Nearly 7 out of 10 early-career teachers leave or consider leaving the profession within the first five years, according to the Center for American Progress. That statistic is particularly sobering to me, as I only began teaching in 2025.
To help navigate my development as a teacher, I attended the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP). I had just graduated from STEP but wanted more professional development, so I signed up for a second round of workshops. To my surprise, most of our activities centered on an approach that initially felt out of place — improv.
Improv, or improvisational theater, is an artistic form where actors make up dialogue, settings and plotlines on the spot for an audience. While improv certainly has its place on the stage, it was challenging to see its connection to teaching, let alone my science classroom.
I found myself making up stories and acting out scenes with other teachers as if we had known each other for decades. But participating felt risky, as I opened myself to the judgment of others. And as I saw myself making mistakes in front of my peers, I noticed I hesitated to engage more. Through these exercises, I realized the level of risk-taking that comes with learning and how self-doubt and fear of embarrassment can stunt student engagement.
Improv inspired me to reevaluate how I facilitate learning in a science that is difficult for many students and causes some to shut down. Instead of just cold calling for student responses and highlighting the “right” answer, I could use elements of improv to introduce the importance of risk taking and encourage my students to take their own risks.
A New Frame for Teaching
While designing learning experiences and focusing on content may appear at the heart of education, they don’t encompass everything a teacher must consider to cultivate a successful classroom. Other factors, including student engagement, have just as much of an impact. According to a Yale study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, student engagement is the driving force behind classroom environments conducive to learning and academic achievement.
Nevertheless, engagement is not guaranteed when students enter a classroom. While some students feel completely comfortable raising their hand, answering a question or collaborating with classmates, some students can find this kind of participation unnerving.
“Learning itself is risky,” says Marti Lane, a doctoral student in mathematics education who co-led improv activities at STEP. “It is vulnerable, it is scary, it is uncertain.” Many students don’t want to “look dumb” by sharing an incorrect answer. This shroud of uncertainty can stall student engagement and, ultimately, learning in the classroom. Improv can be a simple way for early-career teachers to become more comfortable with risk-taking themselves and help students try it out without worrying about academic performance.
What Counts as Improv?
We are constantly navigating our social environments and adapting ourselves to display a “front-stage” self that is perceived as socially acceptable, Canadian American sociologist Erving Goffman noted in 1959. Teachers do this all the time in choosing what we wear, how we speak to families and in making certain instructional decisions.
However, it isn’t just teachers who improvise — students do it too. In student-centered activities, whether students are sharing their ideas with a peer, creating a culminating project or simply helping others, there may be an underlying drive to appear competent in front of others. And while this drive may not disappear, improv activities can be a way for students to be more open to making mistakes.
I recently did an improv-inspired exercise in my class where I asked students to find someone with the same style of shoes and create their own handshakes. This activity was an easy way for students to practice reaching out to others they may not know, experimenting with what works and risking whether or not someone would accept their ideas. In the past, I would often see students shutting themselves out by putting their head down or using the restroom excessively. But in this period, I saw students come out of their shells smiling, socializing and bouncing ideas off each other as they came up with their own unique handshakes. It lowered the bar for participation and helped students collaborate with each other more readily in the science lesson that followed.
It was a new activity and, as with any, I was nervous to try it. It was hard to be vulnerable with my students and not know how they would react.
But it was this activity where I discovered that there is room for improv in science. Improv helped me step into the shoes of a student again and understand the importance of taking risks. I remembered always dreading not having an answer for my students, having an activity that goes south or messing up a laboratory demo in front of everyone. But I realized I would never learn as an early-career teacher if I never took risks. Ultimately, it showed me that it was okay to center mistakes, silliness and joy in my science classroom. It helped me humanize my teaching and reach more students.
So, to lead by example, I took another risk and shared what I was doing with my older colleagues.
And, to my surprise, even my older colleagues were intrigued by what improv had to offer their own students. After telling them about my students making their own handshakes to facilitate engagement, one asked me to share my protocols for the activity and what to expect if they tried it in a future class.
Connecting Improv to Young Teachers
Lisa Rowland, a lecturer in Stanford University’s Department of Theater and Performance Studies and a STEP instructor, believes improv encourages early-career teachers to “transform their relationship to failure.” Through improv, young teachers struggling to reach their students see that the question is not a matter of when students fail, but how students respond to it.
Science is already a challenging subject for lots of students, and as a teacher I know that mistakes can be discouraging. However, I also know that these mistakes are essential to the learning process and are often what leads to the most enduring, transformative learning.
Improv made me wonder whether I was promoting an environment where mistakes were allowed and celebrated instead of shamed and discouraged. How do I react to an idea that deviates from the correct answer? What does my body language convey when I notice something incorrect? Whose responses get elevated or dismissed and why?
Improv’s emphasis on risk-taking gave me an “aha!” moment when it came to evaluating my classroom environment. It showed me the massive barrier some students face when it comes to participating, collaborating with their classmates or engaging with material and gave me more of an empathetic approach to tackling disengagement.
Ultimately, through learning about improv, early-career teachers can better understand how to cultivate risk-taking in their own classrooms and create learning environments that are safe, engaging and open to mistakes, including for early-career teachers themselves.
