Performance: a Tool for Creative Teacher Development

Luke Prodromou, Greece

Luke Prodromou graduated from Bristol University, has an MA in Shakespeare Studies (Birmingham University), a Diploma in TEFL (Leeds University), and a PhD (Nottingham University). He is the founder-member of the Dave’n’Luke English language Theatre: http://davenluke.wordpress.com/ and the Disabled Access Friendly campaign:
www.disabled-accessfriendly.com lukep@otenet.gr

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Background
Teacher training
Reflecting on training
Personal qualities
Voice and body language for competence teachers
Theatre skills
What is teacher development?
Teacher development and the teacher’s voice
Teacher development and ‘theatrical skills’
Final remarks
References and further reading

Background

This article argues that we can and must continue to develop as teachers as the years go by and routine sets in. More specifically, the challenge as we grow older and our energy diminishes is to continue to grow creatively as teachers, to continue to be stimulating and to be stimulated in the classroom. There is a particular satisfaction in teaching creatively, an aim which becomes more difficult as we get set in our ways and we feel our powers waning. On the bright side, creativity may be facilitated by the confidence and knowledge that comes with experience of life outside the language classroom.

In this article, I look back on my involvement in teacher training and teacher development and, from the vantage point of a teacher at the latter end of his career, I reflect on ‘ways of training’ and ways of development for teachers of English as an international lingua franca. I will consider the nature of training and development, two related but distinct processes, as the background to a consideration of theatrical skills and, in particular, acting skills as an essential component in the growth of a teacher towards a more creative practice. In reflecting on acting in teaching, I focus on the importance, as I see it now, of the teacher’s voice and body language as factors that contribute to that elusive and quintessential quality in effective teaching: presence.

Teacher training

Most teachers begin their career by taking a teacher training course of some kind. In such courses, there is a fairly fixed syllabus which the trainee must ‘cover’ and as he or she works towards certification: language awareness, language teaching (vocabulary, grammar, functions), teaching the skills, methodology, syllabus design, materials evaluation and design, classroom management, and so on. The ‘candidate’ is examined on these subject areas in written form, whether through project work or end of course exams, and through teaching practice. Teacher training courses are compulsory for most people who follow English language teaching as a profession rather than as an occasional fill-in.

The aim of teacher training courses is to help the trainee acquire a particular set of competences, which are based on the course content I mentioned above (language awareness, teaching the skills, classroom management etc). These competences are separated into discrete topic areas for the purposes of presentation, practice and assessment at the end of the training course: the ‘four skills’, theories of learning, methods and techniques, correction, elicitation etc. The course will last for a predetermined period (ranging from a few weeks to a year) and once it is over, the process of training is unlikely to be repeated. It is a ‘one-off’.

The aims and procedures of a training course are decided by an outside authority, not the trainees themselves and not even the trainer. The process of training is hierarchical and will tend to be top-down, with the trainer taking the initiative as to what is to be taught and how. The trainer is cast in the role of expert and the trainee in the role of novice. The tracks are laid out nice and clear and there is little room for improvisation or creativity. The aim is not for the trainee to demonstrate originality: it is to reproduce the competencies, qualities and behaviours contained in the syllabus, more or less. This is not surprising and is not particularly reprehensible: at the end of the course, if all goes well, one comes out of it qualified to teach and above all in a position to get a job. Especially in a time of recession, getting the piece of paper and earning an income is no easy matter.The trainee and trainer give priority to conforming to the requirements and getting the grades. Emulation rather than originality is what is required. Innovation can be saved for later in one’s career. For the duration of the course, the trainee is advised to ‘play safe’: the personal and individual are put on hold and the candidate is expected to demonstrate the ability to behave as one of the group and to act according to the group’s approved codes of conduct. Creativity in an exam situation is risky.

