Teachers First!: Learning and Teaching with a Play Mindset
This paper highlights insights from ongoing research that focuses on shifting in-service teachers’ mental models to what we have dubbed a Play Mindset by introducing them to improvisation games and Playback theatre techniques. Teachers become students who adopt a culture of play in a collaborative learning environment with clear rules, where they learn to listen deeply, respect each other, become curious, take chances, make mistakes and discover new ways to learn together playfully while creating a supportive classroom climate. From session to session, teachers adapt these techniques to their own classroom settings, write reflections upon them and report upon successes and failures, and most important of all, keep playing. This method places the teachers first.
