Reading Online - Articles: The Improvisational in Teaching Reading

The Improvisational in Teaching Reading

Michelle Commeyras,
with Dianne Johnson, Betty Hubbard, Lisa Irwin, Susan Leitner, Lynda Norton, Catherine Killmaster, Barbara Courtet, and Jennifer Moon Ro

Prologue

Reading clinics or centers have been established at many colleges and universities to provide assessment and instructional practice to university students enrolled in reading specialist certification or graduate programs in reading. Clinics also provide a service to children from the surrounding community who have been identified as having reading difficulties.

The following is based on my experience with eight graduate students in a reading clinic course. I chose to teach the course as one who identifies more with being a learner than an expert dispenser of knowledge. As professor, my responsibility has become primarily to guide and inspire the learning of others. I strive to learn alongside students, and in doing so I have become increasingly aware that my teaching style is improvisational.

My thinking about improvisation in teaching began when I joined an improvisational theater group several years ago. In rehearsals and in performing for audiences I learned to concentrate on being fully present in the moment and trusting that something interesting would happen among all players. At the heart of improvisation is the free play of consciousness as it emerges from the unconscious. Improvisation calls for unblocking whatever obstructs our creative processes. In this sense, we are all improvisers. Consider everyday conversation. As we talk and listen, we using underlying structures of semantic, syntactic, graphophonic, interpersonal, and cultural knowledge to create communication. Each conversation is like a piece of improvisational jazz music.

Stephen Nachmanovitch offers that “whether we are creating high art or a meal, we improvise when we move with the flow of time and with our own evolving consciousness, rather than with a preordained script or recipe” (Nachmanovitch, 1990, p. 17). In Free Play: IMPROVisATIOn in Life and Art, Nachmanovitch provides language that can be used to show the improvisational dimensions of the eight graduate students’ experiences in tutoring children in the clinic and of my experience as leader of the course. I will combine quotations from Free Play with anecdotes from the course to make the case that we should value and learn more about the improvisational in teaching reading.

Faithfulness to the moment and to the present circumstances entails continuous surrender.... Surrender means cultivating a comfortable attitude toward not knowing, being nurtured by the mystery of moments that are dependably surprising, ever fresh.

Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play, pp. 21-22

Each graduate student began her relationship with the child she was tutoring by using activities or experiences that would allow the two to become acquainted. Several tutors used magazine pictures and print to make collages about themselves to bring to the first session. In presenting her collage, each tutor let the child get a sense of who she was. It was significant that the tutor presented herself to the child first, following the assumption that this would make it easier for the child to open up in return.

Dianne, one of the tutors, wrote about the surprising results of surrendering her “exceptionally good” plans for the first tutoring session with Carlton:

Carlton was a much better reader than I expected. I knew instantly that the selection of books and activities I had chosen for us to do were [sic] inappropriate. It was then I realized that I had absolutely nothing for Carlton to do. Consequently this led to an hour of meaningful conversation. We spent time talking about our families, the places we’ve vacationed, the things we did while on vacation, and our top 10 favorite books. In just one hour I discovered a list of things Carlton enjoyed doing. They centered on the outdoors. Carlton and I headed to the library and began our learning quest. While in the library I witnessed Carlton selecting books like he was selecting ice cream.... His arms were weighed down with books on herpetology.

When the most challenging labors are undertaken from the joyous work spirit, they are play. In play we manifest fresh, interactive ways of relating to people, animals, things, ideas, images, ourselves.

Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play, p. 43

The tutors sought a collaborative teaching stance that was in tune with the individual children’s interests and personality. Two pairs of tutors and children created alphabet books. Dianne and Carlton used a different kind of snake for each alphabet letter; Lynda, another tutor, and Sharyn found the name of a famous woman for each letter. In both cases, tutor and child used a variety of books and Internet resources to find information. They took turns reading to select interesting details to include in the alphabet books, and the children practiced writing by putting the information into their own words. Dianne and Carlton collaborated in making a PowerPoint presentation of their alphabet book, taking turns inserting pictures and typing descriptive information. I think the children experienced the making of alphabet books as joyous work, more playful than what they typically experienced in school as reading instruction.

We improvise when we move with the flow of time and with our own evolving consciousness rather than with a preordained script or recipe.

Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play, p. 17

In graduate courses within a reading clinic or center, tutors administer an array of scripted assessments to learn about the specific needs and abilities of individual readers. One assessment mainstay is informal reading inventories that include prereading questions, graded word lists, retellings, comprehension questions, and timed oral or silent readings. The eight tutors I worked with gathered information using the informal Qualitative Reading Inventory and the American state of Georgia’s Basic Literacy Test. They also tried a variety of formal assessments such as the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and other reading tests. While I encouraged the eight graduate students to learn about scripted assessments, I also encouraged them to create assessment methods in response to what they needed to know about the children with whom they were working.

Susan created an assessment in response to a particular situation. The child she was working with, Karin, frequently misread words in context that she had identified correctly on word lists. Susan composed a story made of 200 high-frequency words to investigate this inconsistency in Karin’s reading of words in and out of context:

One night, Karin couldn’t sleep, so she got out of bed, stood up, and went for a walk. First she went outside, because it was still light out, although it was almost ten. It was beautiful; the sky was looking more like morning than later, as the moon was big and round. As she was looking out between the green tree on the left and the little house on the right, she saw someone that began to look like her mother, so she went behind her home to the back yard. Now she heard the sound of an animal near by, over in the plants. Perhaps it was the large dog or the black cat that lived next door. Karin stood still so that she could listen better. She wasn’t sure she wanted to find whatever this might be, and she became scared. It could be her brother; if so, he would probably get her into trouble. Just then “it” started running, although she thought it turned away from where she was trying to watch. This was not a funny game any more, and she was finally ready to rest. As it was getting really late, Karin went back inside and back to bed, where she would dream about what “it” might have been.

Karin only misread three words, and in each instance her miscue did not significantly alter the meaning.

Dianne also created an assessment, this one in response to a concern Carlton’s mother had that he could not read automatically the 220 Dolch sight words that account for 50 to 70 percent of all words used in textbooks, library books, newspapers, and magazines. I had told Carlton’s mother, who is an elementary school teacher, that I thought he was getting practice identifying common pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and verbs while working on the Web-based alphabet book. But I sensed that she was skeptical that this would be sufficient. So I conferred with Dianne and asked how she might assure Carlton’s mother that he would master the Dolch list while working on his Web-based alphabet book on snakes.

Two weeks later Dianne had created a list of phrases by combining Dolch words with words commonly associated with computer use. When she administered it to Carlton, he read the entire list with only two mistakes. His success was encouraging because he was exhibiting reading competencies in our tutoring setting that apparently were not in evidence at school.

Planning an agenda of learning without knowing who is going to be there, what their strengths and weaknesses are, how they interact, prevents surprises and prevents learning. The teacher’s art is to connect, in real time, the living bodies of the students with the living body of knowledge.

Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play, p. 20

I attempted artfulness by connecting knowledge I acquired in my personal reading life with what was currently at issue for the tutors. For example, a New Yorker magazine profile of the playwright August Wilson (Lahr, 2001) related to impassioned discussions we were having on the ethics that we sought to live by as teachers. We were concerned about a parent and her daughter who were feeling very discouraged by a classroom teacher who they said never offered an encouraging word and did not acknowledge improvements. We talked about what code of ethics guided us as teachers as we strove to support children’s self-esteem as learners. August Wilson had a teacher who did not believe in him. He responded by exiling himself from school.

At 15 years old, Wilson was a sulky student who sat at the back of the class. But he wanted to impress a teacher who ran an after-school club for students preparing for college, so he took seriously an assignment to research and write about a historical figure. He chose Napoleon and conducted thorough research. Wilson then rented a typewriter with money he had earned mowing lawns and paid his sister to type the paper.

The day after Wilson turned it in, his teacher kept him after class to show him two marks on the assignment: A+ and E. His teacher asked, “Can you prove to me that you wrote this?”

Wilson replied, “Hey, unless you call everybody in here and have all the people prove they wrote them, even the ones that went and copied out of the encyclopedia word for word, I don’t feel I should have to prove anything” (p. 56). The teacher gave Wilson the failing grade.

From that day, Wilson chose the local library over school, spending as many as 5 hours a day there. Over the next four years, he read everything -- sociology, anthropology, theology, and fiction. He discovered that he did not need anyone to teach him. Wilson recalls that he began seeing himself as a warrior, surviving unapologetically on his own terms.

