Not all forms of teacher development feel alive.
Some feel like information delivery. Others feel like compliance. Very few feel like genuine growth.

Performative pedagogy, and the Community Forum approach that sits within it, offers something different. It reminds us that teacher learning is not linear. It moves in loops. It expands, contracts and grows through repetition, experimentation and shared imagination. It is less about content and more about connection.

More than anything, it is about community.

Over the past few years, I have seen how teachers respond when they are invited to engage with their work in embodied, creative and relational ways. When they move beyond talking about their challenges and begin exploring those challenges through story, image and re-enactment. When they stop performing for an evaluator and start rehearsing for reality alongside peers who understand the same daily pressures.

This approach is not simple, and it is not always comfortable. It asks for a shift in mindset.

It asks us to:

• Move from expert-driven delivery to co-created inquiry
• Allow space for vulnerability and emotion in professional settings
• Build institutional cultures that support participation rather than passive attendance

But the rewards are unmistakable.

When teachers reflect together, act together and imagine together, several things happen:

• They feel genuinely seen and heard
• They regain a sense of agency over their practice
• They discover solutions that emerge from the group rather than from a slide deck

These moments of shared insight are not small. They often change how teachers relate to learners, to colleagues and to themselves.

What We Have Learned

Across countless workshops and forums, four principles stand out:

1. Teaching is embodied, relational and performative. Community Forums make space for the full reality of teaching, not just the cognitive side.
2. Facilitation matters. Effective facilitators create safety, curiosity and collective ownership rather than directing or correcting.
3. Stories, images and re-enactments reveal what discussion alone cannot. They allow us to understand our dilemmas at a deeper and more emotional level.
4. Learning is most powerful when it is social and sustained. A community of practice is not an optional extra. It is the engine of growth.

Looking Ahead

The practices described here are not step-by-step instructions. They are adaptable frameworks that you can reshape for your own context. Whether you work in a school, a training centre, a university or a community space, performative pedagogy invites you to rethink your role.

Instead of transmitting information, you become someone who cultivates dialogue.
Instead of delivering answers, you help create the conditions for shared insight.
Instead of standing at the front, you help hold a circle.

This work is part of a broader shift in education. A shift toward approaches that honour experience, creativity and human connection. A shift that recognises the emotional reality of teaching. A shift that invites teachers to learn in the same meaningful, embodied ways we hope our learners will.

This is not an ending. It is a beginning.

If this resonates with you, consider this an open invitation.
The Performative ELT community is a growing global space where teachers explore embodied approaches, share practice, collaborate on research and learn through the same creative processes described here. It is for teachers who want development that feels meaningful, human and alive.

You are warmly welcome to join us and be part of shaping what comes next.