Results tagged “improv” from PEDABLOGUE

The slides for my "Teaching and Learning" presentation today on Improv and Teaching are here on google docs:

Whose Class Is It Anyway?

For related topics (including a two-part review of Impro by Keith Johnstone, click the improv tag below.

For a few years now, I've had this nagging worry that students are coming to college more and more distracted, less and less prepared to concentrate long enough to read -- and my intuition, like that of most, is to correlate this with the proliferation of cell phone texting, twittering, IMing, gaming, etc., etc.

Then I myself learn more about this trend via Twitter itself (thanks Matt Cardin). There's a good article in the May 17 2008 issue of New York magazine by Sam Anderson, called "In Defense of Distraction: The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation" which I think teachers who share my growing concern about student multitasking, ADD, and lack of focus ought to read.

Are we experiencing a "cognitive plague" -- or are we simply wasting our cognitive surplus? Is "multi-tasking" a myth? Is paying attention "a kind of sexy, visceral activity"? (Sure it is!) Is meditation the solution? These are the kinds of questions raised by the article.

My question is: how can we teach focus and concentration...or at least, teach it better than our curriculum already presumes we do. I think the answer lies somewhere in how well we teach reading -- whether book-length prose or complex arguments or even, perhaps, well-crafted poetry -- and listening. There's a degree to which we already expect students to be able to concentrate well; perhaps this is not an assumption we can rely on any longer in the same old ways.

It is paradoxically difficult to teach concentration and focus because it may take concentration and focus to learn it.

But there may be ways of fomenting the sort of positive distractions that Anderson writes about, which lead to greater awareness. This is why, I think Improv activities and Drama Games in the classroom work so well.

Paul Miller has posted an excellent entry on his blog, PaulsPen, called "Thou Shall Have Balance: The Ten Commandments of Teaching Creative Writing." Here they are. Each is explained in great depth on his blog, so be sure to visit his site:

I. Thou shall teach both theory and practice

II. Thou shall teach students to neither mistake, nor suppress, themselves for their audience

III. Thou shall articulate the difference between vision and revision

IV. Thou shall create a plan and be prepared to improvise

V. Thou shall encourage and practice freedom with restraint

VI. Thou shall boldly state absolutes in the realm of the relative

VII. Thou shall teach reading and writing, and the importance of both

VIII. Thou shall coach students to strive for art but be prepared for life

IX. Thou shall lead as an equal

X. Thou shall temper the dream with pragmatism

I admire Paul's mission to teach a balanced approach to the art and trade of writing. This is a useful addition to research on creative writing pedagogy -- thanks, Paul!

I was browsing through a list of open source academic journals on the web this morning and found Critical Studies in Improvisation -- a journal of music and performance theory, mostly -- whose latest issue [Vol 3, No 2 (2007)] is a Special Issue on Improvisation and Pedagogy.

Having studied Keith Johnstone's book, Impro, as a source for ideas in the teaching of writing, I found it a worthwhile follow-up. Teaching is always improvised, to some degree, but what these writers focus on is how improvisation in the classroom generates learning.

Of particular interest to me was R. Keith Sawyer's essay on "Improvisation and Teaching" which draws on cognitive learning scholarship to define the skills of "expertise":

1) Deep conceptual understanding. Experts haven’t simply memorized a large repertory of facts. Of course they know a lot of facts, but in the expert’s mind, those facts are embedded in complex conceptual frameworks. Experts understand the mechanisms underlying phenomena and are able to explain surface features in terms of underlying mechanisms and conceptual structures.

(2) Integrated knowledge. Each piece of knowledge is highly interconnected with all of the other pieces of knowledge. Expertise does not result from possessing distinct compartmentalized knowledge; everything known is related in an integrated framework.