Reflecting on training

For most of my English-language teaching career, I have been involved in training teachers. Part of this process involved observing teachers in action in the classroom, providing feedback and assessing the practical and written work of ‘candidates’; the ‘candidate’ was often a colleague or would-be colleague in the same workplace. My acting as ‘judge’ of their work, both written and practical, was a complex and delicate balancing act between control and collaboration. Before embarking on this process of training others, I had been trained myself and quickly made the transition from trainee to trainer – and, no doubt, my own conventional training influenced the way I approached my trainees.

In the wake of the communicative paradigm shift in language teaching in the ‘70s, I found myself moulding generation after generation of novice teachers of English in the principles and practice of communicative methodology. My relationship with the trainees was hierarchical, with me wielding authority and they with varying degrees of co-operation submitting to my guidance and judgements. Both sides knew there was an agenda to fulfil, set by outside powers: the course content, the number and nature of assignments and observed lessons.

The pre-determined nature of the process and possible outcomes were reflected in the existence and use of checklists of things to aim for when demonstrating competence in the principles and practice of ELT. The integral role of grades (including a ‘fail’ grade) made the process of training and the interaction between trainer and trainee, candidate and institution, frequently fraught with tension and even conflict. Nervousness, insecurity and fear were inevitable side-effects of a process which might have ended – for the trainee - in the failure to acquire a qualification and a job and – for the trainer - a failure to get the candidate ‘through’ the hoops; as a trainer, the pressure was on me to demonstrate my competence and enhance the professional reputation of the training institution by getting ‘good scores’.

The raising of the affective filter against the examination agenda does not mean the areas focused on in the training were not important: lesson planning, classroom management, presentation skills, building rapport, and so on, are all essential skills for both a novice and an expert teacher; in a sense, the requirements of the conventional training courses I was involved in were the distillation of professional experience and wisdom: they were, on the whole, good for teaching and I was convinced they enhanced the possibility of students acquiring English, which is why we were doing all that training in the first place.

As I observed lessons, I felt there was a reasonable match between the items on my checklist of officially approved behavior and successful pedagogy. More or less. However, there were times when teachers that I saw doing a bad job in the classroom and having a terrible reputation with the class as boring and ineffective teachers would be ‘passed’ by an external assessor and, conversely, teachers who, I felt, had demonstrated, over a lengthy period of time, the ability to engage students and to ‘infect’ them with effective language acquisition practices, failed. This paradox raises the possibility that there are some things effective teachers do that cannot be easily captured on a checklist of discrete items and whose impact on language acquisition may not be observable in a one-off teaching practice. Some qualities of ‘expertise’ in language teaching may be both elusive and long-term in their cumulative effect. One such area of expertise is the nebulous range of behaviours that my assessment forms referred to as ‘personal qualities’.

Personal qualities

The official checklist for assessing teaching practice - or ‘instrument of observation’ - I was using had three sections: Personal Qualities, Preparation and Execution. The paradox I referred to above (bad teachers sometimes pass/good teachers sometimes fail) may be explicable in terms of the relationship between these three kinds of competence in language teaching. My good teacher, who by general consensus of the school community, deserved to pass, might have slipped up on the day of the assessment on several of the discrete items in the list (eg lesson planning, clarity of aims, achievement of aims, handling of phonology, checking of learning etc); however, the overall impression of the lesson was good: the class was buzzing with motivation and engagement and English was being activated in some form or other, albeit in a disorderly manner. The qualities, skills and behaviours demonstrated by effective teachers may not always be describable as separate items but as an ability to integrate a variety of competences on the different levels (Personal Qualities, Preparation and Execution). Some teachers who failed had a presence in the classroom and a relationship with the learners that suggested they had a natural gift for teaching: this came across through their use of voice and body language; I began to feel that good teachers had a way of weaving together the disparate parts of a lesson through the use of voice and body language; their use of these behaviours was part and parcel of their personality and, as a result, they had a presence in the class which belied their weaknesses on individual parts of the checklist. I think most of the teachers in this category also tended to be more creative than their peers – they would take more risks in an effort to produce an educationally satisfying lesson, which would often leave them open to criticism for diverging from the straight and narrow requirements of the guidelines or checklist.

