Teaching Improv

It was my first day teaching today, and I think it went so well! I have such a great group of students that didn’t seem to resist transitioning to me as teacher. We did some warm ups, took some notes (using the smart board Notebook and a much more condensed version of her notes), and then played improv games. I wasn’t quite sure if I was taking over today because of all of the snow days, but I had enough prepared just in case. The kids seemed to like my approach to lecturing/note taking and volunteered answers and came up to the board willingly.

The best part was I lucked out with the improv games I chose to do this morning. I’d originally planned to do the dating game, questions, then what are you doing, but my cooperating teacher suggested switching dating game and what are you doing. Thank goodness she did! I was nervous about what are you doing at first because I couldn’t quite remember the rules. I started them out with the most basic version of what I remembered. As they played, I remembered more rules. So I wound up building steps of difficulty in the game. The final step really required the students to build structure – the focus of the day. They really saw how much more interesting an improv scene can be when they have structure. Then during the questions game they learned how difficult it can be when you ask questions on stage (one of their “don’t”s is asking questions). Some of the students began to incorporate structure into their rounds, and all of the students stayed engaged. They left the class knowing what I wanted them to know (I think!). All in all, a successful day of teaching!