(3) Adaptive expertise. Experts have mastered a large range of standard procedures and solutions. When first encountering a new problem, they typically will quickly recall a variety of similar problems they’ve encountered in the past, and they will begin by considering one of the solutions that has worked in the past. But experts do not simply apply these memorized procedures in rote fashion; they are able to flexibly modify the routines they’ve mastered or to combine elements of distinct routines as is appropriate to the new problem.

(4) Collaborative skills. Experts work together with other experts in teams and in complex organizational structures. Unlike the hierarchical corporation of old, where everyone’s job description was quite specific, the boundaries between each team member are fluid, and many tasks require the simultaneous and joint contributions of multiple experts to be successfully accomplished.

Sawyer draws specific connections between these skill sets and the needs of the improvisational musician, but argues that too often, the Industrial age classroom model (chairs lined up in rows, teacher-centered lectures, "banking model" frameworks etc.) inhibits -- and even prohibits -- these skills from fomenting. Such outdated models, moreover, are inappropriate for contemporary culture, which "requires a new learning environment" that is project-based, inquiry-based, or problem-based. "These new learning environments are unified by their improvisational nature—they place students in loosely structured environments, where they work together in a relatively unstructured, improvisational fashion."

One of the reasons this article spoke to me was because I recenty saw a news report on MSNBC that revealed new studies in the brain function of jazz performers, in which scientists have musicians play keyboards while inside an MRI machine. They hope to unravel the "secrets of creativity," and so far their findings suggest that the brain of a creative artist in action, performing live, functions in the same way as a dreaming brain does. This does not come as a surprise to me at all, but I think it is important to recognize the way that irrationality and the unconscious always play roles in the overly rational space of the college classroom, and that what we sometimes see as nonsense is often the most productive classroom experience.

As I prepare to teach some graduate learning modules in the Writing Popular Fiction program later this month, this article reminds me to keep the environment improvisational and not to over-plan the courses into dull singalongs. I think I often have approached teaching in an improvisational way, creating an open and collaborative learning environment, but I tend to think of the literary texts or student writing that we employ as "composition" -- that is, like sheet music. But, no, perhaps the texts are the instruments themselves in the student hands, not a set of directions. Learning occurs when that texts are processed, following student comments and discussions that riff off one another. The teacher can conduct, or perhaps better yet, play along. In the cacophony of student group work and open class discussion, an outsider might hear chaos -- but I need to remember that that's what learning sounds like, as I try to assist students toward a sense of knowledge mastery and expertise.

In this entry, I continue and conclude my discussion of Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone (New York: Routledge, 1981) and its implications for educators.

For my earlier discussions of Chapter I visit here and here.

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CHAPTER TWO: STATUS

In the second chapter of Impro, Johnstone focuses on the importance of pecking order and the unconscious politics of everyday life. Johnstone coaches improvisational actors to be spontaneous and creative by getting them to observe, intuit, and relate the underlying power struggle inherent to everyday social interactions. He calls this a "status transaction" and treats it as the key to performance, even when there is no script or when the actors are put into a vague or pointless situation. The unspoken hierarchy in place in any human relationship is central to this notion. If one actor can play "low status" and another "high status" (or vice versa) then they play off each other in maintaining their status or squabbling unconsciously for more or less power -- and this works best when the gap between the players' status is minimal (as in a conversation between friends), rather than obvious (as in hero-villain archetypes, like Darth Vader vs. Obi-Wan), because status transactions are a matter of performance rather than content -- they are what happens between the lines in a script. When played in this way, conflict transpires on an almost invisible plane which the audience will unconsciously pick up: the most mundane gestures and casual behaviors -- where to sit, who speaks first, what the choice for dinner will be, etc. -- become sites of struggle in virtually imperceptible ways. Every sound and posture implies a status, and recognizing this leads to a change in one's worldview. "Normally we are 'forbidden' to see status transactions except when there's a conflict," Johnstone writes (33). "In reality status transactions continue all the time. In the park we'll notice the ducks squabbling, but not how carefully they keep their distances when they are not." A great deal of the comedy or tension from a play derives from the tiny ways that people vie for power by trying to raise their own status or lower the status of others in an implicit rather than explicit way.