I was surprised to read in the yearly reports issued by the examining body that one of the most common ‘reasons for failure’ was ‘lesson planning’ (43%) while ‘voice’ and ‘presence’ accounted for a small number of failures (6% and 14% respectively). ‘Achievement of aims’ accounted for 90% of failure to pass the observed lessons. It seemed, statistically, that ‘personal qualities’ (voice, presence, ability to establish rapport) were less of a problem than achieving the aims of a lesson plan.

As the years went by and my experience of sitting in on classes grew, I began to observe a pattern in the behavior of outstanding teachers: not only were they strong on ‘personal qualities’ but they seemed to have a knack or intuition for integrating ‘personal qualities’ with other aspects of the lesson, especially classroom management (giving instructions, correcting, eliciting, questioning, explaining and so on). I came to feel more and more that skills which seemed to be discrete, in reality, formed an integrated whole. For example, the effectiveness of asking questions and involving the whole class in the process of questioning seemed to have a lot to do with the teacher’s use of voice to convey clarity, enthusiasm and support. It wasn’t just what the teacher said but they way she said it that seemed to facilitate the participation of the class: their ability to come up with the ‘right answer’ or produce longer stretches of English.

Similarly, the correction process could be transformed not only by audibility of voice but by tone of voice. Volume and projection of voice were, of course, a precondition for a successful lesson: if students in various parts of the room couldn’t hear the teacher’s instructions, questions or corrections, the whole process fell flat. Clarity of diction was also a noticeable advantage, especially with lower level classes. What was more elusive was the way voice had discourse functions. It could signal transitions in the lesson from one stage to the next and weave together the different parts to create a sense of ‘flow’; it could focus on new as opposed to ‘given’ information; it could shift attention from one student to another, from one problem to another; above all, the quality of the teacher’s voice could signal involvement and enthusiasm on the part of the teacher, authority, humour and so on.

I also began to see the establishment of rapport as part of this integrated process of engagement generated by the teacher’s ‘personal qualities’. Take, for example, another area of frequent failure in the practical test: ‘lack of sensitivity to pupils linguistic and learning difficulties’. Although this criterion for a ‘pass’ was in the ‘execution’ section of my observer’s checklist, I noticed time and again how inseparable it was from ‘personal qualities’: it now seems obvious that personal qualities such as ‘sensitivity’ to the difficulties of others can be expressed by voice and/or body language; the problems students have learning English, such as fear of making mistakes, not understanding and being afraid to ask, can be softened by the teacher’s voice and ability to establish rapport between teacher and learner and between the learners. The teacher’s posture, position in the class and gestures can reinforce rapport and understanding or can obstruct them.

The use of ‘body language’ was absent from my observer’s checklist and in the reports of the examiners: I felt increasingly that the use of stillness and movement had an impact on the ‘execution’ of the lesson in the most subtle, unexpected ways.

Voice and body language for competence teachers

My intuition, refined by observation, of the importance of non-verbal skills in language teaching was confirmed by my reading of a book on expertise in teaching in general education: Body Language for Competent Teachers (Neill and Caswell, 1993). This book describes the results of the author’s classroom research into the use of body language and voice in successful teaching. The researchers observed novice and ‘expert’ teachers and noted how they used or did not use non-verbal techniques (or intuitions) to achieve their aims. Below, I have divided their observations into those that describe successful and unsuccessful lessons. I highlight the key words.

