You can do improv. Now someone's asked you to teach it. And you've discovered that knowing how to ride a bicycle and knowing how to teach someone to ride a bicycle are completely different skills.
The performer-to-teacher transition isn't about learning new improv skills. It's about developing a new set of capacities: reading a room, structuring a class, giving feedback that actually changes behavior, and creating the conditions where other people can fail safely.
Start with the one thing that matters most: safety in the room. Before any improv skill can be taught, the environment must support failure. Students who fear judgment won't take risks. Students who don't take risks won't learn. Your job isn't to make them comfortable — improv is inherently uncomfortable — but to make the discomfort safe. Boundaries matter: start on time, end on time. Names matter: learn them immediately. Modeling matters: fail in front of your students and show them it's survivable.
Curriculum design is the architecture underneath your class plan. Skills build on prerequisites. You need listening before yes-and (you can't accept what you didn't hear). You need yes-and before game (you can't play a pattern you keep denying). You need scene work before editing (you can't judge when a scene is done if you can't recognize what a scene is doing). Every school follows roughly the same progression: safety → listening/acceptance → scene work → game → form → performance. The details differ. The architecture is universal.
Warm-ups aren't filler. They're your diagnostic instrument. The warm-up tells you where the group's energy is today — and today's energy may be nothing like last week's. Over-prepare your lesson plan, then be ready to throw it out. As Jay Sukow puts it: "Over prepare, then throw your lesson plan out the window and hear what the students want to do."
Side-coaching is the skill that separates a teacher from someone who runs exercises. It's real-time guidance delivered into the work without stopping it. "Slower." "Stay with your partner." "What do you feel?" "Name what you see." Spolin called it an art as much as a skill — and it requires the same presence and responsiveness you use in a scene. You are your students' scene partner from the side of the room.
Giving notes is where most new teachers go wrong. The instinct is to say everything you noticed. Don't. Will Hines: notes should be 10-15 minutes max, with "a very simple take-away for each scene." And here's the deeper principle: an exercise that creates the right experience is almost always more effective than a verbal note that describes the right behavior. "Once a team can FEEL something working, they can keep doing it."
Reading the room is the meta-skill that governs all the others. Are they tired? Push them physically. Are they stuck in their heads? Switch to exercises that bypass thinking. Are they playing safe? Raise the stakes. Is someone checking out? Find a way to include them that doesn't spotlight them. This is where teaching becomes improv — you're responding to what's in front of you, not executing a plan.
One more thing: trust your teaching voice. Billy Merritt warns that insecure teachers teach in "absolutes" — rigid rules delivered with false certainty. Mature teaching means holding multiple truths: yes-and is powerful AND it has limits. Game is useful AND not every scene needs one. Johnstone and UCB disagree AND they're both right about different things. Your job isn't to have all the answers. Your job is to create the conditions where your students discover their own.