At one point in this chapter, Johnstone divides teachers into three types of "players" in everyday status games: low-status players who he characterizes as incompetent teachers who "twitch" and "[turn] red at the slightest annoyance...seem[ing] like an intruder in the classroom"; compulsively high-status players who "fill [students] with terror" because they "exert a ruthless discipline" and "status experts" who can raise and lower their status skillfully and in a cooperative way (35). Status experts are teachers who can "play along" with students, even when they misbehave -- they are skilled at spontaneity. Johnstone writes: "The pleasure attached to misbehaving comes partly from the status changes you make in your teacher. All those jokes on teacher are to make him drop in status. The [status expert] teacher could cope easily with any situation by changing his status first" (36). One of the reasons for this is that the status expert has spent a great deal of time observing status exchanges in everyday life and recognizes that there's no such thing as a neutral position in any relationship. Breaking eye contact, keeping one's head still, a nervous chuckle, a flap of the hand -- all of these non-verbal gestures, even, are expressions of status wishes and status disavowals.

All the world's indeed a stage, and Impro takes this metaphor quite literally. Johnstone may be guilty of essentializing, but his theories are founded in psychoanalytic literature that suggests that people naturally incline toward a dominant or submissive personality type...and he reveals how these traits often unconsciously motivate teachers. But status, for Johnstone, is something one does, not something one has. It is performed, he implies, as a defense mechanism -- not necessarily to exercise power over others. Overly dominating teachers operate out of a fear that they'll lose their high-status position in the classroom, and orchestrate the environment so that they'll retain it. Submissive teachers will disavow the very power and discipline that an educational environment might require; having the authority of the teacher puts them in a position they are uncomfortable in. Fear, in both cases, has taken control and has hampered the spotanaeity that brings the human relations in a classroom to life. By thinking of teaching as live performance, and the classroom a theatrical sort of space where status "seesaws" up and down, a teacher can become a "status expert" of sorts, getting students to think creatively.

A great deal of this chapter and the chapters that follow focuses on specific techniques Johnstone uses to coach actors to play status roles in impromptu performances in preparation for the stage. I don't teach drama courses or direct in theater, but I see the pertinence of his methods to the practice and teaching of writing and hope to borrow from some of his techniques in order to prompt students (and myself) to approach a topic more creatively. Johnstone talks about actors who have the equivalent of "writer's block": students who try too hard to "get it right" or who hold too closely to the script and therefore perform two-dimensionally or even lock up completely. By getting the actors to emphasize the underlying status transactions between characters in dialogue, Johnstone helps them to find the character's motives or to play the part more dramatically (or comically). This focus on status games offers writers a way of getting into not only conflict and drama, but also -- in fiction writing -- dialogue, which is often flat and boring when unmotivated by characters who are functioning as puppets for the plot...but if I can get students to treat their dialogue as a sort of "status transaction" then I know they will write more interesting verbal exchanges and perhaps even extend the psychological depth of their characters. Indeed, one of the mantras of teaching plot is that "a character must change" by the end of the story, and getting students to see that change as an alteration of status might be useful. Or in my literature courses, I might be able to get students to "read" for status transactions in the text (much the way a Marxist might find class struggle in a conversation between the king and the fool in a Shakespeare play) -- and to understand how such transactions produce the comic or tragic mode of the piece. (Johnstone, for example, reports that teaching status transactions is the only way to make sense of the comedy in Beckett's Waiting for Godot -- and I think it could explain a lot of other texts that have confounded my students). And, of course, when I ask writers to deliver their work orally and think on their feet in a Q&A with the class, I might draw on the ideas in Impro to stimulate them.

