“restoring a freshness and dynamism to children’s learning”

I am delighted to receive another response to my book “The Improvising Teacher” from Mark Wilson.

Mark Wilson is at heart an educator. He has worked as a drama teacher and a qualified professional coach with over thirteen years’ experience of working in HE institutions. He is very much a renaissance man: he is also a writer, theatre director and visual artist. He says “whatever we use to create, be it film, dance, oil paint, music – anything, I believe that what we are doing, at heart, is story-telling”

You can find out more about Mark’s painting at https://www.markwilsonart.com/

In ‘The Improvising Teacher’, Nick Sorensen makes the case for the view that the very best teaching – and, indeed, the most natural form of learning – involves a flexibility, a pragmatism and a way of ‘seeing’ the discovery potential within a context that we might call improvisation.

Bringing a focus to learner curiosity as an essential element to children’s learning, the writer describes how, at their best – and both consciously and unconsciously – teachers develop an improvisational skills base with which to respond to that most powerful of learner responses.

Supported by both theory and empirical case-study evidence, he now calls for a radical shift in the way we view and enact expertise within the teaching space, arguing that an improvisational approach, rather than being an unquantifiable and thus inherently messy – even dangerous – teaching style, actually harnesses the very oldest of learning traditions: ‘trying stuff out’. It is this, he argues, that now needs to be developed to form a key element within teacher training programmes as a way of restoring a freshness and dynamism to children’s learning.

If you would like to offer a response to my book please leave a comment below. I’d be delighted to know what you think of improvisation as a form of expert teaching and how this informs your creative practice – whatever you do.

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