Learning to Bridge, Bridging to Learn
Note: this essay first appeared in a compilation called “The First Three Minutes,” assembled by Dr. Steve Seidel and members of the 2017–2018 cohort of the Arts In Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
As a theatre artist, I trained in the art of games — games to build trust, games to release inhibitions, games to energize, games to activate the imagination. The games were there to cultivate the acuteness of the physical, mental, and emotional capacities that would be needed when our selves were both artist and artwork. We called them “warm-ups.”
When I was younger, directors and teachers would lead these warm-ups for us. After all, they had skills and tools to pass on. We would stretch our cheeks with “Lion Face, Lemon Face,” chew on invisible donuts, and yell out “KOOJA!” When I arrived at my first acting class sophomore year of college, our teacher told us that we would be leading our own warm-ups. Each day somebody different would write up an activity and teach it to the class. One day, two classmates were leading the popular improv game “Bang!” (an exercise in reaction time) and my teacher, Ann, stopped us to comment on the activity. She directed us to think about the students who were getting “out” and how this meant that some people were losing the opportunity to continue warming up.
Ann knew that games do not automatically lead to learning; they need to be designed and led with intention. Just as actors warm-up before a performance, learners (and the learning community) must find purposeful ways to plug in, turn on, and engage before diving in to the task that requires their full physical, mental, and emotional selves.
In my early years as a teaching artist, I moved beyond the notion that all one needed to do was begin with a compelling game. Instead, I thought about warm-ups as priming. I had studied backwards curriculum design — the idea that we “begin with the end in mind” — and planned my warm-ups carefully. For instance, I knew that if we were going to be working in gesture that day, it would be useful for me to include a gesture warm-up: to talk about what it is, and give learners some room to play and experiment in that form.
I still think this is good design, but it doesn’t always work out. Sometimes, when I try to “prime” a warm-up for a particular class session, I find that the activity is not right for that particular group at that particular moment. For example, while my planned warm-up may have been about enhancing focus, it turns out that the group is already focused! When this happens, I question whether warm-ups can really be planned at all, or whether they need to be selected at the exact moment that the group’s energy can be identified — and chosen accordingly. But this, too, can have its complications. I’ve spent many stubborn moments trying to lead an energy-shift warm-up for a group whose energy was just so firmly-rooted that it would have been better to say “yes, and” to what I was being given and turn my curiosity toward the way this unexpected dynamic might impact the day’s learning.
Most recently, I have come to think of warm-ups as a bridge: as an invitation that guides the learner from the chaos of the outside world to the slightly-more-controlled chaos of the learning environment. The first three minutes of a learning experience are an opportunity to transition learners across that bridge:
From I to we.
From being to doing.
From free to focused.
(Or from focused to free.)
The bridge model recognizes that we are all coming from somewhere when we enter the learning environment, and that to become fully present, we have to cross over into a different way of being. Knowing how to build the bridge requires careful listening: both to your own curiosity and expertise as teacher, and to the desires of your learners.
Maybe I thought the bridge was going to be one thing, and it turns out we need to take a detour to get where we want to go. The bridge model doesn’t mean we have to leave all our questions and anxieties and quirks outside the classroom; we can take them with us. But we do have to gather them up and carry them — so to speak — so that they can travel with us across the bridge.
If warm-ups are a bridge, then we are somewhere different when we arrive in the space of learning. Not better, worse, or even changed; just different. And whether these warm-ups are games, rituals, conversations, or check-ins, the bridge must be built sturdily, and in tandem — between teacher and learner.
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