Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-lvwk9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-17T20:03:27.328Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Professional Improvisation and Teacher Education

Opening the Conversation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Stacy Dezutter
Edited by
R. Keith Sawyer
Stacy Dezutter
Affiliation:
Millsaps College
R. Keith Sawyer
Affiliation:
Washington University, St Louis
Get access

Summary

In this chapter, I argue that teacher educators should help their students understand that teaching is inherently improvisational. I propose this as part of a larger shift that, I believe, needs to occur in teaching: We need to redefine our profession as an improvisational one. By this I mean that we should liken teaching to other explicitly improvisational professions such as unscripted theater and jazz music, where conscious efforts are made to develop improvisational expertise, and where a body of knowledge has been built up for doing so. This chapter uses the improvisation metaphor to extend the tradition of research on teacher expertise (summarized in Sawyer’s introduction) that has found that expert teachers have mastered a large repertoire of scripts, plans, and routines, while at the same time becoming experts at appropriate and disciplined improvisation in practice. This reconceptualization of teacher expertise will be an important move toward supporting the kinds of teaching that are needed to meet the demands of our society in the twenty-first century.

Type
Chapter
Information
Structure and Improvisation in Creative Teaching , pp. 27 - 50
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, L. M. (2001). Nine prospective teachers and their experiences in teacher education: The role of entering conceptions of teaching and learning. In Torff, B. & Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.), Understanding and teaching the intuitive mind: Student and teacher learning (pp. 187–215). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.Google Scholar
Bereiter, C. (2002). Education and mind in the knowledge age. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Berliner, P. F. (1994). Thinking in jazz: The infinite art of improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blumenfeld, P., Hicks, L., & Kracjik, J. S. (1996). Teaching educational psychology through instructional planning. Educational Psychologist, 31, 51–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borko, H. & Livingston, C. (1989). Cognition and improvisation: Differences in mathematics instruction by expert and novice teachers. American Educational Research Journal, 26, 474–498.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bransford, J., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2003). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Bryan, L. A. (2003). Nestedness of beliefs: Examining a prospective elementary teacher’s belief system about science teaching and learning. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 40(9), 835–868.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, B. & Sumara, D. (2003). Why aren’t they getting this? Working through the regressive myths of constructivist pedagogy. Teaching Education, 14(2), 123–140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donmoyer, R. (1983, January). Pedagogical improvisation. Educational Leadership, 40(4), 39–43.Google Scholar
Fishman, B. J. & Davis, E. A. (2006). Teacher learning research and the learning sciences. In Sawyer, R. K. (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences (pp. 535–550). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hargreaves, A. (2003). Teaching in the knowledge society: Education in the age of insecurity. New York: Teachers College Press.Google Scholar
Holt-Reynolds, D. (1992). Personal history-based beliefs as relevant prior knowledge in course work. American Educational Research Journal, 29(2), 325–349.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holt-Reynolds, D. (2000). What does the teacher do? Constructivist pedagogies and prospective teachers’ beliefs about the role of a teacher. Teaching and Teacher Education, 16(1), 21–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, K. (1987). Impro: Improvisation and the theatre. New York: RoutledgeGoogle Scholar
Kelly, G. J., Brown, C., & Crawford, T. (2000). Experiments, contingencies, and curriculum: providing opportunities for learning through improvisation in science teaching. Science Education, 84, 624–657.3.0.CO;2-S>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labaree, D. (2005). Life on the margins. Journal of Teacher Education, 56, 186–191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lobato, J., Clarke, D., & Ellis, A. B. (2005). Initiating and eliciting in teaching: A reformulation of telling. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 36(2), 36.Google Scholar
Lobman, C. (2007, April). The Developing Teachers Fellowship Program: Exploring the use of improv theatre for the professional development of inner city teachers. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL.
Lobman, C. & Lindquist, M. (2007). Unscripted learning: Using improv activities across the K-8 curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press.Google Scholar
Lortie, D. C. (1975). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Olson, D. R. & Bruner, J. S. (1996). Folk psychology and folk pedagogy. In Olson, D. R. & Torrance, N. (Eds.), The handbook of education and human development: New models of learning, teaching and schooling (pp. 9–27). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Patrick, H. & Pintrich, P. R. (2001). Conceptual change in teachers’ intuitive conceptions of learning, motivation, and instruction: The role of motivational and epistemological beliefs. In Torff, B. & Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.), Understanding and teaching the intuitive mind: Student and teacher learning (pp. 117–143). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Renninger, A. (1996). Learning as the focus of an educational psychology course. Educational Psychologist, 31, 63–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richardson, V. (1996). The role of attitudes and beliefs in learning to teach. In Sikula, J., Buttery, T. J., & Guyton, E. (Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education (2nd ed., pp. 102–119). New York: MacMillan.Google Scholar
Richardson, V. (2003). Constructivist pedagogy. Teachers College Record, 105(9), 1623–1640.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rogoff, B., Paradise, R., Arauz, R., Correa-Chávez, M., & Angelillo, C. U. (2003). Firsthand learning through intent participation. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 175–203.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sawyer, R. K. (2003). Emergence in creativity and development. In Sawyer, R. K. (Ed.), Creativity and development (pp. 12–60). New York: Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sawyer, R. K. (2004). Creative teaching: Collaborative discussion as disciplined improvisation. Educational Researcher, 33(2), 12–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sawyer, R. K. (2006a). Educating for innovation. Journal of thinking skills and creativity, 1(1), 41–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sawyer, R. K. (2006b). Introduction: The new science of learning. In Sawyer, R. K. (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences (pp. 1–17). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Scardamalia, M. & Bereiter, C. (2006). Knowledge building: Theory, pedagogy, and technology. In Sawyer, K. (Ed.), Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences (pp. 97–118). New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Siegler, R. S. (1998). Children’s thinking (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Simon, M. A. (1995). Reconstructing mathematics pedagogy from a constructivist perspective. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 26(2), 114–146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spolin, V. (1983). Improvisation for the theater. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Strauss, S. (2001). Folk psychology, folk pedagogy, and their relations to subject- matter knowledge. In Torff, B. & Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.), Understanding and teaching the intuitive mind: Student and teacher learning (pp. 217–242). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Torff, B. (1999). Tacit knowledge in teaching: Folk pedagogy and teacher education. In Sternberg, R. J. & Horvath, J. A., (Eds.), Tacit knowledge in professional practice: Researcher and practitioner perspectives (195–213). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Tudge, J. & Rogoff, B. (1989). Peer influences on cognitive development: Piagetian and Vygotskian perspectives. In Bornsten, M. H. & Bruner, J. S., (Eds.), Interaction in human development (pp. 17–40). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Weber, S. & Mitchell, C. (1995). That’s funny you don’t look like a teacher: Interrogating images and identity in popular culture. Washington, DC: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wideen, M., Mayer-Smith, J., & Moon, B. (1998). A critical analysis of the research on learning to teach: Making the case for an ecological perspective on inquiry. Review of Educational Research, 68(2), 130–178.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Windschitl, M. (2002). Framing constructivism in practice as the negotiation of dilemmas: An analysis of the conceptual, pedagogical, cultural, and political challenges facing teachers. Review of Educational Research, 72(2), 131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woolfolk Hoy, A. & Murphy, P. K. (2001). Teaching educational psychology to the implicit mind. In Torff, B. & Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.), Understanding and teaching the intuitive mind: Student and teacher learning (pp. 145–186). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×