Putting the Human Centre Stage

Practical theatre techniques to develop teacher presence, rapport and a positive classroom community

This practical handbook focuses on the hidden skills within your teaching repertoire. Develop, reflect on, and improve these skills, enriching your practice in the process.

It focuses on a teacher’s interpersonal skills, classroom presence, classroom atmosphere and group dynamics, teacher’s voice, non-verbal communication, the general affective aspects of teaching, motivation, rapport, teacher’s energy and motivation, improvisation, and preparing for the unexpected.

This book will:

prompt you to reflect on your approach
encourage you to build a positive classroom community
enrich your teaching.
There is support for the knowledge and skills-based approaches that currently exist. However, in Putting the Human Centre Stage Mark Almond argues for more of a practical emphasis on hidden skills which many teachers and trainers deem ‘unteachable’. He demonstrates that they are teachable, backing this assertion up with theory and research. Most importantly, he includes a wide range of practical activities that can be done individually by teachers or used by teacher trainers in a classroom training situation.

Putting the Human Centre Stage consists of two parts. First, Almond covers the theoretical underpinnings of this book. Drawing on research, he critically argues that there needs to be more of a focus on being a teacher rather than the what or how. In the second part, he puts the theory into practice. This section is full of exercises, activities and lesson ideas in a recipe format. These will help you to develop or improve teacher presence and classroom rapport, and build a positive classroom community. These activities are all suitable for individual teachers. Many will be suitable for teacher trainers and managers involved in professional development or in running formal teacher training programmes.