Introduction

Teaching intelligence is the term I have coined to describe those generally undescribed and untaught skills that teachers use to facilitate learning in as effective a way as possible. These skills (if indeed they are skills) partly fall into that nebulous area of rapport, of the ability to create a good atmosphere and to cause a class to gel and the students to get on well with one another. And this area, as trainers and mentors who supervise teaching practice well know, is an area that is usually left alone because it is felt that the supervised teacher has either got `it' or has not got `it' and that `it' cannot be taught or developed. Goleman (1995) has written extensively about emotional intelligence in his book of that name. I owe a debt to him for the term `teaching intelligence' as well as to Hargreaves (1998) and his article entitled The Emotional Practice of Teaching.

In this paper, I intend to unpack teaching intelligence in order to show what I think it consists of, but before I do so, I want to describe how we do things well (and what `doing things well' means), and what gets in the way of our doing things well. In doing so, I shall refer to a number of common human activities, but above all I shall examine teaching.

How we do things well

Doing things well, whether it be driving a car, closing a door or buying a train ticket, means doing those things as appropriately or fittingly as possible. It means tailoring your behaviour as closely as possible (and only as closely as is necessary) to the needs of the situation. For example, if you are leaving a room and you do not want to wake the baby sleeping in the room you are leaving, you close the door slowly and carefully so that the door meeting the frame does not make much noise; and at the same time, you release the handle in such a way that it does not squeak or bang. But it is not necessary to take ten minutes doing this. You, more or less unthinkingly, find the right balance between achieving a reasonable degree of silence without going so far as to achieve total silence.

Fortunately, in order to achieve behaviour that is as fitting as possible, we do not usually have to consciously plan the performance every time. When you greet an acquaintance on the street in the morning with "Morning! A bit frosty, isn't it!", you are able to draw on a pattern, in this case a linguistic one - the reduced "Good morning!" does not require any effort and the pattern "It's + adjective, isn't it?", with the addition of "a bit" and the appropriate falling intonation on the question tag comes easily. One piece of the utterance that requires local knowledge - knowledge, that is, of the present circumstances - is "frosty"; another aspect of the utterance that requires local knowledge, and therefore a degree of planning, is the degree of formality. Had the person you greeted been a very good friend, you (or I at least) might have said "Hi! Bloody freezing, isn't it!"

I am not suggesting that these bits of local knowledge required any conscious thought - your `decision' to say "Morning" instead of "Hi!" would not need planning of the kind we associate with lesson planning. But what I am suggesting is that all behaviour, as in the example of greeting someone on a cold morning, is a mixture of patterns (things you have said or done many times before) and fine-tuned, contingent reactions to the moment. When I talk or write about this, I always give the example of putting your trousers on. Those of us who wear trousers have put them on many times and have an automatic routine for doing so. It was learned as a child, with difficulty at first, but proceduralisation soon caused it to become automatic. However, local circumstances will cause you to adjust the way in which you do it. If you begin to lose your balance as you are putting them on, you will adjust your basic pattern to fit the new circumstances, just as I have adjusted my frequently used example of trouser-putting-on to suit the local environment of this particular paper for novELTy.

Let me now move back to the example of conversational behaviour before finally arriving at teaching. van Lier (1996) says "conversations are locally assembled rather than pre-planned" (p. 169). You cannot go into an informal conversation with a fixed plan of what you are going to say and how you are going to say it. If you did, you would soon lose your friends and might even end up in an institution. All conversations, outside the foreign language learning classroom are contingent. However, whilst agreeing with van Lier, I would add that our ability to take part in conversations successfully depends on pre-planning in a different sense. First, there is a kind of sociolinguistic pre-planning: we have 'done' conversations many times before so we have a kind of outline or blueprint of how they tend to work, even if this pattern is tacit and unarticulated. And we make use of a large number of linguistic patterns we have used or encountered before - whether these are traditional grammar `structures' or lexical phrases or discourse patterns or suprasegmental patterns is not relevant to my argument. What matters for this paper is simply that the patterns are there: we make use of chunks and frameworks that we are familiar with, and we fine-tune them to fit the moment.