The tutors agreed with me that it was fortunate that August Wilson did not internalize his teacher’s negative assessment of his integrity. And Wilson’s success today as a playwright is no doubt due in part to all the reading he did on his own.

It was also timely for me to share this article from my personal reading because it dramatically illustrated a summary of research I had recently provided on the relationship between reading outside of school and reading achievement in school. I am increasingly interested in the connections I find (or create) between my personal reading life and my teaching life. I can be a more artful teacher by being open to the serendipity of relations between my everyday reading and my everyday teaching.

We re-create the book as we read it. Reading, listening, looking at art is a matter of active response, or dialogue with the material.

Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play, p. 105

Teaching is also a matter of active response to and dialogue with our observations of and interactions with the student. Understanding a child’s reading lies in noticing details and then being specific in one’s thinking about those details. My intention as a learning guide was for the tutors to become keener observers of children and to learn how to be in dialogue with those observations. Tutors were asked to write anecdotal records to capture with detail significant moments in their tutoring sessions. To teach them what I had in mind, I offered anecdotes I wrote based on my observations of tutoring sessions. In the following example I record an instance of Stan re-creating a book as he read it:

I enter the room and Stan and Barbara are on the carpet in the corner. Stan is reading aloud. I take a seat on the carpet too. Stan is reading with adequate fluency. He pauses on the word “metallic” which Barbara helps him decode. Once he’s pronounced the word correctly he indicates understanding it by laughing softly about the sentence “the metallic clicks are driving me crazy.” Stan further demonstrates his comprehension by saying, “click, click, click.” It is this kind of spontaneous talk or action by a student that best indicates reading comprehension.

The separate beings of audience and performance can disappear, and at such moments there is a kind of secret complicity between us. We catch glimpses in each other’s eyes and see ourselves as one. Our minds and hearts move together to the rolling of the rhythm. This is more likely to happen at informal performances....

Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play, p. 101

Many of the children said that they wanted to become better oral readers. (They were in classrooms where teachers often called upon children to read aloud while the rest of the children were directed to listen and follow along.) While most out-of-school reading is done silently, we could see that for these children to feel good about themselves as readers in school, we needed to help them become readers who could perform.

Betty used a professional audio recording of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone with Brandy. Sometimes they chorally read along with tape. But when Brandy chose to read along on her own, she surprised and amused Betty by mimicking the British reader’s accent and expression. In listening to an audio version of her own oral reading, Brandy told Betty about new ideas she was getting related to pacing and phrasing that would help her read more expressively. There seemed to evolve between Brandy and Betty a kind of complicity that allowed Brandy to shed some of her shyness when reading with Betty. Sometimes in the tutoring sessions, the separate beings of teacher and student disappeared.

A creature that plays is more readily adaptable to changing contexts and conditions. Play as free improvisation sharpens our capacity to deal with a changing world.

Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play, p. 45

Teaching is a changing world. Joining in was a playful way for Susan to engage Karin in a comprehension activity that called for cutting out and pasting pictures in response to reading directions:

I had originally thought that she would enjoy this activity, but she didn’t seem interested.... [H]owever, when I offered to cut out the pictures, so that she could just paste them on, she became enthused. It appears that she liked to do activities together so that we are both participating. She seemed to really enjoy this project once we got started, sitting up straight and reading and gluing correctly.

Tutors found that the children responded with more joy when teacher and student shared or exchanged roles. Role reversal is a playful thing. For example, Lisa offered to take dictation from Shyama when she acted reluctant about writing sentences and stories. She wrote, “Shyama seemed to enjoy it when I took dictation from her. She then reread what I had written, and also help correct some of my mistakes.”

Play makes us flexible.

Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play, p. 43

One way to hold on to flexibility as an adult is to continue to find ways to be playful, as we were as children. Catherine took Ogle’s (1986) teaching strategy KWL and made it playful for her and Colin. He was enthusiastic and knowledgeable about sea creatures and reptiles. He read on these subjects with great interest, so Catherine brought him a book on sharks. When he announced that he had read it before, Catherine improvised. She asked him to recount what he knew about the book. Then she wrote questions about what she wanted to find out from the book, since she had never read it. Colin volunteered to read the book to her. She recounts, “He held the book away from him so I could see too. He made extra efforts to show the pictures to me and add details and his prior knowledge. After reading we wrote what I had learned from the book.”

