way of Thinking About Teacher Development

Teaching is not only instructional. It is performative.

Performative strategies and de-performative strategies

A useful parallel: cognition and metacognition

What is meta-performative awareness?

Why this matters for teacher development

Rethinking the data through three categories

Why this concept matters now

Teaching Artistry