This a cross posting of an item I wrote for the "Improving Your AIMM" blog for the Advancing Inquiry in Middle Mathematics project I am part of in East Texas.

Teaching is Improvisational

I want to share what I learned while writing a chapter about using improvisational games in educational settings. Teaching in discussion-based classrooms is a lot like an improv performance. To make this comparison, in formal theater everyone has specific lines and has practiced until perfect. Everyone on stage knows how the performance will end. The audience’s task is to absorb. Contrasting that type of theater is improvisation. During improv there are rarely any props, no script and the acting team needs to listen and respond to each other to keep the act going. However, there are rules and guidelines that the acting team must follow, it’s not just a free-for-all. This comparison parallels the contrast between teaching as directive and teaching in a discussion-based lesson. And, like improv, the task and goals of a mathematics lesson form the rules that the team or class follows.

However, as the AIMM team well knows, improvisation during math lessons is a demanding task. As we have taught your students while you watch, you have observed how we have to be ready to respond authentically to students. You have all seen us struggle at times to be open to an unexpected idea or an idea that is incorrect or partially formed without shutting down the student contributions. By the way, these struggles become an important part of our follow-up discussion of the lesson, as well and the unexpected student responses.

The “yes-and…”/”yes-but…” improv game is one of my favorites for building understanding of what we need to be doing and not doing with our students during math conversations and discussions. When learning how to have these discussions, we might be tempted to respond to a student idea and say, “Yes but…” and go on to insert the correct term, or redirect the student to a more efficient way.  But what if, instead, we said, “Yes, and what else are you thinking?” or “Yes, and can we hear from another student?” or “Yes and, I like how you have used what we have learned about graphs to explain the pattern…” The object of thinking “yes, and…” is to keep the conversation going, and to be inclusive of the other players’ (students’) ideas. 

This game can be played between students in a fun way first to help them develop better, more supportive communication skills between each other. In the beginning, students can play the game using a non-mathematical context, like planning a vacation together. It is important to play the “yes, but…” scenes too so students can have a discussion about what that feels like in comparison to the “yes and…” scenes. 

The Bridging Project was a Mathematics PD that used an improvisational framework along with content sessions to develop middle school teachers understanding of mathematics argumentation (conjecturing, explaining, justifying and generalizing). The most compelling finding was that students of teachers who learned how to use improv in math class had higher academic achievement that students of teachers who did not have the training in improv. These teachers also held substantive discussions more often in their classrooms. Both sets of teachers received the same PD in content. Interestingly, teachers did not have to teach the students improv games directly (some did and some did not) as that aspect did not influence the results at all (Knudsen and Shectman, 2016). This indicates that it may be as or more important for teachers to practice and build improvisational skills when learning these new and complex discussion practices.

My chapter, Improv games in educational settings: Creative play and academic learning,

has been accepted and will soon be published in the Springer online publication, Encyclopedia

of Educational Innovation: Teaching and Learning Innovation Through Play.

I hope to have permission to share it directly with you when it is finalized. Until then, the rules of the game I highlighted here in this post are described via this link: http://www.yesandyourbusiness.com/portfolio/yes-but-yes-and/). 

References

Knudsen, J., & Shechtman, N. (2016). Professional development that bridges the gap between workshop and classroom through disciplined improvisation. Taking Design Thinking to School: How the Technology of Design Can Transform Teachers, Learners, and Classrooms, 163.