Colin enjoyed sharing his expertise with Catherine, who honored his knowledge by assuming the role of learner. Colin was more motivated to reread the book because Catherine had been flexible enough to adopt the role of one wanting to learn about sharks.

Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.

Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play, p. 41

The intuitions of teachers usually become more astute with more experience. As a participant observer in the tutoring sessions, I noticed intuitive teaching. An example that I find particularly interesting occurred between Amy and Caden. Caden was doing a St. Patrick’s Day word-find activity that had been passed out to all the children by the secretary who assists with the reading clinic. I watched as Amy, Caden’s tutor, found a way to participate that heightened the educational value of an activity that is often seen as a simple game.

Amy watched carefully as Caden found and circled words in the seeming jumble of the letter grid. Amy asked questions: “How do you like to find the words? How are you looking for words? Where did your eyes go?” Amy was trying to discern Caden”s thinking processes, which were probably mostly intuitive. I also see intuition at work in the questioning Amy pursued. While Caden found it difficult to answer the questions, it still seemed important that they be asked because it encouraged Caden to think about her thinking (i.e., metacognition). The line of questioning Amy pursued was intuition in action, and it allowed the muse in her to emerge.

Mistakes are of incalculable value to us. There is first the value of mistakes as raw material of learning. If we don’t value the mistakes, we are unlikely to make anything at all.

Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play, p. 88

I introduced the value of mistakes with regard to spelling on several occasions when a tutor was testing a child. Once the child had completed writing the list of words, I intervened before simple right-or-wrong correction began. I asked the child to circle those words that he or she thought were spelled incorrectly. The child usually did not circle all the incorrectly spelled words, but did identify many of them. Then I asked the child to look more carefully at each circled word. I directed the child to underline the letters that he or she was quite sure did belong, even if the order of the letters was not certain. The child was usually very capable at identifying correct letters. Then the tutor and I were able to praise the child genuinely for knowledge of letters and spellings.

This inquiry approach to spelling created a constructive context for showing which letters were missing or misplaced. By involving the children in assessing their spelling, we were helping them recognize the knowledge they had while allowing them to learn from their mistakes and see the value in so doing.

For the sake of being accepted, we can forget our source and put on one of the rigid masks of professionalism or conformity that society is continually offering us.

Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play, p. 50

As teachers, we desire professionalism. But how can we achieve that without adopting rigid masks of conformity? My own fifth-grade report card from 1964 does little to portend that one day I would be a professor of reading education. Mr. Donahue, who taught the “pupils of above average reading ability,” reported that my performance was “average.” I showed my mediocre grades to 10-year-old Sharyn and her mother. My purpose was to reassure them that comments from Sharyn’s fifth-grade teacher that she was only average should not be viewed with undue alarm.

I wondered aloud to Sharyn’s mother how my teacher had evaluated my reading to conclude that I was average. I know that as a 10-year-old I was reading regularly outside of school for pleasure. Sharyn also liked to read outside of school. I urged her mother to concentrate on supporting that as a lifelong pursuit and to minimize pressure on Sharyn with regard to her school grades. It seems in today’s educational milieu that no child or parent feels at ease with the concept of being “average.” I wanted Sharyn’s mother to consider that we really do not know what a final grade means unless we know precisely what assessment evidence was used. It is possible that I was better than average as a 10-year-old reader, and that Sharyn is, too.

Sharyn’s tutor, Lynda, and I found understanding Sharyn as a reader far more complex than thinking in terms of average would allow. Sharyn was in some respects above grade level and in some respects below, according to the formal and informal assessments conducted. We documented specific information about her strengths in word identification and her needs with regard to vocabulary knowledge. Our overall view of Sharyn as a reader was more positive than that being reported by the Accelerated Reader program tests used at her school. (For more information on Accelerated Reader, see Labbo, 1999, online document; Topping, 1999, online document.)

