Improvisation

Teaching is a performing art. In this day and age in the classroom, more and more teachers open the textbook and follow a script. Moreover, principals, superintendents and state legislatures expect us to teach in this way. One teacher is on a given lesson, and the teacher next door is expected to be on the same exact lesson. The world of education, the growth of knowledge does not fit this model whatsoever. Quite the contrary, lessons need to move and change to fit individual students.

To dispense knowledge you must have the attention of your students. They must be engaged, either while a teacher is speaking or learning from the setting the teacher has created to prompt discovery, discussion, or research. One size does not fit all, the scope and sequence of any class should only exist as a guide. A plan is a mark to aim for, it’s not a dictator. Any great teacher adjusts lessons, and most lessons need adjusting.

For example, I remember running literature circles where groups of students read a novel together. The various groups, every year, and had different roads to travel. One group, who read a given novel, had entirely different discussions than other groups that read the same novel. If I had to teach a given curriculum content area, say ‘tone’ for example, the students would pick different words from their reading and construct meaning that made sense to them. The many and varied ways that students learned voice, main idea, theme and even grammatical ideas such as possessive nouns and punctuation were all valid and all arrived at by different means.

This not only applies to reading but across all content areas. In math, I can recall many times when the scripted lesson for the day was (thankfully) sidetracked to clarify some other math misconception. Getting denominators to match was consistently one of these areas. To
find a common denominator, I invariably had to ‘sidetrack’ and remind students of how to find the greatest least common multiple. When rounding, or comparing numbers, I always had to revisit place value. Honestly, these few examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Great
teachers shift, move, adjust and improvise; they don’t stick rigidly to a set plan where students’ understanding is not taken into account.

I remember once when a student was challenging me on the fact that Hawaii was located out in the Pacific Ocean. He said something to the effect of, “They went down to Hawaii.”

I ventured to correct him by replying, “You mean over to Hawaii right?”

The student retorted, “No Mr. G. Hawaii is down there by Mexico.”

Should I stay with the plan? Do we have time to go off on a tangent and clarify a geographical misunderstanding? The fact that many
maps, including the one in my classroom, inlay Hawaii down in the bottom right hand corner of the map threw him off. He had seen it down
in the right hand, bottom corner many times; this prompted the student to believe that Hawaii was located in the Atlantic Ocean right next to
Mexico.

Musicians and other performers do this all the time, they adjust. Great teachers are performers. I have played many solos and often times
there comes a point where I play an accelerando. I start out slowly, steadily increase the speed, and then fly into warp speed. If the crowd
starts screaming and cheering, I will stay with the speed for a while longer. If the crowd is quiet, I will move on to the next section of my
solo. Teachers must do the same thing.

Led Zeppelin is one of my very favorite rock groups. Their improvisation is one of their greatest attributes. In their live stage shows Jimmy
Page would play and awesome guitar lick and Robert Plant would mimic the guitar riff with his voice. The back and forth communication was
pure excellence. Jazz musicians do this all the time as well, a trumpet or a sax player will take a verse for a solo, they’re feeling it,
improvising, they take musical roads they may not have planned on taking – but they’re valuable, amazing and enlightening roads! Educators need to take these roads as well.

Art is expression, using human creative skill, and tapping the imagination. Isn’t that what teachers do everyday? Even something as mechanical and logical as math, often uses the phrase, “solve the expression,” or “express the answer in such and such a manner.” Knowledge is an expression, and/or understanding of an expression. The analogy holds up even better with the visual arts. Isn’t your school day literally the making of a movie? How we treat others, teach with examples and use narratives analogous to the strokes of paint on canvas? Administrators and teachers, what did we paint today? Is the picture a serene seascape? Or is it an avant-garde, buckets of paint flung on the canvas?

I can tell you this: the performance or the painting describes what happens in the realm of education much better than an ordinal percentage assigned by a standardized, multiple choice test.