The fourth of our short series of posts from Jack Richards’ Key Issues in Language Teaching explores the idea of English language teaching as ‘skilled improvisation’.
When one observes experienced teachers in their classrooms, one is struck by their apparent effortless management of the different dimensions of lessons. They may not need to refer to a lesson plan, because they are able to create effective lessons through monitoring their learners’ response to teaching activities and can create learning opportunities around important teaching moments. Their teaching can be viewed as a kind of skilled improvisation.
Over time, experience leads to the development of routines that enable classroom activities to be performed fluently, automatically and with little conscious thought and attention, enabling the teacher to focus on other dimensions of the lesson. Experienced teachers engage in sophisticated processes of observation, reflection and assessment, and make ‘online’ decisions about which course of action to take from a range of alternatives that are available.
These interactive decisions often prompt teachers to change course during a lesson, based on critical incidents and other unanticipated aspects of the lesson. Research on how teachers depart from their lesson plans can reveal the principles which prompt their improvisations. For example:
1) Serving the common good: Change focus to a problem that many learners experienced in the class.
2) Teach to the moment: React to immediate opportunities that arise during lessons.
3) Furthering the lesson: Move the lesson on when possibilities are exhausted.
4) Accommodating different individual learning styles: Improvise with different teaching strategies.
5) Promoting student involvement: Allow space for students to participate.
6) Distribute the wealth: Stop particular students from dominating the class, and
encourage other students to take turns.
As teachers accumulate experience and knowledge, there is, therefore, a move towards a degree of flexibility in teaching and the development of the ability to improvise. Research on expert teachers suggests their teaching has the following characteristics:
- A wide repertoire of routines and strategies that they can call upon.
- Willingness to depart from established procedures and use their own solutions and are more open to improvisation.
- They learn to automatize the routines associated with managing the class; this skill leaves them free to focus on content.
- Improvising more than novice teachers. They make greater use of interactive decision-making as a source of their improvisational performance.
- More carefully developed schemas of teaching on which to base their practical classroom decisions.
- Paying more attention to language issues than novice teachers (who worry more about classroom management).
- Ability to anticipate problems and have procedures available to deal with them.
- Carrying out needed phases more efficiently, spending less time on them.
- Relating things that happen to the bigger picture, seeing them not in the context of a particular lesson.
- Able to distinguish between significant and unimportant issues that arise.
Exploring how experienced teachers achieve these dimensions of teaching can be a useful focus for activities that link experienced and novice teachers, such as classroom observation, team teaching, and group planning activities.