And that, of course, is what I think we do with teaching. We plan in varying degrees of detail: if we are being observed for examination purposes, we produce a detailed plan, whereas an experienced teacher will often only have an outline in her head. We make use of all manner of patterns during the lesson - previously used activities, techniques and routines (some of which we may well be unaware of) which enable us to teach long hours, week after week, without having to constantly plan fresh lessons every time. But we adjust those patterns, both before the lesson, when planning, and during the lesson, from moment to moment, in response to the action. And this is the best sort of teaching, what Shuy (quoted in Eisner, 1991) calls `responsive teaching', "closer to conversational dialogue, a two-way communication mode with both parties initiating topics, changing the direction of the lesson and relating it to their own lives" (p. 147).

So, to recap, we do things well - that is, as appropriately and fittingly as possible - by drawing from a vast store of patterns acquired from experience and by adjusting those patterns to suit the moment, to fit the local circumstances. A part of this ability may be intuitive and a part may be conscious. van Manen (1991) lists four types of reflection and these, I think, are pertinent here. The first is anticipatory reflection - conscious planning, reflecting into the future. The second is active or interactive reflection - this is intuitive, spur of the moment decision-making based on rapid, unconscious reflection. The third is mindfulness, where you actually have time to reflect in the heat of the classroom moment, and then consciously respond as appropriately as possible. And the last is what we all associate reflection with - recollective reflection, where we look back at a lesson or an incident in a lesson, and plan for the future as a result of that recollection. And this type of reflection neatly ties in with the first.

What gets in the way of appropriate performance?

Two large things get in the way of appropriate performance. Firstly, insufficient knowledge prevents us from doing something well. I speak no Hungarian so it is difficult for me to converse effectively in Hungarian. Someone whose English is limited would have difficulty in teaching English well. A speaker at a conference who had not discovered that the audience was made up solely of primary teachers might not deliver a fitting paper.

Secondly, over-routinised behaviour gets in the way of effective performance. This is particularly so with teaching. It is very easy, when you are teaching long hours and have been teaching for a number of years, to fall back on routine and pattern too much, to rely on tried and tested procedures without thinking about whether they are in fact suitable for this class, at this time, on this day. "Oh! I'll do that activity! It went well last time;" or "Oh! I'll just do the next unit in the coursebook". Both of these common and very understandable approaches to a lesson hold in them the seeds of inappropriate and ineffective teaching. They are all right if they are accompanied by the contingent fine-tuning I mentioned above. But without that fine-tuning, the teaching is likely to be brittle and ill-matched to the students' needs.

Teaching intelligence: What is it?

One of the many things that contribute to a teacher's ability to teach well is teaching intelligence. van Manen (1991) uses the word `tact' to describe most of the ground I cover with my term `teaching intelligence'. van Manen talks of tact as "instantly knowing what to do, an improvisational skill and grace in dealing with others. Someone who shows tact seems to have the ability to act quickly, surely, confidently and appropriately in complex or delicate circumstances" (p. 125). Tactful teaching is a large part of teaching intelligence. It seems to involve the following:
 

• being personally present. By this, I mean that the teacher needs to be completely with and in the moment. She cannot afford to daydream, nor can she afford to teach on automatic pilot. Only if she is personally present can she fine-tune effectively.
• being open - not being over-planned. Lessons unfurl in unexpected ways and a teacher needs to be ready to go with the flow or to go against the flow, regardless of what she planned. But at the same time, a teacher needs to be sufficiently prepared. If a teacher is open, she is more likely to avoid mechanical, over-routinised teaching.
• getting the tone right. By this, I mean both the teacher's tone of voice and the overall tone of the class - the mood and the ambience. And the first meaning of `tone' feeds the second: the quality and use of the teacher's voice influences the mood of the class.
• having genuine interest. This ties in with being personally present. Genuine interest in students and what they say (not just how they say it) is a key part of teaching intelligence. This also applies to students - their interest in one another and in the teacher.
• having a sense of humour and a sense of fun. I do not mean that the teacher has to be good at telling jokes. Rather, teachers should be able to encourage humour and fun, to create the potential for lightness and enjoyment in class, when appropriate, and to allow students to do the same.
• being on good form. Again, this ties in with being personally present - it is difficult to be personally present and showing genuine interest if you are not on good form.
• being confident - but not over-confident
• being calm and relaxed - but alert at the same time.