But even just student discussions of a reading in the classroom are a performance where status is exchanged. I think the strategies in Impro can be creatively retooled for any classroom situation so that the "rules of the game" that students always play can be altered. Johnstone has acting students play out a "Master-Servant" game, for example, with a direction to actors to play a sort of role reversal, where the actors play the King low status and the Fool high...and it produces great comedy (63). Likewise, a teacher could invent a game in class that substitutes the teacher for the master and the student for the servant, and swap roles. Or have students role play teacher and student in skits or creative writing exercises pertinent to the class topic.

When Johnstone writes of the "status resistances" his students have (say, when a person who is naturally inclined toward "low status" is asked to play the king in a play, and delivers the lines without authority), I'm reminded of the students who resist to "play along" with creative exercises I might assign in the classroom, or who are inexplicably rigid or shy. There may be strategies I can borrow from Impro that can help me to get these students to loosen up and participate in the game of learning. Johnstone offers several types of exercises that explicitly engage in raising the consciousness of status transactions (trading insults, playing master-servant, and clowning around non-verbally). I think any creative-centered course could benefit from having students play these games, because, at root, Johnstone weans students out of their comfort zones by nudging them into playing status levels they're not used to. Shy or apathetic students might be trying to protect their submissive, "low-status" position, but even students who are very vocal (or even monopolizing class discussions) can be seen as vying for dominating "high-status" -- whether by affiliating with the teacher (like the students who always raise their hands, who always agree, or who always "show off" that they possess all the right answers) or by directly conflicting with the teacher (the class clowns, the over-argumentative skeptics, the perpetual scoffers). The "status expert" teacher can marshal improvisational exercises and simulations that diffuse these overt conflicts and change the rules a bit so that students are nudged out of their comfort zone and habitual "coping strategies" by being required to play different roles in a game where the rules can shift spontaneously.

This is, in a sense, what happens when a teacher moves away from a "teacher-centered" classroom and adopts a "student-centered" ideal. Such a movement does not just mean facilitating open discussions instead of preparing lectures -- it essentially requires an abdication of the need for "high status," and I think it's safe to say that both teachers and students are psychologically uncomfortable with this shift in authority, and instructors will unconsciously struggle to retain their centrality without realizing it. They over-prepare and overlord, even when they're not lecturing. They send mixed signals that say "you are your own instructor, and can learn from one another" verbally while non-verbally giving off subliminal cues that suggest they're really not through unconscious gestures or games with eye contact. And their classes -- if not their inner lives -- suffer because of it. If Johnstone is right, then to be a talented teacher might very well mean being an expert in terms of the status games of everyday life, as much as it means having expertise in the class content -- or even in pedagogy. Of course, these things are difficult for administrators and advisors to evaluate, and perhaps impossible to self-evaluate, but I think a teacher who is consciously applying Johnstone's techniques will be more engaged and likely see the results in their students' willingness to "play along" with the game of learning.

In the next chapter, "Spontaneity," Johnstone will elaborate on techniques for getting people to think more creatively on their feet.

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RELATED READING: See The Improv Wiki for an overview on status. The article, "Acting in Character" (.pdf file) by Barbara Hayes-Roth, Robert van Gent, and Daniel Huber makes extensive reference to Johnstone's chaper on status and personality traits in relation to acting.

Although Johnstone doesn't seem to deal directly with them, theories of the politics of everyday life in cultural studies literature often point back to Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life and Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. For future study, I note two recent books of interest that develop scholarship in this area: Ben Highmore's Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction and Roger Abrahams' Everyday Life: A Poetics of Vernacular Practices.

In my discussion of chapter one of Impro, I talk about Keith Johnstone's notion that students fear failure and this becomes a blockage to learning. I just read a blog entry by John Moore at Brand Autopsy called "Lessons Learning from Improv" that summarizes some key life lessons he gleaned from an Improv course, one of them being that failure is a (productive) option:

Failure is an Option
In business we’ve been conditioned to believe failure is bad and most be avoided at all costs. Improv believes in the opposite. In Improv, I’m learning failure is good because it means you are challenging yourself to take chances in pursuit of living in the moment. Failure happens. Mistakes happen. Learn from failures. Learn from mistakes. If we don’t take chances and fail, how else will we ever feel the pleasure of learning?