Epilogue

I came across an example of the antithesis of an improvisational perspective on teaching reading in an article about a for-profit company called Advantage Schools that is running 15 charter schools across the United States (Kolbert, 2000). The highly scripted method of direct instruction, as developed by Siegfried Englemann 35 years ago at the University of Illinois, is used for teaching reading and math. Here is a description of a reading lesson that was observed at an Advantage school:

“Find lesson seventy-eight,” Stiles told the class. “Touch column one. Word one is ‘seagulls.’ What word?” He snapped his fingers.
“Seagulls!” the students answered, in unison.
“Seagulls are birds that are seen around the ocean,” Stiles went on. “They are sometimes called gulls. Word two is ‘elevator.’ What word?” He snapped his fingers again.
“Elevator!”
“Read, spell, read ‘elevator.’ Get ready.” He snapped his fingers.
“Elevator. E-l-e-v-a-t-o-r. Elevator.” (Kolbert, 2000, p. 35)

And so the lesson proceeded, with the teacher reading from a manual based on research reporting how often children need to hear a slogan before they memorize it. Advocates of this approach to teaching reading applaud that there is rarely any doubt on the children’s part about the right answer. Direct instruction requires little teacher judgment or discretion. To improvise with the scripted lesson is seen as a serious violation of the fidelity and integrity of the reading program.

The founder of the Advantage company, Steven Wilson, finds fault with schools of education for socializing teachers to apply their own creativity to a problem. Wilson thinks that this is acceptable up to a point, but finds it “psychotic” for tens of thousands of teachers to be trying to “stumble” on the “best way to teach reading” (Kolbert, 2000, p. 35). Wilson presumes, as do many others, that there is one best way to teach reading to all children. The tutors and I presume differently, as I hope has been demonstrated in the examples from our experiences working with children in the reading clinic. We do not see how a scripted method can effectively teach reading to a diverse group of students. It seems essential that we have a wide repertoire of teaching strategies that allow for individualized instruction, whether for a group of students or a single student.

In an improvisational approach to teaching reading one needs to have significant knowledge of reading as a process and of methods that have been researched and found empirically to be sound. Improvisation is about how you use that knowledge as you concentrate on being fully present in a relationship with the learner. My colleague and fellow improvisational actor Jerry Gale has written about improvisational performance as relevant for the practice of psychology. Borrowing from him (Gale, 2001), I can further explain that in addition to being relational, improvisation is also about context sensitivity, problem solving, and doing without failure or rules.

One fundamental guiding principle is the “Yes, and...?” approach. This avoids blocking creativity: You take up whatever is given by the other actor and build upon it. For example, when Colin announced that he had already read the book on sharks Catherine brought him, Catherine took a “Yes, and...?” stance when she adopted the role of someone who wanted to learn about sharks. This gave Colin the new option of becoming the teacher who reread the book so Catherine could listen for answers to her questions about sharks. Adopting a “Yes, and...?” improvisational stance in teaching avoids those disagreements and blockages that can stymie reading instruction.

References

Gale, J. (2001, August 24). Theater and performance: What they tell us about psychology. Paper presented at the annual conference of the American Psychology Association, San Francisco, CA.
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Kolbert, E. (2000, October 2). Unchartered territory: Is there money to be made off the failure of public school? New Yorker, pp. 35-41.
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Labbo, L. (1999, November). Questions worth asking about The Accelerated Reader: A Response to Topping. Reading Online. Available: www.readingonline.org/past/past_index.asp?HREF=/critical/labbo/index.html
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Lahr, J. (2001, April 16). Been here and gone: How August Wilson brought a century of Black American culture to the stage. New Yorker, pp. 50-65.
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Nachmanovitch, S. (1990). Free play: IMPROVisATIOn in life and art. New York: Penguin.
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Ogle, D.M. (1986). K-W-L: A teaching model that develops active reading of expository text. Reading Teacher, 39(6), 564-570.
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Topping, K. (1999, November). Formative assessment of reading comprehension by computer: Advantages and disadvantages of The Accelerated Reader software. ReadingOnline. Available: www.readingonline.org/past/past_index.asp?HREF=/critical/topping/index.html
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About the Author

Michelle Commeyras is an associate professor in the Department of Reading Education at the University of Georgia (Athens, USA), where she also serves as graduate coordinator. She earned her Ph.D. in education at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana and her M.A. in critical and creative thinking at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Michelle strives to bring critical inquiry and creative processes to her teaching and scholarship. Her commentary “On Choosing to Be a Literacy Animator” appeared in an earlier issue of this journal.

Contact Michelle by e-mail at michelle@coe.uga.edu.

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Citation: Commeyras, M. (2002, May). The improvisational in teaching reading. Reading Online, 5(9). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=commeyras2/index.html