The Developing Teachers Fellowship Program: Exploring the Use of Improv Theatre for the Professional Development of Inner City Teachers

"In a cultural climate where education is narrowly focused on the acquisition of knowledge and skills, an important question for many teachers, teachers educators, and researchers is how can educators fulfill those requirements and still relate to their students as learners - as people who are not just the passive recipients of knowledge, but who are active creators and developers of their lives and their learning. Is it possible for teachers to maintain a focus on the development of their students as creative, inquiring social learners, and still function within the confines of traditional school settings?"

This paper, presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, responds to that question through a case study of one attempt to bring creative development into urban public school classrooms in the United States.

Specifically, Carrie Lobman explores a programme that provides teachers with training in an improvisational approach to teaching and learning. This approach is grounded in the educational theories of Lev Vygotsky, which centre around the concept of the zone of proximal development (hereafter, "zpd"). Lobman describes zpd as "the activity of people creating environments where children (and adults) can take risks, make mistakes, and support each other to do what they do not yet know how to do....The 'more developed' partners do not create the zpd so that the 'less developed' child can learn - the zpd is created by the improvised activity of its participants....The activity of creating the zpd, of creating the environment for learning, is inseparable from the learning that occurs."

In this framework, the focus shifts away from an emphasis on the products of learning (outcomes) toward the actual process of creating learning environments. As Lobman explains, improvisation has been identified as a strategy for helping teachers organise themselves and their students to "collectively create an emergent scene or story building off of each other's ideas and suggestions....Because improv is about taking risks, thinking outside the box, listening, and working collaboratively, it is effective in creating environments where teachers and students are able to go beyond what they already know, and learn and develop in new ways." Lobman cites research findings that have explored this understanding of teaching as a form of improvised performance or "pretend play". In general, these studies have found that, "when teachers improvised together they became better listeners, engaged their fear of losing or giving up control, and became more collaborative in their work with each other and with the children....In addition, the teachers in these studies introduced improv to their students in the form of games and activities that supported team-building in the classroom. Participants spoke of being able to use improv activities to organize the children to be more supportive and helpful to each other and this then allowed the teacher to focus more on the learning needs of individual children."

To explore this phenomenon in greater depth, Lobman details a study of the Developing Teachers Fellowship Program (DTFP), which is a project of the East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy in New York City (NY, United States). As part of DTFP, 11 experienced inner-city public school teachers (all women) from pre-k through high school are participating in an intensive year-long training in improvisational teaching and learning that includes bi-weekly workshops and monthly on-site supervision in their classrooms.

The remainder of the paper examines the shape of this programme in detail. In brief, the Fellows meet every other week for a 3-hour workshop which is itself "fluidly improvisational. For example, while the session may start with an improv warm-up activity like Slow Motion Movement, this can easily lead into a philosophical conversation about the relationship between individuals and the group, and this could then transform into a supervisory discussion about an incident in a Fellow's classroom. The content of the workshops is emergent." It is also described here as fluid: "[R]ather than teaching them 'seven steps to a supportive, playful environment' we approach that goal by inviting them to create such an environment with us and each other. Our understanding is that, while there is no guarantee of how they will make use of their development, if they themselves grow they will be in a better position to support their students to grow." In addition, each of the Fellows is assigned a mentor who visits their assigned Fellow once a month and also creates a context for their Fellows to be able to talk to each other and to their mentor in between workshops.

Lobman provides several illustrations of how the process of creating an improv laboratory can work - both within the workshop sessions and later, in the classroom. She describes the experience of one Fellow named Maria with improvising with content through the following games:

• "What if" (which Maria experimented with in the workshop setting) - As part of this game, performers create a scene about an historical event. The game begins with everyone (audience and performers) brainstorming all of what they remember about the event and then the ensemble begins performing it as an improvised scene. After the performers have established the scene, the director stops the action and asks the audience to make a suggestion for what might have happened next. The topic Maria chose to focus on was colonisation, and the story she used was Cortez's landing in the Yucatan and his meeting with the Aztec King Montezuma. The first time the Fellows performed the scene Maria gave a lot of direction that focused on the content of the story. Maria said that with her own students she felt equally concerned about letting them improvise and was worried that they would not learn the right material or get the right message. This led to a discussion about the difference between directing theatrically and directing as a teacher. "When the scene was re-performed one of the things we discovered was that with theatrical direction the performers actually were able to use the content more than when they were being reminded of it....During the course of the What if activity everyone, audience members and performers, learned something about the meeting of Montezuma and Cortez. It was not necessary for the scene to stick with the historical accounting for the participants to learn the 'facts' of what happened in such a way that they could recall them on a test."
• "The History Bus" - Maria's class created a "bus" with 8 passengers and one driver's seat in the center of the room. To begin the activity Maria made index cards with the names of some of the historical figures they had studied; each of the 8 students chose a card, working with a team of 3-4 other students to review the history of this character and generate ideas on how this character might act on a bus. Maria explains, "[t]o remind the students to stay in character, I made the bus driver a Renaissance courtier, a character that many students were familiar with. Despite what the historical passenger said/did to the courtier, his job was to be the consummate gentleman. As the figures entered the bus, it was interesting to see their depth of understanding, even between figures that didn't live in the same time period. For example, there was...a discussion between Martin Luther and Jesus about what Jesus really intended for his followers..." Lobman suggests that this activity reflects "the obvious benefits of history coming to life and of giving students an opportunity to see things from multiple perspectives. It also demonstrates that even in high school with a traditional curriculum and a high stakes assessment at the end of the year, Maria is able to do something creative that supported the curriculum rather than competing with it."

Lobman goes on to offer several additional mini "case studies" of ways in which the approach described above is powerful in shaking up familiar "roles" that can stymie fresh, creative learning. Based on these examples, she asserts that "[in] general, the relationship between students and teachers (particularly as children enter the middle grades) is often very scripted - the roles of teacher and student are clear and the range of responses allowed to either role is quite limited. Through the program the Fellows have begun to play with those roles, both in terms of how they respond to their students and in how they support their students to respond to them and other teachers....For example, during a discussion about ways that the teachers felt challenged in the classroom, Heather, a second grade teacher, asked for help in responding to a girl in her class who often had tantrums. The suggestion that came out of the workshop was that she could create a Tantrum Theatre where all of her students could have a chance to perform what they and others look like when they are having a tantrum. Rather than trying to get the individual child to stop or change her behavior, Heather and her students could relate to tantrums as one of the many performances that children (and adults) sometimes do, and as something that can be performed in an infinite number of ways. While the girl might still have tantrums at inopportune moments, Heather, the girl, and the rest of the class would all have a different relationship to the tantrum by virtue of having created something with it...[B]y turning the whole thing into a written play they were able to incorporate literacy and other skills that are important for Heather to be teaching."

Based on this research and these experiences, Lobman concludes that - even in schools driven by a sequential, linear understanding of learning and governed by standardisation and testing - it is possible to bring creativity and playfulness into the picture. Professional development models that incorporate supporting teachers as "skilled environment creators" can, Lobman seems to suggest, breathe new life into stale educational exchanges in fruitful ways for both teachers and students.