Under discussion [electronic resource] : improvisational theatre as a tool for improving classroom discourse
Keywords: Education.

Classroom talk matters. Although young people are expected to arrive at college and career settings knowing how to engage in collaborative conversations, this kind of talk is rare in American high-school classrooms and virtually absent from low-track classes. As a result, young people are often not adequately or equitably prepared to participate in college-level classroom talk. Discussion, when facilitated effectively, invites students to deepen their understanding of subject matter; practice powerful social norms and skills such as listening, adding to others' contributions, tactfully disagreeing, and taking turns; and orally craft arguments that may carry over into their writing. Facilitating classroom discussion is hard work and requires teachers to both carefully prepare and improvise based on students' contributions. How do teachers learn to engage in the difficult work of orchestrating a rich and, by nature, improvised discussion? This dissertation addresses this question through a case study of four high-school teachers who participated in a summer workshop on discussion; two of these teachers also took a course on improvisational theatre. A key hypothesis driving the study was that purposeful professional learning about the instructional practice of orchestrating discussion, combined with additional learning in an improv theatre course, may be a way for teachers to change discourse patterns in their classrooms to support student talk. Both masterful improvisers and expert facilitators of discussion listen carefully and purposefully pick up on others' actions and utterances. This nimble responsiveness reflects the application of the "Yes-And" tenet (in improv) and the application of 'uptake' (in discussion), which the author defines as the range of verbal moves a speaker can use to pick up on and respond to others' contributions during conversation. This research looks within and across the four classrooms to consider how these teachers used discussion in their classes following the summer workshop, how discussions seemed to change over the course of the semester of observation, and how discussions may have been affected by the improv course. Data sources for each teacher included a questionnaire, four videotaped observations of classroom talk, classroom artifacts used during observed talk, and five audiotaped interviews. Intervention data sources included annotated lesson plans, field notes, artifacts, and audio and video recordings of selected activities. Results suggest that students were using uptake with more frequency and at higher levels toward the end of the semester than at the beginning. The author theorizes about what may have accounted for these shifts, including the role of the teacher and the role of the text in mediating talk. The author also argues that the additional experience of the improv course supported teachers' development of new approaches to discussion. In particular, the author describes how the instructor of the improv course orchestrated interactive exercises to elucidate the principles of improv and debriefed these exercises through whole-group discussion. The author maps these experiences onto teachers' shifting definitions of what it means to improvise and the ways they seemed to embody these evolving conceptions of improv (and the improv instructor's template of talk) through their own facilitation of discussion. This study adds to the literature on classroom discourse by examining the skills teachers need to facilitate discussion effectively, the ways in which teachers can develop these capacities, and the influence training in improvisational theatre may have on teachers' conceptions and facilitation of classroom discussion.