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Learner-centered interactions, whether in formal or informal settings, are by their nature unscripted and require both the educator and learner to improvise. In fact, improvisation skills have been recognized as beneficial and applied in a variety of professional development training programs (including science communication, organizational development in university administration, teambuilding and leadership in business, and communication skills in medical education); yet, their inclusion in educator training has been limited. MOXI and UCSB partnered with a professional actor and theater instructor (third author of this paper) to implement applied improvisation training to support informal educators' skills development. After four years of incorporating applied improvisation training in our facilitation training program, we have found that the basic skills of listening, observing, and responding that are critical in learner-centered education are taught effectively through the well-developed, practical, and fun exercises of improvisational theater. In this article, we describe our applied improvisation training and how it builds skills pertinent to implementing learner-centered facilitation, how graduates of our training program connected applied improvisation training to their facilitation, and how other institutions can incorporate it into preparing educators for working in either informal or formal settings.
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Using Improvisation to Increase Graduate Students’ Communication Self-Efficacy
Utilizing the foundational principals of improvisation, we developed a practicum that gives early career researchers an opportunity to practice the skills necessary to successfully communicate their work orally to both public and professional audiences. Course evaluation data indicate that students find the practicum to be an effective route to increase both confidence and self-efficacy in their communication skills. Due to the instructor’s emphasis on creating a supportive learning community, the practicum can only accommodate a small number of students each semester. To address this challenge, we developed a training institute for instructors to learn how to teach the practicum or incorporate a subset of the content into their existing courses and workshops. Similar to the practicum, we found a 2.5-day Training Institute to be an effective way to train faculty developers how to innovate and incorporate improv-based principles into their local programming.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1720415
- PAR ID:
- 10213497
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Change
- Volume:
- 52
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 0009-1383
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 46-52
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/00091383.2020.1794262
