How Teachers Improvise: An Analysis of In-the-Moment Teaching Practice

• In Event: Expanding Theory on Teacher Noticing Through Collaborative Inquiry and Co-Design

Abstract

Objective or purpose
Mathematics teaching continues to be dominated by curriculum-driven and inflexible forms of instruction that perpetuate inequities (Louie, 2018), despite decades of research about the importance of responsiveness in teaching (Robertson et. al., 2015). In contrast, improvisation has been recognized as an important construct for responsive and equitable teaching (Kavanagh et. al., 2020; Philip, 2019). However, improvisational practices are difficult to describe and cultivate (Sawyer, 2011). This study therefore asks: what are the improvisational practices that teachers enact to disrupt dominant forms of instruction?

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
This study uses jazz as a model for conceptualizing teacher improvisation. Jazz is an improvisational discipline that values virtuosity, precision, and the creative enactment of technical knowledge and skill, which leads jazz improvisers to think and talk about their practice in detailed, rigorous, and structured ways (Berliner, 1994). Applying concepts that jazz musicians use to characterize their improvisation as a framework to analyze empirical cases of teacher improvisation can therefore help develop a similarly rigorous account of how teachers improvise.

Methods and data sources
This paper draws on data from the CoATTEND video library, in which researchers and teachers collaborated to identify critical events from classroom observations and discussed those events in video-stimulated interviews. We began by reviewing the video library and selecting videos in which improvisation was salient; criteria included unexpected events, changing plans, and in-the-moment decision making. We wrote memos re-narrating those videos using terminology from jazz improvisation and compared memos to identify practices and themes across videos (Locke et. al., 2015). Analysis then iterated between examining the videos and revising the analytic memos, with the aim of progressively refining our hypotheses about teacher improvisation (Engle et. al., 2007).

Results
Analysis indicates that teachers position themselves in a facilitation role that evokes the jazz practice of “comping”, in which a player improvises a structure (i.e., chord progressions) within which other players perform melodic improvisations (i.e., solos). In this role, teachers improvise context and circumstances that prompt and support student contributions. This secondary improvisation thereby serves to reposition students as the primary performers. This analysis also highlights teachers’ simultaneous attention to circumstances within a given moment and across time, which jazz improvisers describe as thinking vertically and horizontally. Teachers accounted for in-the-moment decisions by referring both to the details of a given event and how they envisioned it fitting in broader trajectories of learning and classroom activity.

Significance
This work illuminates the details of enacting responsive and equitable teaching in context and in the moment. For instance, developing language to describe teacher “comping” affords insight into the mechanics of facilitating student-led discourse that centers student thinking and experience (e.g., Levin et. al., 2013; Michaels et. al., 2008). Because these improvisational aspects of teaching practice are challenging to articulate, having precise language to describe them is an important resource for teacher education and professional development, and it offers an actionable alternative to procedural approaches that reproduce inequities in the classroom (Keefe & Miller, 2021).

Authors

• Ethan Rubin, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Elizabeth A. van Es, University of California - Santa Barbara