What Instructors Can Learn From Improv

Suzy Gorman

Creative people bring fresh insights to difficult problems. They cope with uncertainty and change. They build new things. They are equipped to succeed at work and in their lives more broadly.

Here’s the good news for colleges: While creativity is often seen as an innate ability, experts say it’s a skill that can be taught. A growing number of colleges are making a point of developing students’ creativity, often in the form of a signature program in which they tackle an open-ended problem as an interdisciplinary team.

Several of those models are featured in “The Creativity Challenge,” a new report I wrote for Chronicle Intelligence that examines the importance of creativity, what colleges are already doing to foster that ability in students, and the obstacles they face in making such training widely available. (You can buy a copy of the report here in the Chronicle Store.) The report offers insights for college leaders — and for individual professors, too.

That’s because cultivating students’ creativity, experts say, shouldn’t be seen as an optional add-on to the college experience. Ultimately, it’s about how students are taught in every discipline. That’s the argument made by Keith Sawyer, a professor of education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies creativity and learning.

To help students become more creative, Sawyer argues, instructors must shift away from “instructionism,” in which students absorb information and parrot it back to professors, to a mode he calls “guided improvisation,” in which instructors provide just enough support to students as they tackle open-ended problems. That approach requires educators “to be in a mind-set where you’re open and receptive and listening to each of the students,” Sawyer says. That allows instructors to “respond in the moment, in an improvisational way.”

Sawyer, a jazz pianist, began studying improv theater in graduate school. In his 2019 book The Creative Classroom: Innovative Teaching for 21st-Century Learners, he describes how the same principles that facilitate a successful improv performance can be used in another setting in which a group of people collaborate to create something: the classroom. While most of the book’s examples concern elementary- and secondary-school classrooms, Sawyer says its lessons apply just as well in higher ed.

Guided improvisation, Sawyer writes, helps students develop what he calls “creative knowledge” of a subject — the kind of deep understanding that allows them to remember and transfer what they have learned, and use it to make something new.

Here are a few of those improv techniques:

Yes, And

In improv, Sawyer writes, actors are supposed to do two things every time they speak: “Accept what was proposed by the previous actor, and build on it by adding something new.” That, he writes, is “the most important rule of improvisation.” It propels a scene forward, and allows the actors to work together to create something new.

How does that apply in a classroom? Instructors often feel compelled to correct students’ mistakes and misunderstandings. After all, they want to ensure that students learn the right answer. But rather than simply correcting, Sawyer says, “it’s more effective pedagogy if you meet students where they are, and help them start with what they just said and then improvise from there.”

Research shows that students learn material better when they’re helped along from a wrong answer to the right one — an approach that allows them to understand why the right answer is correct.

No Denial

This related rule tells actors not to reject another actor’s contribution to a scene.

Instructors working to facilitate a class discussion usually avoid rejecting students’ contributions outright, Sawyer writes. But denial can take subtle forms. A professor might accept what a student said, but then immediately pivot rather than engage with an unexpected comment. That’s a missed opportunity to meet students where they are.

Instead of responding, in such moments, with a comment like “That’s very good, Susan. OK, let’s turn to our next problem,” Sawyer writes, an instructor can have a back-and-forth with the student, linking her idea to what has already been discussed and then connecting it with the point of the lesson.

Don’t Ask Questions

In improv, Sawyer writes, actors are told not to ask questions because doing so would limit the possibilities available to the next actor.

Sawyer doesn’t actually argue that professors shouldn’t ask any questions at all in class. But he does warn them away from “known-answer” questions, which might test students’ knowledge but don’t teach them anything new. Still, he writes, teachers tend to like such questions: They give an instructor control and keep lesson plans on track while still providing some chance for students to participate.

Sometimes instructors pose questions that seem open-ended, but they are in fact seeking a particular answer. That doesn’t count. In the book, Sawyer recounts a time when a teacher asked, “What can you tell me about a Bunsen burner, Alan?” The question seems open, but it turned out that the teacher was looking for a specific response about luminous and nonluminous flames.

A really good question, Sawyer writes, “asks students to think deeply and explain what they’re thinking and doing.” In the book, he illustrates that idea by describing how a preschool teacher who disagreed with a student’s interpretation of a story asked an open-ended follow-up question — “Why can’t he decide for himself what kind of wings he wants?” — that sought to help the student examine her initial response without shooting it down.

Asking that kind of question requires an instructor to give up some control. When he or she does that, Sawyer writes, students can join the instructor in a “collaborative, exploratory, and improvised discussion.”