All the lessons Moore discusses are pertinent to education and worth a look.

Brand Autopsy also links to a new book by Patricia Ryan Madson, a teacher out of Stanford U, called Improv Wisdom which might be a nice follow-up to Impro...and possibly useful in the classroom. Another possible source for classroom activities is the games collection at the rich treasury at the Improv Encyclopedia.

Years ago, my old writing friend Bruce Holland Rogers mentioned a book to me called Impro by Keith Johnstone. It's a book about improvisational theater, but Bruce said it really taught him a lot about the creative process as a writer. I've finally gotten around to reading this book, and it's just wonderful -- chock full of insights into spontaneous creativity, while remaining just philosophical enough to be called theory. It's really helping me think about exercises for my writing workshops, and even sparking a lot of new ideas for my own writing, because Johnstone really succeeds at prompting the reader into a creative mindset. But I'm also reading it from the viewpoint of an educator and I think it has a lot to say about the art of teaching -- particularly in the teaching of the arts. Indeed, Johnstone writes from the perspective of a drama teacher (or coach), sharing his techniques and the motives behind it. But it's useful for more than just thespian teachers -- the bulk of the book is about prompting people into thinking on their own and he incorporates many anecdotes about his life in school, as both student and teacher.

The book is a quick read, but I'm going to re-read it carefully and process some of my thoughts on each chapter here on Pedablogue (as I did awhile ago with my discussion of Ernst Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered).

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On Johnstone, Keith. IMPRO: Improvisation and the Theatre. New York: Routledge, 1981.

CHAPTER ONE: NOTES ON MYSELF
In the opening autobiographical chapter to Impro, "Notes on Myself," Johnstone explains his resistance to traditional schooling techniques and orthodox theatrical performance. He talks about how habituation dulls the senses and diminishes our sense of perception of the world around us. In recounting his experiences in the British school system, and later as a teacher himself, he explains that traditional schooling is mostly to blame for turning an otherwise colorful reality gray, because it insists on compartmentalizing the world into informational units, rather than grooming students' innate talent and helping them to really perceive and understand the world around them by attending to phenomena.

This idea of "attending" to the phenomena of reality -- which we might otherwise understand as the skill of "concentration" -- is vitally important to Johnstone because paying attention to reality brings the world to life, and this, in his view, is what the aim of artistic learning should be:

...it was largely my interest in art that had destroyed any life in the world around me. [Through schooling in the arts] I'd learned perspective, and about balance, and composition. It was as if I'd learned to redesign everything, to reshape it so that I saw what ought to be there, which of course is much inferior to what is there. The dullness was not an inevitable consequence of age, but of education. (14)

For Johnstone, education is not a "substance" (where bad teachers supply too little of it and good teachers supply a lot), but rather a "process" -- an activity. In his view a "bad teacher" is one whose process is destructive, "wrecking talent," by inculcating students with a fear of failure (16-7).

Johnstone tells some wonderful anecdotes about the few teachers in his life who awoke his creativity and, later, influenced his teaching. Given a batch of students who no one else wanted to teach, he realized that it wasn't the students who were "ineducable" -- it was that the traditional methods of schooling weren't working because they squelched creativity (22). He sought to release the innate passion these students had by prompting them to not think of themselves as "being educated." He adopted a stance of "non-interference" that could generate the enthusiasm for life the school children had as children.

