We recently saw a show at the Alliance Theatre from the Second City acting group. It had an extremely long title (something about peaches dropping and rolling everywhere), but I'm not going to bother with that right now. Part of the show was scripted and part was all improv. Although the show was overall very enjoyable, the best part was definitely the improv. It was fun to see the actors make up hilarious situations on the spot.
The whole point of the grant Toby got is to figure out how to use what we are seeing in the theater in our own classrooms. Naturally, I had no idea what to do. I thought about using improv techniques to teach indirect characterization or to have students imagine a character from a book in a new situation while still retaining the character's traits.
Both of these ideas seemed profoundly lame.
Today, however, Randy from Dad's Garage came and spoke to us while we workshopped at ASC today, and he gave us several, useful ways we can incorporate improv in our classrooms. The one I'm most excited about is the story telling one word at a time. Here is an example:
Person 1: The
Person 2: cat
Person 1: ate
Person 2: some
Person 1: Doritos
Person 2: and
Person 1: then
Person 2: barfed
Person 1: it
Person 2: all
Person 1: up.
As you can see, it's not exactly great or intellectual story-telling, but it can help students think creatively and get them to think critically about how stories are told (and incorporate exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution in their own works). I'm leaving today hopeful and excited about using improv techniques in my own classroom.
I, too, am excited about these improv techniques. 1 thing we discussed that I'm superexcited about is the way improv can help with ideation skills. Just a few days after our workshop I had to administer the mock writing test to my 10th graders, and I was inundated with "I don't know what to write about." Or, they came up with a topic, but they couldn't think of reasons to support their opinion or examples for those reasons or counterarguments they would need to refute. I'm not sure if practicing ideation with improv exercises will improve their ideation in writing persuasive essays, but I really want to give it a try. This Friday, I will have my students write another persuasive essay, but before we do, I will pair them up for the one word at a time story activity. We may even try that paired activity with the disaster scenario. I'm excited to see if it makes any difference.
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