COM 66 — Think on Your Feet: An Improviser’s Guide to Business and Communication
Quarter: Winter
Instructor(s): Debra Schifrin, Daniel Schifrin
Date(s): Feb 21—Feb 22
Class Recording Available: No
Class Meeting Day: Saturday and Sunday
Class Meeting Time: 10:00 am—4:00 pm (PT)
Tuition: $450
Refund Deadline: Feb 14
Unit(s): 1
Enrollment Limit: 26
Status: Closed
Quarter: Winter
Day: Saturday and Sunday
Duration: 2 days
Time: 10:00 am—4:00 pm (PT)
Date(s): Feb 21—Feb 22
Unit(s): 1
Tuition: $450
Refund Deadline: Feb 14
Instructor(s): Debra Schifrin, Daniel Schifrin
Enrollment Limit: 26
Recording Available: No
Status: Closed
Thinking on your feet is now mandatory in the workplace. In this interactive, improvisation-based communication course, you will learn skills for handling the unexpected with calm, grace, inclusiveness, and humor. You will increase your agility and grow your confidence in unpredictable situations while adopting critical mindsets. These include being present and open to surprising ideas, cultivating curiosity, and engaging your audience with energy and commitment. Whether addressing one person or 800, you will learn to prevent missteps from derailing you. The course will show how spontaneity can be joyful and how play and humor create authentic connections with your audience. Expect a blend of activities in pairs and small groups, targeted debriefs, discussions, and mini-lectures. By practicing these techniques in a supportive environment, you will emerge as a stronger, more intuitive communicator.
This course is not a theater-performance course; no theater or improv experience is necessary.
DEBRA SCHIFRIN
Lecturer, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Debra Schifrin is a corporate consultant and lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she created the school’s first and only improv-based MBA leadership course, "Spontaneous Management." As the founder of Debra Schifrin Consulting, she designs and leads innovative, improv-based training sessions for businesses on leadership, communications, collaboration, and storytelling. Her clients come from multiple sectors, including AI, tech, consulting, medicine, educational technology, consumer goods, and finance. DANIEL SCHIFRIN
Founder, StoryForward
Daniel Schifrin, through his consulting firm StoryForward, has worked with numerous teams across the corporate and organizational landscape to sharpen and amplify their messages. He has taught creative writing at UC Berkeley, SF State, and Stanford Continuing Studies. His fiction and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. An award-winning fiction writer and playwright, his collection of literary essays, Here You Are, is forthcoming. Textbooks for this course:
There are no required textbooks; however, some fee-based online readings may be assigned.