Structure and Improvisation in Creative Teaching

Dr R. Keith Sawyer is internationally known as an expert in the learning sciences and in the psychology of creativity. He is editor or author of more than seventy scholarly articles and ten books, including The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (2006), Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (2006) and Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (2007).

'This book should be recommended to teachers who are willing to develop creative teaching practices and to take a constructivist teaching approach within their classrooms. It should also be recommended as a useful teachers' training handbook since it provides a key to successful creative teaching approaches that make the fixed structures of expertise productive within the everyday improvisation of classroom practices.' Tim Higgins, London Review of Education

• Foreword David Berliner; 1. What makes good teachers great? The artful balance of structure and improvisation R. Keith Sawyer; Part I. The Teacher Paradox: 2. Professional improvisation and teacher education: opening the conversation Stacy DeZutter; 3. Creativity, pedagogic partnerships, and the improvisatory space of teaching Pamela Burnard; 4. Improvising within the system: creating new teacher performances in inner city schools Carrie Lobman; 5. Teaching for creativity with disciplined improvisation Ronald A. Beghetto and James C. Kaufman; Part II. The Learning Paradox: 6. Taking advantage of structure to improvise in instruction: examples from elementary school classrooms Frederick Erickson; 7. Breaking through the communicative cocoon: improvisation in secondary school foreign language classrooms Jürgen Kurtz; 8. Improvising with adult English language learners Anthony Perone; 9. Productive improvisation and collective creativity: lessons from the dance studio Janice E. Fournier; Part III. The Curriculum Paradox: 10. How 'scripted' materials might support improvisational teaching: insights from the implementation of a reading comprehension curriculum Annette Sassi; 11. Disciplined improvisation to extend young children's scientific thinking A. Susan Jurow and Laura Creighton; 12. Improvisational understanding in the mathematics classroom Lyndon C. Martin and Jo Towers; 13. Conclusion: presence and the art of improvisational teaching Lisa Barker and Hilda Borko.