Teachers often have no idea why a student will not write. Whether it is social-emotional or literacy deficits, improv can help. You know those students, the ones that won’t write or write enough for you to assess content knowledge or teach writing skills? This can be a difficult situation to address. Teachers don’t often know if their resistance or reluctance to write is due to a deficit in their literacy skills or because of a social-emotional reason, like a lack of self-esteem, trust in one’s ability, or anxiety.
“I Don’t Know What to Write”
In the classroom I had content to assess and writing skills to teach. While some students occasionally “got stuck,” there were always those few students that would only write a few words or sentences if they wrote anything at all. This made assessing or teaching writing futile. I tried externally prompting them, thought by thought. This provoked a learned helplessness as they sat waiting for me to prompt them each and every assignment. While they waited, they sometimes grew resentful, felt stupid, and some became even more resistant to writing.
I used high interest or fun writing topics. Students were sometimes engaged by the humor of an assignment or by their passion for a topic. They would forget anxieties that regularly impeded them. This approach, however, failed to help students produce writing on a consistent basis. When the next “not so fun” or interesting assignment was given, down went the pens and sometimes the heads.
Improv Impacts Writing Fluency
Trying to engage and motivate students to write wasn’t always disastrous, but it was exhausting and not actually all that effective in creating confident and self-sufficient writers. To my surprise, improv changed all of this. Students felt more comfortable and confident participating or sharing their thoughts. All of their ideas mattered. Students contributed without fearing they would be rejected, laughed at, dismissed, or ignored. Students began to engage in class activities comfortably and eagerly.
Most of those results I had hoped for and expected. What really got my attention and piqued my curiosity was what happened when the students started applying the concept of “Yes, and…” in a way I had not anticipated. They had transferred it to their writing assignments. Those statements of, “I don’t know what to write,” “I don’t have anything else to write about,” and “I’m done,” began to disappear. Improv was impacting writing fluency.
A Counter-Intuitive Approach
Such a counter-intuitive approach was not conceived in theory, but instead organically. Overtime and unexpectedly, the students had independently transferred specific improv concepts and skills to their writing. I wanted deliberate approach with rapid results. I began to teach a sequence of improv’s story telling games to students in hopes to increase their willingness and length of writing. The approach could be completed in as little as five class periods.
Two research studies, published in the International Journal of Education and the Arts focus on whether or not writing fluency was impacted from this scaffolded sequence of improv games and improv-writing activities. The studies found that whether the students participated in classes over six days or six weeks, regular education students showed a 50% increase in the length of their writing, and special needs and “at risk” students showed a 100-300% increase in their individual writing assignments.
With 90% of the time in collaborative groups and 70% of that time engaged in oral games, this approach is clearly counter-intuitive. In addition, students achieved significant growth by spending only 10% of their time writing by narrative stories by themselves. They were then able to transfer their ability to topic drive writing assignments.
Learn More
Improv helps students progress rapidly through a series of essential literacy skills that impact the ability to write. They also develop important social-emotional skills that also affect a students’ individual writing. Research showed that students independently transferred skills gained during improv to topic-driven journal writing without any practice or coaching. To learn more about this research, review my recent blog Improv Helps Students Write: Researching Impact of Scaffolded Games on Writing Fluency. To get started in your classroom, be sure to pick up a copy of Improv ‘n Ink: Overcoming “I Don’t Know How to Write“.