It is no coincidence that these attributes are also the attributes of someone who is good at relating to others. After all, a large part of our classroom management skills (which include establishing and maintaining rapport) are skills we display outside the classroom. van Manen says that a tactful teacher has "the sensitive ability to interpret inner thoughts, understandings, feelings and desires of (students) from indirect clues such as gestures, demeanour, expression and body language" (p. 125). These are the very skills we find in someone who is good at relating to others outside the classroom as well as inside.

Another aspect of teaching intelligence, related to being on good form, being present and being relaxed but alert, is the ability to be `in flow'. Flow has been described in detail by Csikszentmihalyi (1990) but for a short, clear account of it, I turn to Goleman (1995):
 

Flow is a state of self-forgetfulness, the opposite of rumination and worry: instead of being lost in nervous preoccupation, people in flow are so absorbed in the task at hand that they lose all self-consciousness, dropping the small preoccupations of daily life . Paradoxically, people in flow exhibit a masterly control of what they are doing, their responses perfectly attuned to the changing demands of the task People seem to concentrate best when the demands on them are a bit greater than usual, and they are able to give more than usual. If there is too little demand on them, people are bored. If there is too much for them to handle, they get anxious. Flow occurs in that delicate zone between boredom and anxiety (pp. 103-104).

Obviously, we cannot always be in flow, but I would suggest that awareness of that "delicate zone between boredom and anxiety" and of the need to avoid the easy and to seek out the demanding, the challenging (if only slightly), is a part of teaching intelligence.

Two other important aspects of teaching intelligence are rhythm and timing. An effective teacher both plans a lesson with an awareness of rhythm - a variety of activities, changes in pace and focus - and reacts as the lesson progresses, altering activity, pace and focus either consciously and instinctively. And an effective teacher seems to have, or to develop, an intuitive sense of timing, knowing how many minutes there are left, adjusting activities to suit the time remaining and planning with an acute awareness of how long each stage of the lesson will take.

Developing teaching intelligence

The first step teachers and trainers must take to develop teaching intelligence is to defamiliarise. Much of what we do in class has become so familiar that we no longer really notice it: we see it, are a part of it, but we do not consciously notice it. We need to raise our conscious awareness of what we do and how we do it. And I would suggest that much of what we do well - many of the skills of effective teaching practitioners falls into this category of invisible behaviour, performance that we do not really notice - aspects of teaching intelligence.

Many years ago, I came across these words in the Guardian Educational Supplement: "The assumption is that trainee teachers will pick up good methods by osmosis. But often a trainee does not know what to look for. It is very difficult to analyse what makes a lesson go well. A lot of it is based on routines built up over time. It is important for experienced teachers to get into the habit of articulating what they do." And the teacher who spoke these words gave the example of how experienced teachers can anticipate trouble coming from a particular student or group of students and will be able to nip that trouble in the bud. But it will be difficult for her to explain what signs she saw - how she handled the situation. You could argue that this kind of skill - surely an aspect of teaching intelligence- can only be learned through experience. But I think that we must look for short cuts to acquiring this kind of tacit knowledge of classroom skills. We need to defamiliarise our own skills - to bring them to the surface so that we can talk about them and share them with trainees.