Indeed, one assumption built into Johnstone's pedagogy is that good teachers enable students to release their "inner child," who is spontaneous and playful rather than repressed and too dependent on the "adults" of the educational system for permission to think for themselves. After years of struggling in school, he eventually found himself in the position of schoolteacher, and Johnstone "began to think of children not as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children" (25). He tells a great story about an art class where his most important teacher asked the students to do preposterous things with paint...like an assignment to "imagine a clown on a one-wheeled bicycle who pedals through the [black] paint, and on to our sheets of paper. 'Don't paint the clown,' he [says], 'paint the mark he leaves on your paper" (18). Johnstone struggled with trying to figure out what to do: how to get it right, demonstrate his skill, and impress the teacher. The teacher then asked them to find patterns and fill them in with "nice colours, nasty colours, whatever you like." Johstone was flummoxed. After they finished, the teacher showed the students the results of the same assignment from another class. Johnstone marvels at how excellent these examples are, assuming they're done by an advanced class, but then the teacher reveals that they were created by eighth graders who were given the same exact guidelines. The kids instinctively knew what to do -- to follow their intuition rather than try to "get it right" for the teacher. He concludes that one of the major blockages for him was that his education had destroyed him into a state of dependency and fear, rather than freedom. This became a model for Johnstone's own teaching in the improvisational arts. He learned from his mentor that "the art was 'in' the child, and that it wasn't something to be imposed by the adult," and, moreover that "the student should never experience failure. The teacher's skill lay in presenting experience in such a way that the student was bound to succeed" (20).

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Obviously, Johnstone advocates radical pedagogy that works against the conforming and socializing impulses of most educational programs. To suggest that a "student should never experience failure" is contrary to any normative system of letter grading, where "F's" abound. But he's right, I think, when it comes tackling the problem of the uncreative, unmotivated student: if you can get them over their fears, particularly their fears of failure, then you can often unleash the creative expression that's latent within them. Writer's block, for example, often has it's roots in fears of failing to please, failing to finish, failing to capture the felt idea perfectly on the page. Victoria Nelson's book, On Writer's Block, shares quite a bit with Johnstone's in suggesting that one way to overcome these fears is to unleash the so-called "inner child" who has no fear but only curiosity, spontaneity, wonder, and the ability to "attend" to phenomena, working without a net handed to them by the educational system. Writers and artists who succeed at this are able to attract an audience because they are able to appeal to draw the audience's "attention" to the text and initiate a parallel sense of wonder, curiosity, etc. While I'm as hesitant to accept the idea of the "inner child" as much as I am unable to reject the grading system I have to operate within as a teacher, Johnstone's point about failure reminds me of a key point: that failure is a social construct which we integrate into our personalities, which inevitably leads to conflicts and blockages to expression and learning. For writers like Johnstone and Nelson, moreover, the talent of the child is often marshaled as a metaphor for the impulses of the unconscious, which -- like art -- processes reality in a different but true way than the pre-processed world given to us by the education system. By attempting to construct an alternative learning environment where traditional notions of failure are "bracketed off," the instructor can help students take creative risks and exercise creative freedom.

There is a telling moment in this chapter, where Johnstone reveals one method by which he constructs the classroom to help liberate students from their fear of failure:

The first thing I do when I meet a group of new students is to sit on the floor. I play low status, and I'll explain that if the students fail they're to blame me. Then they laugh, and relax, and I explain that really it's obvious that they should blame me, since I'm supposed to be the expert; and if I give them the wrong material, they'll fail; and if I give them the right material, then they'll succeed. I play low status physically but my actual status is going up, since only a very confident and experienced person would put the blame for failure on himself. At this point they almost certainly start sliding off their chairs, because they don't want to be higher than me. I have already changed the group profoundly because failure is suddenly not so frightening any more. (31)

Once he gets students and teacher on "the same level" then it all becomes "just playing" -- including the see-sawing performance of high and low status in the exchanges the teacher has with students: "...they just do what they're asked to, and see what happens. It's this decision not to try and control the future which allows students to be spontaneous" (32). To "see what happens" is to take a creative risk, win or lose. That freedom lies at the heart of creative self-expression. But it's also interesting that Johnstone himself takes a creative risk as a teacher, subordinating (and at times depricating) himself to the students, while, ostensibly, still retaining his status as an intellectual leader who has earned -- and is earning -- the right to that status. Johnstone's clever "game" with the students is -- remarkably -- a status game, which inherently treats the teacher and the student as a role that is played in a sort of social theater. Although Johnstone is literally emphasizing the theatrical performance for play actors, this concept lies at the crux of Johnstone's teaching strategy as discussed in the next chapter, "Status."

