Book: The Second City Guide to Improv in the Classroom: Using Improvisation to Teach Skills & Boost Learning
by TeachThought Staff
Who will this book help you teach? Students of any age in any content area
What book are we talking about here? The Second City Guide to Improv in the Classroom: Using Improvisation to Teach Skills & Boost Learning
Where is it useful? Your classroom, on a YouTube channel, in the community
Why should you consider it? To promote team-building, collaboration, thinking on-the-fly, fun, and creative thinking in your classroom.
When can you use the ideas centered in the book? Anytime–as assessment, practice, method of engaging hesitant learners, pushing students that are comfort with traditional academic settings but less so in non-traditional circumstances
Short Description
Guide to Improv in the Classroom:
“Most people know The Second City as an innovative school for improvisation that has turned out leading talents such as Alan Arkin, Bill Murray, Stephen Colbert, and Tina Fey. This groundbreaking company has also trained thousands of educators and students through its Improvisation for Creative Pedagogy program, which uses improv exercises to teach a wide variety of content areas and boost skills that are crucial for student learning: listening, teamwork, communication, idea-generation, vocabulary, and more.
The scores of ready-to-use exercises offered here can be used to teach a wide variety of subjects—including language arts, math, science, and social studies—as well as to build classroom community and develop cooperative learning skills. All of the lessons are linked to current national standards for the United States and Canada, and have been proven particularly effective with kinesthetic learners and students with attention difficulties.”
Disclosure
Note: Part of our strategy to grow teachers is to recommend reading–usually books–that supplement the shorter essays and blog posts we create. In some cases, purchases made through the links to these books may provide a commission to us. This does not influence the books or other products we recommend. If you’d like to make sure we don’t receive any kind of commission, simply Google the title of the book you’re interested in, or go directly to your preferred bookseller rather than clicking on the link.
Reader Rating Sample
“As a new high school teacher, I’m always searching for interesting ways to deliver my material. The last thing I want to be labeled as is “boring”– a description I admit I’ve been accused of in my first year, and boy did that sting. But I used some of McKnight’s improv techniques during my last day of class, a week after I got this book, and the students absolutely loved them. My teaching partner and I immediately agreed we’d incorporate many more of these techniques next year in our class. I also just signed up for Second City’s Creative Pedagogy class this summer. Love this book! Will refer to it time and time again in the coming years.”
Book: Using Improvisation To Teach Skills & Boost Learning