Educational Improv Works

The Troubling Ways Schools Treat Troublemakers "Rather than use classrooms as an opportunity for young children to imagine and to practice a better way, we prepare them for the world we have now instead of the world we want."

This article offers great analysis of what we need to do to create a healthier climate in our schools ... it notes that the first step is to improve the quality of relationships among the students and the adults at the school.

A healthy school climate thrives on better communication, closer connections, and true inclusiveness — to help shut down the isolation, bullying, and harassment that can lead to violence. And as the article notes, a better school climate not only affects students' mental and emotional health, but also boosts academic success.

This is one of the reasons we believe so strongly in teaching the tenets of improv: because it's difficult to feel isolated and alone if you're sharing these core rules.

TENETS OF IMPROV:

• Listen in order to receive
• Always make partners look better
• Build on what's given
• You can't be wrong
• Keep moving forward
• Focus is a consequence of caring
• "Yes, and" (never "no, but")

Here's How To Prevent The Next School Shooting, Experts Say Hundreds of organizations and experts are calling for a public health approach to school-based violence.

This is the kind of program we support and admire.

Shakespeare & Company, a theater company in Lenox, Massachusetts, works with the courts to get youngsters who run afoul of the law sentenced to perform works of Shakespeare onstage as an alternative to community service or juvenile detention.

Building confidence, involvement, and a sense of accomplishment changes lives.

For juveniles sentenced to Shakespeare, the world's a stage PITTSFIELD, Mass. (AP) — For some juvenile offenders, their choice is straight out of Hamlet: to act or not to act. Shakespeare & Company, a theater company in L

Penny wise and pound foolish, as the old saying goes. Tim Clue, our program director, says: "This is a crisis and we need an intervention ... what will it take to make it happen?"

Black And Latino Students Lose Out To White Peers. And It's Getting Worse. Six decades after Brown vs. Board of Education, a U.S. agency finds we still have a two-tiered education system.