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Presents an interview with director, teacher, performer, and author of the ground-breaking "Story Theater" Paul Sills. Discusses his unique style of storytelling and improvisation. (RS)

Play allows children to make creative discoveries. This is a result of the fact that creation comes from tinkering and the absence of fear of failure, rather than from minds trained to follow what is already known. Suggestions for building a curriculum based on serious play are offered. (LB)

This paper describes the development and evolution of a modular pharmacy practice course that uses practitioners as role-model instructors in prepared and impromptu scenarios. The course reviews the top 200 drug products while introducing students to both community and institutional practice settings. Appendices include a summary of the Institutional Practice Manual. (GLR)

Describes how plays can be improvised and written by English-as-a-Second-Language students, and how the end-products can be modified in a variety of ways to create new teaching material. (six references) (GLR)

Suggests that watching for certain signs can help music teachers to improve students' performance in jazz solos. Recommends dealing with problems one at a time beginning with the most blatant and focusing on good communication skills as the basis of improvisation. Discusses lack of spacing, repetition, planning, form, and finality. (DK)

Discusses improvisation as a phenomenon. Offers suggestions for a learning sequence. Warns against allowing students to skip levels. Identifies developmental levels of improvisation as exploration, process-oriented, product-oriented, fluid, structural, stylistic, and personal improvisation. Urges that improvisation can and should be a meaningful part of every student's music education from preschool through adulthood. (DK)

Offers ideas for teaching musicians to be improvisors. Suggests that structure, organization, and continuity are problems that can be solved by learning to improvise. Recommends exercises in building phrases to help students acquire a sense of the developing whole. Concludes that improvisation can be taught by showing students how to teach themselves. (DK)

Offers suggestions for students and teachers for learning jazz improvisation. Discusses listening, practicing scales, chords, phrasing, developing a sense of swing, and shaping creative ideas through structural features. Emphasizes the relationship between chords and scales as a critical key to improvisation. Recommends educational materials to quantify theory and practice. (DK)

Discusses the Manhattanville Music Curriculum Project's concentration on the purpose, substance, and means of music instruction. Describes improvisation as the dominant means for teaching concepts, knowing how music works, and knowing how to make musical sense. Urges that the same goals of aural acuity, creative thought, and musical facility are just as pertinent today. (DK)

Discusses the importance of teaching improvisation. Defines improvisation as the spontaneous generation of melody and rhythm without specific preparation or premeditation. Answers reasons for not teaching improvisation. Suggests training the ear, providing models, allowing for imitation, developing performance facility, guaranteeing success, and pacing the instruction. (DK)

Presents a lesson plan illustrating how creative dramatic techniques can go beyond basic enrichment to provide a meaningful milieu for thinking and language development. Presents content, form, and evaluation of a lesson for a third grade class. (SR)

Presents 13 improvisation exercises offered by 5 teachers. (SR)

Presents a unit of lessons in which intermediate grade students improvise fairy tales and learn dramatic techniques. Offers an overview, an implementation schedule with activities, creative activities for fairy tales, and a fairy tales chart. (SR)

Describes "Theatre Sports," a type of improvisational theater that actively involves the audience. Presents a beginning workshop that explains the basic skills of improvisation (group cohesion and trust, movement, pantomime, spontaneity, offers and blocking, characterization and status, narrative, and endowment) and explains how to play theater sports in each one. (SR)

Describes how to start an improvisation troupe. Discusses appropriate books, casting, training the performers, rehearsing, developing the group's identity, creating challenges, performances, and the role of the leader. (PRA)

Outlines a philosophy for music literacy for all students that emphasizes wholeness. Suggests that music educators concentrate on nonverbal knowing, integrating popular and classical culture, balancing learned literature and improvisation, and making singing a central part of the music curriculum. Maintains that artistic excellence should be a common pursuit. (KM)

An extracurricular program in an Australian university French language program that brings together adults of varying ages and nationalities for oral language development activities is described. The program uses improvisation, psychodrama and role playing, and suggestopedia all together to develop a theme or in alternation, for creativity and relaxation. (MSE)

Explores ways in which "storying" and storytelling occur as an integral part of the collective creation of meaning in improvised classroom drama. Describes storying as a learning experience in a dramatic context that requires thinking in the narrative mode and about narrative as a means of interpreting and verbalizing experience. (MG)

Explains the use of dramatic texts in the classroom to demonstrate how ideas which are inconsistent with a culture's sense of reality may sometimes be rejected as implausible. Argues that a dominant ideology makes other views seem implausible or even inconceivable. Provides several examples from a variety of dramatic works. (SG)

Improvisational role-play is presented as a teaching strategy that can help students with hearing impairments learn to use a variety of language forms while growing in literature appreciation. The teacher develops lesson plans around a story the children are reading, and students enter into the characters' roles, exploring the situations that challenge the characters. (JDD)

Presents a collection of teachers' ideas on instruction for musical improvisation. Includes suggestions for ascending grade levels, spontaneous composition, and creation of sound maps. Recommends making technique training fun and creative through improvisation. Suggests that children be taught to think in sounds and to experiment with variations. (DK)

In each era in which white jazz musicians have received acclaim, black musicians have been the true innovators. Black jazz musicians of the past and contemporary artists are discussed. Although they may not receive the publicity they deserve, black musicians will continue in the forefront of jazz. (SLD)

Contends that an improvisational stance in teaching avoids disagreements and blockages that can stymie reading instruction. Outlines eight graduate students' experiences teaching improvisationally. Explains that the tutors sought a collaborative teaching stance that was in tune with the individual children's interests and personality. Defines teaching as a matter of active response to and dialogue with observations of and interactions with students. (PM)

Planning, teaching, and post-lesson reflections of three student teachers of mathematics were compared with those of three cooperating teachers with whom the student teachers were placed. Differences were accounted for by the assumption that novices' cognitive schemata and pedagogical reasoning skills were less well-developed than those of expert teachers. (SLD)

Uses 20 years of research on organizing as a way of viewing current research efforts and of laying a foundation for future efforts. Compares organizational adjustments to jazz improvisations. Argues that, because of the relationship between organizational quality and criticism, there is no need for the additional trappings of hierarchy, rules, regulations, and standardization. (SG)

Focuses on the importance of creative thinking in music education. Addresses three factors that support creativity in music: (1) the availability of resources for teachers, (2) the growth of information related to understanding creative thinking, and (3) the role of technology. Introduces this issue of the "Music Educators Journal." (CMK)