I just read Ronald A. Smith's great essay, "Competence Is What You Do When You Make a Mistake" (.pdf file from BYU's Focus on Faculty newsletter). I love that definition.

In this piece, Smith explains how teachers often equate "competency" with appearing masterful and therefore error-free -- which is not only impossible, but misleading. We get so hung up on avoiding the appearance of "incompetence" that we hide our errors and miss out on opportunities to model problem-solving in the name of generating an aura of mastery. But students should be made to feel like they can make mistakes too, if they hope to learn from them. Often the "perfect" teacher is the one they fear revealing weaknesses to the most. We need, as Smith concludes, to "demonstrate how errors can become opportunities for learning."

What Smith doesn't mention is the level of confidence it takes to admit mistakes in front of an audience. As a teacher, you have to be quick on your feet when you make a mistake -- and not let the embarrassment humiliate you or to listen to your inner voice when it whisper "you've been outed as a charlatan and a fraud!" The longer you teach, the more mistakes you'll inevitably make -- and the more confident you'll become when you respond to them. If you lack confidence, you react to errors to cover up your own ego-bruise rather than responding in a constructive manner that seizes the opportunity for enhancing student learning.

Smith's essay focuses on how he used to solve math problems from the book at home, then display his mastery to the class, never risking an erroneous solution on the board by doing it "live." But the mistakes he'd make "live" were likely to be the same ones the students would make when they did their homework, so he realized it would be better for them to share the error and collaboratively discuss how to solve problem. I like this. I'm also reminded of the day-to-day sorts of mistakes that I've made as a teacher, and how I treat them differently now that I've got a little more experience and confidence than I used to. Here are a few of the mistakes I've made, and how I've dealt with them, both poorly ("reactive") and positively ("constructive")...

Mistake: A student raises her hand to announce that there's a typo on a handout.

Knee-Jerk Reaction: Saying "I did that on purpose just to see if you guys were paying attention."

Constructive Response: Reward the student who discovered the typo. Ask the whole class to correct the error on the handout by hand. Then have them look for more typos, turning the moment into an editing exercise.

Mistake: Calling a student by the wrong name.

Knee-Jerk Reaction: "Jimmy, Jamie, whatever...you know I meant you."

Constructive Response: "I'm sorry, Jimmy. I'm great with faces but bad with names. I'm working on this, so be sure to correct me if I get it wrong again. In the mean time, let me make sure I have your name correctly written in my grade book." (Later, calling on the student again in the class to use repetition as a way of helping memorization.)

Mistake: Breaking class up into the wrong number of small groups (i.e., five discussion questions, one for each group, but -- oops! -- I split them into six groups!)

Knee-Jerk Reaction: Awkwardly splitting up Group Six to join all the other groups, one by one.

Constructive Response: "Group Six: why don't you guys come up with a question for the rest of the class that isn't on this list of discussion questions?"

Mistake: Misspelling a word on the board and being called on it.

Knee-Jerk Reaction: Ignoring it even when a student points it out. "Whatever...you know what I mean."

Constructive Response: Using the board interactively and playing the role of the poor speller. Erase the word and ask the students to spell it letter by letter as I rewrite the word. Repeat the performance for other difficult keywords in a sort of spelling game, transcribing what the students say.

Mistake: Forgetting to bring the instruction sheet or guidelines for an important homework assignment to class.

