We Did Improv in Physics!

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My “Physics of” end of year projects have become legendary. When I introduce the project I hear kids chattering about previous projects by their friends and siblings. I started the projects after hearing Rhett Allain give his “Science of Superheros” talk at Chicago Section AAPT. My goal was always simple: pick a topic and collect data on it. How deep and how far was up to the student. How “good” the result? Also irrelevant. The project is so popular its one of my most visited posts on here and I now see teachers suggesting it as a post-AP idea.

But I couldn’t get over the fact that the presentations were lackluster. The content was fantastic! It was always in-depth and detailed but, frankly, they presentation of the content was not excellent. This was my fault. I never provided much in the way of guidelines. I had properly supported them in scaffolding a big endeavor, but I did nothing to support them beyond it.

Now, on the one hand, I gave myself a bit of grace. After all, I’m no english teacher! In fact, I’d reached out to the english teacher at one point because I knew what “excellent” looked like, but unlike physics problem solving, I had no idea how to get students from novice to expert when it came to presenting and communicating. This was a blind spot for me.

Through my own writing journey and with the help of excellent editors on staff with Edutopia I’ve started to develop a clearer image of the craft of communication. About a month ago someone dropped two titles, The Master Communicator’s Handbook and If I Understood You Would I Have This Look on My Face?

The handbook is simultaneously conversational and technical, and I began to craft an idea for a possible lesson on communication in science. Then I cracked open the Alda book. In the book Alda describes an experiment with 20 engineering students: he had them present their work, then participate in a three hour improv workshop. After the workshop they presented again and the results in their ability to relate while communicating were astounding. I didn’t want to try this, I needed it.

I began to draft my lesson plan on Twitter, in part to hold myself accountable to following through. Here’s what it looked like:

Day 1: What Does an Excellent Presentation Sound Like?

We started class with this sketch

I asked students to craft an outline for the talk. Some of the outlines were super surface level, but some of them were getting to the point like the start of this one below:

I had students share their lists to compare and discuss. After our discussion we watched the following TedX talk. What I love about Helen is that she’s a great communicator and she’s also very real and down to earth.

During the talk I asked students to notice some of the structural components from the comedy sketch:

• When did she make her main point?
• How many stories did she tell and what was the point?
• When did she use illustrative language?
• How did she use slides?

For homework students were asked to watch any two TED talks of their choosing and answer the same set of questions, followed by a comparative analysis between the two videos.

I also highlighted some points in the slide deck you can find in your templates of google slides (its the orange one). It’s based on the work of Chip and Dan Heath who are masters at motivation.

Day 2: Turn Your Lab Report Into a Blog Post

Blogging is the form of communication with which I’m most familiar and comfortable. I also knew that improv was on the horizon. Turning a formal report into a blog was my way of getting the work out of a formal, traditional format and into a more casual, conversational and presentation-worthy one. I took one of Rhett Allain’s WIRED posts and annotated it to point out structure, format and tone.

This ended up being really interesting. Some students totally flew with the tone and format. Other groups, however, made their writing look like a blog and met the word count, but the order and tone was still leaning towards formal report vs blog. I explained to students that given the time constraints I was not going to take off points, but the feedback needed to be considered when it came time to create their final presentations.

Day 3: What does an Excellent Presentation Look Like?

I was fortunate to have an incredible professor for my master’s who is a whiz at data visualization. She put together a great presentation based on the work of Stephanie Evergreen about all things slide related. This was more than just cut your words down! We talked about elements of design and the rule of thirds! We went through examples of “bad” and “improved” slides in an interactive way. Especially important was discussing how the data or your presentation must be shown inn a way that makes the results immediately obvious to your audience.

Day 4: Improv Workshop!

For the final day I took the page literally from Alan Alda’s book. I contacted a former student of mine who is getting his educator license and theatre endorsement and asked if he would lead. I shared with him a short video about the motivation for my plan and he was fully on board

Prior to this day I had told students to be prepared to talk about their project for 2 minutes. I told them nothing else. When they entered my class they found a room with no desks! Today was going to be diferent!

Eli, my invited alum, choose three games. My students had to:

• “Pitch and sell” a random object using only gibberish (focus on tone of voice, pace, expression and body language)
• “Watch them watching you” half the class took various audience roles (normal, kindergarteners who just won a pizza party, lawyers hearing a case) and the “actors” could only watch the audience watching them. The purpose of this was to break the barrier between audience and actor/presenter
• The mirror game (as shown in the video).

By the end of the games there was so much joy and ease and laughter. Students got into their groups and presented to one another again. It was very different this time!

My student had the best comment that summed up the experience

“If I can sell a water cap in gibberish, I can present on anything!”

For a summary of the results and impact of these activities, check out the next post!