Lessons for Instructor–Student Interactions in Physics from the World of Improvisational Theater

Abstract

During my time in graduate school, I was fortunate to spend time working with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. The Center’s most notable feature is its use of techniques from improvisational theater (“improv”) to develop scientists’ public communication skills—an approach that has been borne out in several contexts, including mathematics and clinical medicine. The improvisational concepts I learned there and elsewhere have profoundly influenced my approach to interacting with my students. After all, when a student asks a novel question, I do not know where they are coming from nor what preconceived ideas they may bring to the interaction. In this unplanned space, our conversation could easily become a meandering mess, but my goal instead is that it should have certain essential elements that make it complete and conceptually satisfying, like a successful improv scene. In this article, I summarize three basic improv concepts and provide examples of their use in the physics classroom: active listening, the “yes, and …” principle, and the “button.” These principles embody widely studied theories of physics education yet provide succinct, actionable reminders of how to put these theories into practice.