Knee-Jerk Reaction: "Just wing it...surprise me." Or, "I'll give them to you next time" (even though that gives them less time to work on it).

Constructive Response: Collaborate with the class to come up with the guidelines together, transcribing them on the board.

The truism that we "learn from our mistakes" is often reinforced when we confront them constructively with our classes. The handout with the typo is now well-edited. Group Six came up with a great question that I jotted down and incorporated into my list for the next time I taught the class. The collaborative assignment guidelines took them into creative writing rather than expository writing, something I hadn't tried with that group before. My spelling has improved. And when I shook Jimmy's hand on graduation day, I congratulated him by name.

Just some thoughts I had after a full day of teaching yesterday....

Let the Cat Out of the Bag

Because it is the nature of our jobs to preplan, we often "hold back" material that we've planned for later in the hour or later in the term or later in the student's curriculum. But "holding back" knowledge can sometimes stifle the natural flow of the class. If the students are pressing forward, show your cards and then keep moving forward. The class will go further than it would have if you stuck to your plan.

I taught plot structure a day early in my fiction writing class because I discovered that they were already asking questions about it and some of the students had already done the reading in advance. So I taught next week's lesson a week ahead of plan. Sure, I'll have to come up with something new for next week, but that means I've actually got an opportunity, now to go deeper into analyzing examples and giving students more time for in class writing. And I bet their writing will be better for it, because now they have more knowledge about what they're actually doing.

The Ear Forgives

I borrow this phrase from Chuck Rainey, who mentioned it on his video tutorial for playing the bass guitar. "The ear forgives." What Rainey means is that you can make mistakes when you're playing and the audience probably won't hear them...or if they do, they'll pardon you for it because all the other notes are right and they just want to dance or jam or whatever. Same goes for flubs in the classroom. If you say something erroneous or illogical, don't freeze or over correct Just keep teaching. Naturally you want to correct errors so that the student isn't miseducated. But if you say something you didn't want to, don't worry: the student ear will forgive.

Teaching can sometimes be like improvisational jazz. The students are like the other players in the band, who you have to be in tune with and who's music you can often "play off" and play a solo (e.g. lecture). The content sets the key; the student involvement beats the tempo. But when you're playing your solo, the fingers might slip, the horn might squawk, the amp might wail with feedback. No bother: the ear forgives.

Jeannine Stanko -- a former English student who is moving into teaching as a profession -- wrote me the other day:

"I've been teaching the ninth graders how to write. It's been going well and it's a lot of fun. I find myself trying to think creative ways to help them. I've seen improvements already - it's great. They beg to do one of the exercises all the time. I give them an opening line. Then every 30 seconds I call out a random word. Does this sound familiar?"

Yes it does! Jeannine is referring to a technique I use to assist the movement from point to point in "freewriting" (when students brainstorm by writing as quickly as they can, non-stop, without lifting the pen off the page, without stopping to edit or think first, just write write write). I have students write in this manner, free associating or writing what approximates "stream of consciousness" while once in awhile I will bark out a word and they will have to try to integrate that word into their current stream of thoughts.

This exercise teaches students the power of transitions to shape thought. I shout out phrases that mark turning points in one's logic: "because"; "therefore"; "on the other hand"; "yet"; "in the long run"; etc. It was good to hear that this worked so well for Jeannine that she's inflicting it on 9th graders. She reports that she's trying to adapt it specifically to expository writing assignments because the kids like it so much. (Good luck, Jeannine!) I sent Jeannine this web address, so if you have advice for her, leave a "comment" below.

Most composition instructors advocate freewriting as a way of generating raw material for an assignment. I found this graduate paper by Wendy Bell on "Freewriting: A Means of Teaching
Critical Thinking" which I thought I'd pass along, since it refers to that major advocate of the method, Peter Elbow (author of What is English?). (I'm not sure if Elbow would have liked my Drill Sergeant-like method of barking out transitions, but no matter: it works. Now drop and give me twenty pages.)