The successful lesson

1. ‘the dry content was relieved by intense non-verbal enthusiasm conveyed by intonation, gaze, gesture and head movements’
2. ‘her movement around the classroom meant the pupils needed to watch her closely, as they could not tell who she was going to speak to next’
3. ‘through changes in volume, positioning stance and gaze direction the teacher was able to get the pupils to pay attention’
4. ‘how did effective teachers convey enthusiasm? They used a wider variety of facial expressions, gestures and tones of voice, a wide range in the tempo, pitch and loudness of the voice; illustrative gestures and animated and imitative intonation’
5. ‘effective teachers smiled more and used more joking intonation’
6. ‘speaking in a quiet and pronounced tone also reinforced his control. Standing head up and chin out, making eye contact with each pupil in turn are likely to add strength and maintain control’
7. ‘gestures give the class a second chance to receive the teacher’s message’
   
   The less successful lesson
8. ‘if you are uncertain you tend to avoid the gaze of the class, by looking down at the register or your lesson notes or what you have written on the board’
9. ‘even more undesirable is looking in an unfocussed way into the middle distance: subordinates avert their gaze, dominants do not’
10. ‘ineffective teachers tended to jump in during silences either trying to hurry the child or diverting the question to another child so that the first child was not allowed the answer’

(All quotes from: Neill and Caswell, 1993)

I could multiply the examples from this fascinating book to illustrate the many and varied ways in which voice and body language can facilitate or impede the successful teaching of the content areas of the syllabus; good teachers have many voices: a ‘speaking to the group’ voice and a ‘speaking to the individual’ voice; a voice for highlighting words and phrases crucial to understanding of instructions; similarly, our body can be a great aid to learning: hand movements used to emphasize salient points; moving strategically and tactically around the room, not only to reinforce group rapport but to maintain authority and group cohesiveness, to pre-empt discipline problems, and so on.

Theatre skills

I would like to take up one of the comments made in by Neill and Caswell as they enumerate example after example of how integral voice and body language are to good teaching: ‘effective teachers in whole class work draw more on their theatrical skills’. Indeed, skimming down the list of quotes above one immediately notices the similarity of good teacher behaviours to those we associate with acting. It is often said that a good teacher is a good actor but, like all sweeping statements, this does not apply to many effective teachers who are not, in the conventional sense, ‘theatrical’ in their style of teaching.

‘Theatrical skills’ may be a part of what makes for an effective language lesson but they are certainly not the whole story. Before I go on to suggest ways in which voice and body language can be activated as useful tools in a teacher’s repertoire, let us remind ourselves of the many and varied competences that go into effective teaching, many of which have no connection with dramatic or theatrical skills.

In a survey I conducted with 100 or so teachers and students into what makes a good teacher, the ten most frequently cited qualities were the following (Table 1):

Table 1

As you think about this list, ask yourself: how many of the qualities of effective teaching can be realized or enhanced through voice and body language? My answer would be ‘most of them’ but certainly not all (for example, ‘knowing the subject’ is in no way a theatrical skill). But what makes effective teaching is complex and often contradictory. My informal survey may capture some of the expectations we have of good teachers but more empirically systematic data would be useful in the search for teacher expertise. Borg (2006) provides a survey of a wide range of empirical investigations into effective teachers. There follows a summary of the main points arising from the research:

Expert teachers:

1. ‘have knowledge derived from the classroom’
2. ‘pay more attention to language issues than novice teacher, who worry more about classroom management’
3. ‘learn to automatize the routines associated with managing the class; this skill leaves them free to focus on content’
4. ‘improvise more than novice teachers—they make greater use of interactive decision-making… ‘
5. ‘maintain active student involvement’
6. ‘an expert teacher is both technically skilled and emotionally intelligent..
(Borg, 2006).

Again, how many of these qualities of effective teaching can be realized through voice and body Language? In this case, my answer would be ‘some but not all’ (for example, 4 and 5 might well involve significant theatrical skills).

We have, however, accumulated enough evidence to suggest that the effective use of voice and body language is a very useful if not an essential aid in teaching language skills and managing a class; they are part of our repertoire of pedagogic skills, but not the whole story.

The question now is how can we develop these non-verbal-theatrical skills in the teacher? ‘Develop’ is a key word: in order to continue to grow and to discover our creative potential as teachers we need to move from the kind of teacher training described in the earlier part of this article to the more flexible and creative process of teacher development.

