I’m always buzzing on the first day of a new academic term. The opportunity to start afresh, to see the possibilities of a few weeks of ideas before me activates a mixture of different energies: anxiety, excitement, uncertainty of what to expect as everyone takes on new tasks, challenges, and projects in the days ahead.
As an instructor, I always start my first day of teaching in a register that may appear a bit overly eager. I find myself rehearsing in my head before the class begins, trying to script out what I’m going to say and how I’m going to say it. Inevitably, once the class session actually gets rolling, everything changes. The nerves kick into full gear and there I am: saying something not entirely different than what I imagined, but different enough, responsive to what I hear, see, read, experience, intuit from the students in the room. It is a rush.
Through this rush, I’ve recognized a tension in my teaching, one that I think stems from bridging teaching in online, hybrid, and face-to-face spaces over the years: how much of the class to plan and how much to leave completely open.
As I live tweeted the keynote talk at this year’s ELI conference from Improv Everywhere founder Charles Todd, Joshua Eyler pointed me to a great essay by Sarah Rose Cavanagh about the parallels between teaching and improvisation. Since then, I have not been able to get it out my head. The ending note of the article is what has stuck with me the most: that some of our greatest teaching moments must arise out of moments of uncertainty. If we plan everything too far in advance, if we are so polished in our delivery and our organization of materials, we leave little room to be responsive and creative. In Sarah’s words:
“Having everything preplanned and running smoothly in the classroom also means you are high status again — you alone know what is coming next and how it will go.”
Cavanagh, “All the Classroom’s a Stage”
This particular reflection rang really true for me: in general, I have a hard time not planning out what I’m going to do or say in advance. I pride myself on constructing clearly crafted agendas. Indeed, knowing where a class session is going to go is often essential to ensuring that the notes are met, the outcomes reached.
Yet at what point does this kind of planning make students feel like they are too attentive to the instructors’ needs? At what point does organizing everything make students uncertain about where they can intervene or contribute? At what point does “scripting” our classroom performances, rather than improvising them, stifle the creativity and the collaborative engagement in the room?
To that end, how does improvising the classroom space jive with incorporating effective instructional technologies? Indeed, I’ve found that in order to design teaching experiences with laptops, mobile phones, ample advanced planning is essential to ensure that students have access to these devices and the materials therein. How do we keep a spirit of improvisation alive while also creating opportunities to engage with and test out digital technologies in the process?
I don’t really know yet. I’m still figuring out the right balance between improvisation and “scripting” as I design my own classes. Indeed, during my first class session this term, I improvised a lot more than I normally would and I have to be honest: I left the room feeling pretty uncertain about how well the students really engaged with the content or how much they were left wondering about the value of the course. A bit of dialogue and review, priming some conversation about what we remember from the first day should help me know for sure when I get to the second day.
But on the total, I could tell that as I was navigating the uneasiness of the improvisational moment, I was also at the same time, steering the conversation, instituting my own centeredness in the classroom rather than giving students the full space to live into the experience. Frankly, I think I got a bit nervous about losing control of the conversation, losing sight of what we were supposed to be accomplishing.
In other words, I did not fully lean into the improvisational moment and then wound up falling back to where I was comfortable: the scripted, controlled experience.
Powerful improvisation truly has a spark to it: a moment where connections are made spontaneously, emerging out of moments of creativity. But this kind of spark is only possible when the space feels safe for that to happen, both for the instructor and for the students. I don’t yet have answers here, really; I plan for the work of balancing improvisation and scripting to be an ongoing provocation, especially in a class I’ve aimed to build intentionally with an eye towards students’ digital literacy development in the process.
It’s going to be another buzzy quarter, I can tell, and I remain grateful for the students here to learn alongside me.