Teaching as Authentic Performance
If you’re not a little nervous before your students come into the room, you’re not doing it right.
Each of us distinctly remembers that new teacher feeling we had before our students came in on the first day, or even throughout the first week, of school. Our classrooms were meticulously prepared with stations and desk labels; our boards were demonstrations of handwriting our elementary school teachers would be proud of; and, for some of us, even our PowerPoints were tricked out with animations and images, videos and FONTS, that were meant to capture the spirit of a movie pitch being made to a Spielberg or even, in this context, a Dewey.
But mostly, I remember the feeling of being nervous: my shaky hands, weak knees, and overwhelming anticipation of How will this all play out? Will I master those initial management issues I know to tackle head on? Will they laugh at my jokes? Will they be inspired to be their best selves?
And I remember them coming in, feeling mostly the opposite of what I was feeling.
What strikes me the most these days is how this feeling rears less and less. Some of us still hang on to this feeling when it’s time for annual or biannual observations, but mostly, the veteran-self kicks in and the nerves are kicked out. But we all have these feelings, just maybe not in this context: maybe it’s a presentation we’re giving to colleagues, or a tough parent conference, or even in our own lives when we’re in front of others — performing brings nerves, and that can be scary.
And that’s not a bad thing. Experience helps answer the dramatic question, How will this all play out? in most areas of our lives. Since we’ve gone through it before, we have a good idea for how it will develop, and for what the outcome will be.
Yet that’s unrealistic in the field of education, since people — as individuals and as a group — are so subject to change. On a yearly basis, a monthly, a weekly, and even a daily basis. My dynamic lesson 2nd period has, of course, fallen flat by 4th. Every teacher recognizes this as one truth of teaching: it’s never boring because it’s never the same, no matter how tight our “script” is.
Over the years, many of us have learned tricks to try to keep the spirit of the lesson, and the energy of the students, the same throughout the day: groupings, activities, differentiation, reciprocal teaching, split screens, educational technology, et. al. But we realize that the students are always the variable in the experiment of meeting the objectives, and we do our best to minimize it.
Personally, as the year passes, I become less and less nervous for my classes, but a bit more jaded by fatigue and the stresses that teaching provides. I stop asking, “Am I ready to inspire them?” and start asking, “How many days until break?” And that’s normal, mostly, for teachers to go through. Of course, it’s not consistent, since this profession chose most of us and we are inherently passionate about it — it’s just a normal feeling about work that most of us can relate to.
But it’s become an issue I want to address, and something I think I understand a bit better thanks to theatre.
Teaching is performance. Most of us forget this, but it’s a one person show: us in front of a seated audience. Now, what we do with our show and space (groupings, activities, etc.) is up to us, but every class seems to start with the same thing: us in front of them — our opening monologue. And our kids, just like audiences in theatre, are never coming in our classrooms from the same place with the same mindset, so we need to be ready to captivate and engage if we want them to ignore the gossip at lunch, the mountain of homework ahead of them, the social media drama that started first block.
This is not to say that we need to become a stand-up comedian or a late-night talk-show host. We need to remain our true, authentic selves, but with the realization that we’re trying to gauge and engage a diverse audience. Just like the Friday night audience responds differently from the Sunday matinee audience, our students will respond differently to our performance.
No matter how much we want to place the blame or responsibility on our students (They need to pay attention. This affects their grade. My job is not to make them listen, it’s to teach them.), the responsibility is ultimately on us. Even if they were adults, consider how distracted we can be. The posters on the wall, the teacher’s outfit, another student — our job is to engage them so thoroughly that they, our audience, are not distracted by the world around them, and they are able to commit to the world of the play — the world of the lesson. And, when it’s appropriate, to use what they are learning and put it into the context of their worlds, just like we, as audience members do, after we see a heartfelt drama, or even a romantic comedy.
Since our lessons are nothing without their ability to relate to students and be practical to their lives and worlds, our job is be authentic in buying into whatever it is we’re teaching. If we lack enthusiasm, so do they. If we approach it like a task, so will they.
In short, teaching is an authentic performance — both true to who we are as unique individuals with a bias and a perspective on the world in which we live, but it’s also calculated and rehearsed. We must know our audience and how to pull them in and back in. And we get to do all the fun things in theatre: blur the lines between stage and audience, break the fourth wall, improvise, and even use guerrilla tactics. And it’s really fun. But it’s also incredibly nerve-wracking.
And if you’re not taking a deep breath when that first bell rings and ready to open up your performance, it becomes harder and harder to engage, affect, and inspire.
And you’re not doing it right.