Whether we are teachers on a course, pre-service or in-service, or teachers who, individually or in a small group, are trying to develop their practice outside a course, we need to examine our practice so that we see it afresh. First of all, we need to be aware of what these areas are - and teachers and trainers can draw on my list in this paper and add to it, alter it or reduce it. Then we need to look at our own teaching (by means of audio- or video-recording or through observation, ideally by peers) and at other examples of teaching, in order to identify instances of teaching that illustrate teaching intelligence: for example, the use of voice or gesture or instances of effective or less effective handling of situations that required rapid, unplanned responses or examples of effective or less effective rhythm in a lesson. It really does not matter whether the moments selected for observation and discussion are effective or not: what matters is that the teacher or teachers watching can see the importance of whatever aspect of teaching intelligence is involved (and it will nearly always be more than one: it is very difficult to use one aspect at a time!) and then think and talk about both why the moment was effective or less effective and what that teacher could have done to improve the moment.

Secondly, after viewing lessons or extracts of lessons with teaching intelligence in mind, teachers or trainers then need to think of ways in which the skills that make up teaching intelligence can be developed. Some will object at this point and say that these are aspects of personality that cannot be changed, but I disagree with this attitude. I believe very strongly that teachers can improve these skills, once awareness of their central importance has been raised.

Above all, teachers need to spend more time developing their skills as communicators by attending workshops on voice, on drama and on storytelling. If teachers are on a course, then these should be a part of the course. If teachers are pursuing their own development, for example in self-help groups, they should identify their interest and/or weakness and seek out a course or workshop that will help them. Alternatively, they can find and read relevant texts and help themselves. For example, in the area of voice, Maley (2000) gives plenty of practical ideas for both developing voice and for protecting our voices. He also recommends further reading and useful addresses. This book is an excellent starting point both for individuals to pursue voice development and for trainers to build voice into training courses.

As a profession, we have a great deal to learn from other feeder fields, one of which is the theatre. We should examine what takes place at Schools of Speech and Drama and in theatre workshops and import some of their approaches and techniques. An early example of a book that drew on the theatre is Maley and Duff's (1978) Drama techniques in language learning. This, and other ELT books that promote drama techniques in the classroom, can be used by teachers in training as a way of loosening teachers up and improving their skills in using body language, voice and facial expression to both convey meaning and develop rapport in the class, at the same time as helping them to develop specific classroom techniques.

Role-play is another area that can be used fruitfully. First of all, teachers may want to learn how to use role-play as a classroom technique. And secondly, teachers and trainers can use role-play as a means of heightening awareness of our need to constantly think on our feet and to respond instantly to whatever comes our way in class. We do this constantly in life outside the classroom - responding to the here and now, with no time for careful planning - and we all do with varying degrees of "success". This skill can be worked on and developed through role-plays on a training course.

I am not for a moment reducing the importance of the focus on teaching techniques on training courses. These will always remain the backbone of courses and teachers outside courses will always be on the look out for new recipes and tips to refresh their teaching. But the areas I have looked at in this paper, under the heading `Teaching Intelligence', are the heart and lungs of teaching and they are neglected at peril. It is time for them to be re-examined and re-introduced (or introduced for the first time?) both on training and development courses and in the minds of individual teachers outside courses so that both our teaching can remain effective and we can remain interested and healthy. After all, teaching is a wearying business, full of repetition and hard work: we must do all we can to take the weariness out of it and to keep ourselves fit, happy and genuinely involved. By focussing attention on these areas, I believe we can do both of these things.

Notes

1. This is a revised version of a paper presented at the 10th IATEFL-H conference in Budapest in October 2000. [back]

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper & Row.
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam Books.
Hargreaves, A. (1998). The emotional practice of teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 14, 835-853.
Maley, A. (2000). The language teacher’s voice. Oxford: Macmillan Heinemann.
Maley, A. & Duff, A. (1978) Drama techniques in language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eisner, E. (1991). The enlightened eye: Qualitative enquiry and the enhancement of educational practice. New York: Macmillan.
van Lier, L. (1996). Interaction in the language curriculum. London: Longman.
van Manen, M. (1991). The tact of teaching: The meaning of pedagogical thoughtfulness. New York: The State University of New York Press.