Kimberly Mohne Hill on Training To Imagine

Training to Imagine: Improvisational Techniques for Leaders and Educators to Enhance Creativity, Teamwork, and Learning is now in its 3rd edition. It is used in many educational settings, and we were thrilled to have a professor give thoughts on why they use it, and why they have found it to be an essential tool for students of improvisation.

Kimberly Mohne Hill is Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at Santa Clara University. She teaches many classes, and among them, a class called Improv. The textbook used in her Improv class is Training to Imagine by Kat Koppett. She told us she has used Training to Imagine for over 10 years, and said that it serves her students in a way that is unmatched by any other textbook.

Below are Hill’s thoughts on the book in her own words, lightly edited for length, with headings added for clarity. 

Why Training To Imagine Is So Effective As A Textbook

Background: Improv Student Demographics Are Different Than You’d Expect

The students that we draw in our improv class at Santa Clara are not theater majors. They are not performers usually. They come from other departments, other fields of study: business, engineering, pre-med, pre-law. These are students who are stepping outside their comfort zone for the first time and choosing to take a performance class as their arts credit because they actually believe that they will acquire some skills that they can use in their future lives or their future careers. And that's exactly what happens.

 The reason that Training to Imagine is so effective as a textbook for these students is because it addresses some of the needs that they have. They need to know why they're doing something. So every exercise that we do in class, Kat has described and gives a learning outcome to the exercise so that the students know what they're supposed to have gotten out of it. The other thing that they need to know in order to feel successful is how to do it.

Kat Koppett Provides Scaffolding and Progression In The Book

Now the "how" usually happens through instruction in the classroom in the moment and then in the doing of the exercise. The chapters that Kat has written have been scaffolded in their design so that the students acquire the skills—the "how"—slowly and through a course of very practiced sort of evolution of scaffolded skills. The book starts out with the basics: environment building, the idea of "here's what we're going to do in this class," and "here's how we'd like you to approach the work." Then it moves into skills like spontaneity, a basic in an improv class, and works all the way through to "Performing with Presence," which is probably my favorite chapter.

Reflection and Debriefing Questions Included

The other thing that the book does that is helpful for us is it gives us a chance to reflect on each of the exercises if you need them. Kat has actually given you debriefing questions. It's a lot like Viola Spolin's book but a little bit more addressed to the specific exercise and what you're going to get out of it. And if you need the debrief questions, they're there for you.

Active Learning and Reading — Without Note Taking

But the other thing that the debrief questions do for us is because this class is active learning, there's no lecture, there's no note-taking really in the class. It goes so fast and the students are up doing so often that the only way that they can know what they did, that they can know what to think about what they did, is with the assigned reading. They go home after class and then they are given the assigned reading, and the reading is from the book, and in that reading will be the exercises that we worked on in class. They didn't have to take notes; Kat already has the notes in the book for the students.

Transformative Lessons And A Favorite Chapter

"Performing with Presence” is my favorite chapter because it has one of the lessons that I find to be the most transformative for our students, and that is the lesson on status and non-verbal communication. As soon as the students start to do those exercises in status and non-verbal communication, they are changed immediately. They recognize an immediate change, an immediate growth, and they apply it almost instantly to their lives outside of the classroom, which is really exciting to see. It's a lesson that stays with them for the rest of their time.

Activities & A Grid To Help Plug Exercises Into Your Curriculum

At the very end of the book there’s an appendix of sorts where Kat has listed every single exercise that could be used to illuminate any of the lessons in the earlier chapters. And then she's provided you with a grid that lists the chapters and the exercises and helps you to plug each of the exercises into your curriculum in the way that you need to. This particular resource has been very useful to me in other classes—classes where the book isn't required but that I've used exercises in order to activate the learning in a different way for a different subject altogether.

Training To Image Is A Textbook That Is Focused on Outcomes

Training to Imagine is the work of a pedagogical master. I would say Kat is very good at structure, at outcome, and at allowing the learning to progress at the student's rate. And Training to Imagine adjusts to all of those things. Training to Imagine is probably one of the most effective textbooks I've ever used in any of my classes, and I look forward to using it for many more years to come.

Watch an edited version of this testimonial here on Instagram.