I just spent three wonderful days at the conference “The Art and Science of Improvisation in Teaching.” My visit to the University of Stord, Norway, was sponsored by a project funded by the Norwegian Research Council, “Improvisation in Teacher Education.” I was honored to be invited to give the keynote talk, because the project was inspired by my 2011 book Structure and Improvisation in Creative Teaching. 
I published this book to argue that good teaching is always creative and improvisational. That it’s impossible to “script” teachers. That if policy makers try to overly control teaching, then students won’t learn much. I’m a learning scientist, so I grounded my argument in scientific studies, and in well-proven recommendations for effective teaching.
What’s really exciting about the book is that it shows how we can prepare teachers for this kind of teaching. Each chapter is written by a different teacher educator, who is using improvisation in their teacher education classes. These chapters are important because it’s really hard to teach students to learn in a creative way. You need a high level of professional expertise and improvisational ability. What makes it even harder is that teacher improvisations are always guided by structures that are important to effective teaching–curricular sequences, research-grounded learning trajectories, and government-mandated learning outcomes and assessments.
The Norwegian research project is driven by music educators, who are studying new ways to teach improvisational music performance. Then, they’re going to use this research to enhance teacher education in all subjects. It’s a brilliant group of scholars, and I look forward to the results of their research.
The Creativity Guru 