Hilton Als, writing in the May 5th issue of The New Yorker, observes: "...the best actors understand that it's the accidents, the sudden improvisations and flights of fancy, that can make a performance real, or transcendental..." 

The same is true for education, and for learning more widely. The syllabus and the lesson plan may be the script, but if so -- it is the performance that animates the schematic, makes the data dance.

Keith Sawyer, David C. Berliner, Lisa Barker, and Carrie Lobman, each make valuable points about teaching as a performative art, improvisation and creativity in the classroom, and the relationship between teaching/learning and performance generally.

More's the pity then that we regularly discipline educators who bounce over their lines, who stumble during rehearsal, who go off script. I think we should trust educators -- and all learners! -- to know the difference between an error of incompetence or a malicious oversight and the inadvertent arabesque that leads to insight. We applaud the latter elsewhere, and likewise the deliberate foray into the unknown.

Let us take the reasoned risk of theater within the classroom -- so we discover deeper lessons than those we thought we had fastened to the pages of the book.

Daniel Rabuzzi is Executive Director at Mouse.