Tip & Exercise: Every student is different

I believe that we can have more different types of people as improv teachers. To encourage you to start, or to improve your teaching, every month I will share with you a tip and an exercise.

Tip: Every student is different

What is great about improv, is that every improviser is different. What is difficult about improv, is…. that every improviser is different. When we are teaching a group of improvisers, we might run into this particular challenge.

We look around the room and we see how our students are different. For instance: some people need to learn to take initiative, others need to learn to give space. There are exercises to train ‘taking initiative’ and there are exercises to train ‘giving space’.

When I work with improv teachers in my video course, I even show how you can adapt pretty much any exercise to the goal. And in this month’s article, I want to share with you an exercise that can be adapted to student’s individual goals.

Exercise: Only 1 person moves

Let students pair up and tell them that the only rule is: “At all times only 1 of you moves”. This can be walking, or put some music on to encourage dancing. It works for offline and online classes. In this exercise, you can instruct that either player can give and take (meaning: stop moving, or start moving).

As a teacher, you can choose to mention only one of the two options. If the entire group needs to learn to give focus, instruct only the ‘stop moving’ part. If the entire group could benefit from practicing taking focus, instruct only the ‘start moving’ part.

Additionally, this exercise gives an easy way to have every individual student practice ‘giving’ or ‘taking’. You as the teacher can do that in 2 ways.

One, tell them what to practice. Tell the guy who is always interrupting others, that he can only give focus (i.e. stop moving to let his partner move) but never take focus (i.e. he may not start moving until he is given the focus). Tell the woman who is shy to start scenes, that she can only take focus (i.e. start moving, taking the turn from the other) but never give focus (i.e. keep moving until you decide it is time).

Two, let students decide for themselves what to practice. Often, players with some experience know for themselves in which area they could use a bit of training. Just give them a minute to reflect by themselves, or with their partner, whether they think they could use the practice of giving or taking space.

If you would like to see me (and my partner Gael) instruct this exercise, check out the video below: