 Our next talk, improv at school, lessons from Detroit's young improvisers. Would you give it up for Mark Evan Jackson? Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here. Enormous thanks to Joel Wienstra, the conference organizer for putting together such a great week for people that are obviously such palpably miserable, disinterested folks. Just so little life. Very little life. In 2011, as the city and people of the city of Detroit braced for what became the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, my wife Beth Hagenlocker and I were interested in looking for ways to give back to the city that we love so much. It's where she grew up and it's where we met when I was an actor at the second city in Detroit. And it's a city with a wonderful spirit and we were looking for ways that we could become part of the renewal. And so we gathered, we live in Los Angeles now and we gathered a lot of our Detroit ex-patriot friends and family out there. Actors, directors, writers, musicians, teachers and said, how can we do this? How can we be part of this conversation, be part of this renaissance? Improvisation is something that was very meaningful to each of us. It is life-affirming and empowering. I know I don't have to explain this to you, but I'm going to spend the next 16 minutes doing so. It had such a huge impact. I don't want to threaten you, but what's the longest this has ever gone? Improvisation is obviously so life-affirming and empathy-driving and wonderful that we knew that that was a gift, a life skill that we wanted to share with these students in the city of Detroit. Can you imagine what it would be like if you never forgot how to pretend and play and explore? So this is what we've done. In 2012, we've established the Detroit Creativity Project. It's a nonprofit and our flagship program, The Improv Project, is a 10-week program that empowers kids through improvisation ages 8 to 18. It's a 10-week program and it is including our summer programs. It has grown to now serve nearly 1,000 students annually. Thank you. Your applause and snaps are correct. So I'd like to tell you just a little bit about what we've learned in this process of doing this. In short, nothing. Just as in life, this one exactly is planned. In conclusion, the end. We had a lot going for us. We worked with partners that we'd known for decades, actors and improvisers and teachers in Detroit that I was in the cast with, including Margaret Edward Towsky, who is the director of Y-Arts in Detroit. She's got a lot of connections with schools and obviously in the teachings of the arts. Together, we pitched this program to schools and because this is how it would have been done where I grew up, we pitched it as an after-school program, which school teachers in Detroit thought was hilarious. They thought that was very cute. They have enough trouble getting these students to attend school to begin with, to come to class. When school is done, and we learned this as well, these kids have very adult things to do after school. They work in their family business. They have jobs of their own. They have to translate for family members for medical appointments and things of that nature. So keeping them at school wasn't really something that was going to be an effective thing for us. Early on, one of our classroom teachers, we presented this to him. We were planning on doing this after school and he said, I can give you class time. We thought, well, how is that possible? And he said, well, the good news is that as long as I don't have mayhem in my classroom and don't end up sending anybody to the principal's office, I can teach whatever I want. I can do whatever I want. He quickly added, the bad news is that as long as I don't send anybody to the principal's office, I can teach whatever I want. I can do whatever I want. So if you have a teacher like the ones we work with that are phenomenal, that's a playground and that's great and they can really have an impact. If you don't, if that's not the teacher that's there, there's a tremendous opportunity for very little learning to take place. These are low-performing schools. They're underfunded and these students are at enormous risk of dropping out. So these are dicey times. When we first started the improv project in 2012, a different director at the YMCA put her finger together like this and said, these students that we serve, their world is this big. So we made it our mission to take that looking glass, take that viewfinder and explode it, help them to see that so much more is possible for themselves. And we've been successful in doing so. So right from the get go, it wasn't exactly what we anticipated. And we learned that we had to, what's the word? We had to adapt. We had to collaborate, to use what was in front of us and incorporate suggestions. What's the word I'm looking for? No, I'll think of it. Initially we thought, oh, we know how to teach improv. The teaching of improv is fairly universal and in some senses that's true. But then we realized, when adults sign up for improv classes, that's self-selecting. They've chosen eight weeks and $300 or what have you to do this for themselves. These kids just showed up for school and were like, what are we doing? So that combined with the reticence of anybody to get involved and to be part of something that's normal for anyone is amplified by the high school culture, especially one in a tough city where you don't want to stand out and you don't dare to dream and your world is this small. You've been told that things are probably not going to happen for you. So we did what we would do anywhere. We found initially that we had to create two syllabi. We have one that is sort of theater-based that is used for their literacy skills and then we have one that's more applied. And that uses improv to help these kids deal with situations in their lives, things like social justice and status and point of view and personal storytelling. And so the teachers did what they were meant to do. They exemplify these behaviors. They get up and do examples for themselves. They make themselves vulnerable first. We also found that we had to adapt the curriculum further so that each week is sort of freestanding because attendance is an issue. Some of the problems we face were universal and some were very Detroit-specific. Some of these students aren't in the same school all year. They have family in different parts of the state. They have family in different parts of the country. And so they're itinerant. They leave. They'll be gone for months at a time kind of thing. So our program is cumulative, but we learned to build it in a way that you could miss a week or two or three or five and come back and still have value in there wouldn't be any catching up to do. So we've learned exactly what we teach as well, which is that failure is not a lasting condition. Failure is temporary and the confidence that comes behind it is permanent. We each have a memorable story from when we were in our youth about something that we didn't want to be the first stat. We didn't want to be the example. We learned, especially through improvisation, that that's not so scary after all. And we had students that were not super into this and they became involved, as you'll soon see. Again, there are a lot of voices in their lives telling them, don't dream, don't venture. It probably won't happen. The other undeniable truth that we learned about Detroit is that child poverty is an enormous factor. A 2016 Brookings Institution study found that Detroit had the highest concentration of people living below the poverty line of the 25 largest metro areas. Wayne County, where Detroit is, they found that nearly 6 in 10 people are poor. 94,000 of those are students or children below the age of 17. That's more than half of the students in the city of Detroit. So poverty is not great for many reasons, but it brings with it stress. And we engaged, again, the planets aligned in so many ways for us. We had somebody approach us from the University of Michigan and a graduate researcher. I don't remember science. They wanted to evaluate our program and they looked at lots of things. For the data wonks present here today, they used mini-spin to look at rates of social phobia and anxiety and patient health questionnaire number two to look at rates of depression. These were all self-assessments. So at the beginning of our semester, nearly half of our students in the improv project screened positive for social phobia. This was not what we started out to look for. We were looking to bring the arts to students in Detroit. A lot of these kids don't have an actual art class and the part of their day that is focused academically is focused on meeting test requirements and improving test performance. To that end, we have some wonderful results from what we've done already. Academic performance at schools where we teach the improv project in the same community has improved by a factor of two. So this is the proficiency versus growth argument. The rate of growth effectively is doubled. So if it was 10% prior, it's 20%, which is a fairly remarkable stat. Thank you. The attendance is up as well. We teach at Southeast Fairview Academy in Southeast Detroit and our class is taught as part of a business program. It's the last period on Friday. The school's attendance rate for last period on Friday is 60%. Our program's attendance rate is 98%. And they don't like me saying this, but I love it so much, so I will. We have anecdotal evidence from more than one school that they've run into a specific brand of attendance problem, which is that kids that have skipped school that day are sneaking into the improv project to come and be a part of it. Is it ideal? It is not. But it speaks a little bit about how meaningful the program is to them, which I find pretty great. The UFM research, so we've just reached the end of this program as well. Improv training we know because of science is moving the needle for these kids who screen positive for social anxiety and depression. If we just look at the students who screen positive in week one, four out of 10 of those kids, 40% of those kids 10 weeks later are no longer self-assessing for social phobia, social anxiety, and depression. And the research from UFM is leading us to examine how improv impacts social and emotional learning and gets us to other things that we're interested in. Obviously graduation rates, confidence, moving on to be a successful person in college or in a career, breaking away from childhood poverty and dreaming beyond what the status quo has told you that you can or cannot do. It's an exciting time in Detroit right now too because they have a new superintendent coming in who has pledged to make a commitment to a 2012 education. It's great. There's no money there yet. So what that means in the short term is that there's still need for a program like ours. We've learned a ton by doing this. We have learned that we need to focus on one thing and do it well. Initially I thought we would be the Detroit Creativity Project that would offer a scene shop and dress making and all these things. And with hope those things will come someday. But improvisation really is the basis for it. It is the route from which all this will stem. We learned that the need is infinite. We learned that we need to fundraise. People ask me when I will start the Buffalo Creativity Project or the Los Angeles Creativity Project I answer when everyone in Detroit knows how to zip zaps out. We would run into a lot of the programs I mentioned earlier. A lot of these students would not be into it at first. They weren't sure what it was. They were reticent about it. It was embarrassing. They were vulnerable. We had students, especially at Southeastern, that would come and go from class. Just sort of unannounced. They would have earbuds in, listening to music, watching videos on FaceTime, on their phone. They would have their hoods up. They would be turned away. Our teaching artists learned to incorporate those people by getting suggestions from them, by using them for feedback. How was that? What was your response to that? Slowly they melted and they found their way into it. Those kids are different now. Let's try a different game. This one's going to involve you standing up. We're going to create a foreign movie. We're going to create it. What I need is I need four people. Let's say one, two, three, four. Good, good, good. Four players. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. You haven't played it all yet. You haven't played it all yet, have you, as the last thing said. They're keeping them honest. Improv is the greatest. Thank you for listening. In conclusion, the end.