What is teacher development?

In contrast to the fixed agenda and the hierarchical structure and external constraints associated with teacher training, teacher development involves the teacher herself in choosing in what area and in what way she would like to grow. Because TD is not exam-oriented but person and peer-oriented, it has the potential to reach more creative and innovative corners of competence and to bring them into the foreground. And it actively encourages teachers working together to support each other in the achievement of common aims. It would be nice to think that official teacher-training courses could incorporate ‘creative teaching’ into their ‘instruments of observation’ and innovation into the checklists of ‘things good teachers do’. However, testing situations seem to encourage convergent thinking and conformity rather than divergent thinking and originality. Perhaps there is too much at stake in teacher training in a material sense to make risk-taking advisable, as we have seen in our discussion so far.

The acquisition and maintenance of the non-verbal, holistic skills I have been focusing on in this article can best be seen as part of a process of teacher development rather than teacher training. Table 2 is a summary of these skills drawn from Neill and Caswell (1993).

Table 2

Teacher development and the teacher’s voice

This final section suggests ways in which the teacher’s voice and body language can be incorporated into the teacher’s overall, continued development. One place to start the journey is to read a good book on the teacher’s voice (Neill and Caswell, 1993; Maley, 2000). I have summarized the main findings of Neill and Caswell’s research earlier in this article.

Maley (2000) suggests a wide range of techniques in his chapter ‘Voice for Personal Growth’ which contains useful advice for making more of our most important instrument as teachers: our voice. Many of Maley’s activities can be practised by the teacher alone in the comfort of her own home! For example, meditation techniques, which relax the whole person but also raise awareness of our breathing, are simple enough and do not take up too much time.

‘(Concentration exercises) calm you down and clear your mind. You should feel energised after them. And your breath control will improve dramatically – with knock-on effects on your voice’ (Maley, 2000: 54).

Maley also provides visualization and vocal techniques (‘groaning’ and ‘chanting’!) and ways of raising awareness of sounds and how our voice produces sounds.

Maley’s relaxation and awareness-raising exercises are a somewhat indirect way of building up our vocal skills but they can prepare the ground for more direct voice work by creating the right level of physical relaxation and mental alertness and readiness: we may by ‘indirection find direction out’, as Polonius puts it in Hamlet. Maley’s book on the teacher’s voice ends with a chapter on ‘care and maintenance of the voice’ and this gives practical tips for protecting our precious pedagogic instrument from wear and tear. In sum, his techniques can be practised throughout our professional life and are a good example of ongoing teacher development: the tasks are constantly renewable.

Teacher development and ‘theatrical skills’

My own contribution to this process of vocal development for teachers is to recommend acting for teachers. Acting in plays and sketches has the advantage of integrating voice with body language in a seamless manner. Our development of these non-verbal skills may be initiated by the teacher joining an amateur dramatic society or forming a teachers theatre group and putting on plays with colleagues. The ideal group, however, is one made up of teachers and students. A further option is using drama techniques with students, young and old, in the classroom – and there are ample books and articles on the subject to get us started (see Further Reading). In focusing on the students’ voice, we become aware of the power and flexibility of our own.

Whichever option we choose, our awareness and competence in the use of the teacher’s voice will be enhanced. I have experience of all three options: a teacher’s theatre group , a teacher and student’s theatre group and drama activities in the classroom.

Our teacher and students theatre group (in Thessaloniki, Greece) brought the two sides of the classroom together to write and perform satirical sketches in simple language but also to perform ‘serious’ plays in the original English. We began by putting on sketches from the English Teaching Theatre (Case and Wilson, 1995) and moved on to write and perform our own sketches in collaboration with students. A selection of these sketches, with language and skills exercises for the classroom was published (Bits and Pieces Theatre Group, 1988). Preparation for performance was as important as the actual performance as students and teachers learnt to work together (in English); by working closely on a theatrical text one becomes aware of the need to stand and move and gesture appropriately to get the message across and to use one’s voice to project; audibility and variety of tone develop naturally as one anticipates the desired response in the audience. But there are also rich benefits in terms of second language acquisition:

‘Learning poems by heart and rehearsing a part in a play offer wonderful potential for developing lexical chunks and fluency. In contrast to memorizing long lexical lists, memorizing and acting out a role in a play provides its own context for authentication. This is more than just parroting. In the end, learners will make these chunks their own ( ‘my English’) and use them as play- dough in their own communicative ELF exchanges. Pedagogical imitation can thus be given a new constructivist meaning’ (Kurt Kohn, personal communication).

Theatrical language (like the language of poetry and songs) is language worth memorizing, as Kohn suggests, but I would add that this language is made especially memorable in being ‘embodied’: in other words, language, voice, body language and use of space, are blended in a creative whole that should, we hope, facilitate language acquisition.

Final remarks

I began this article by musing on the challenge faced by even experienced teachers of continuing to develop personally and professionally as the years go by - and soul-destroying routine sets in. I limited the focus to the important role of voice and body language in effective teaching. In my case, the most satisfying solution has been starting a small theatre group with my colleague David Gibson, who also works in Greece in ELT. We had worked together on the teachers and students theatre group and after a period of lying fallow we sprang into action once again with the ‘Dave’n’Luke’ English Language Theatre. (davenluke.wordpress.com).

Our aim was to take up the story of the teachers and students theatre group and to develop it further. We would, of course, put on shows for students, teachers and the general public; but we would ‘reach out’ in co-operation with TESOL Macedonia-Thrace and other ELT conferences to demonstrate the power of voice and body language in classroom interaction, as well as providing pleasure and topics for discussion. We also decided it was time to engage in real critical pedagogy and try and use language teaching to make the world, in a modest way, a better place. Thus, we joined forces with the Disabled Access-Friendly Campaign, based in Thessaloniki, to use drama in the language classroom and - in the real world - to raise awareness of mobility disability problems and how to begin to solve them. One result of this collaboration was ‘The Wheelchair Sketch’, which was videoed and made available on the Disabled Access Website - with worksheets at different levels.

Thus, we hoped our acting skills were being put to good use, to teach language, to educate and help learners have an impact on the world they live in.

Our overall aim in becoming amateur actors has been to entertain and instruct through the performance of accessible texts in English. But we also want to show that language learning can be much more than exam preparation. We hope to encourage teachers to do (more) drama activities with their students and also to discover the power of their voice and body language in the most efficient and effective way possible: by using them in creative activity!

Our motto – as teachers, and as human beings with a life outside the classroom can be summed up – poetically:
An aged teacher is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress…

(with apologies and thanks to W B Yeats: ‘Sailing to Byzantium’)

References and further reading

Almond, M. 2005. Teaching English with Drama (Pavilion Publishing)

Bits and Pieces Theatre Group. 1988. Bits and Pieces Drama Sketches and Language Practice (Collins)

Booth, D. 1994. Story Drama (Pembroke Publishers)

Borg, S, 2006. Teacher Cognition and Language Education (Continuum)

Phillips, S. 1999. Drama with Children (OUP)

Case, D and K. Wilson 1995. English Sketches (Macmillan)

Maley, A.2000. The Language Teacher’s Voice (Macmillan)

Neill, N and C. Caswell, 1993. Body Language for Competent Teachers (Routledge).

Prodromou, L. 2019. ‘Review of Simon Borg’s Teacher Cognition and Language Education’. ELT Journal 63/2: 183-185.

Wilson, K. 2008. Drama and improvisation (OUP)

Woodward, T. 1991. Models and metaphors in Language Teacher Training. (CUP)

Please check the Drama Techniques for Creative Language Teaching course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teachers as Leaders course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Successful Presentation Skills for Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the How to be a Teacher Trainer course at Pilgrims website.