Such a pleasure to be here, such an honor. I can't thank you enough for your advocacy with this program. Also, miss No Mc Lucas has been so outstanding to me as I've gotten things ready for this program, and of course, doctors Bans and Petronio. In addition to being just amazing mentors to me over the years, they've been great friends and colleagues. And so I'm so honored to have this opportunity to talk with all of you today about some of the research that I've been doing over the past few years regarding some new techniques for teaching communication skills, and with that, I'll go ahead and share my screen and we'll get started. I hope we'll have an opportunity to really have some interaction with one another today. I don't know about all of you. In the pandemic. Sometimes getting on these Zoom meetings can feel a little tiring, and I think that engagement with one another really helps us to feel connected. And so looking for the opportunity to chat with all of you today. If you've got your chat screen hidden, you'll want to pull it up. I think it'll be helpful if you've got it pulled up. So that we can have a really robust conversation via the chat. And I think that we'll also have a really fun demo of some of the engagement work that I've been doing with the community and with our faculty on campus. With that, we'll go ahead and jump in and I want to start with just sort of brief warm up question. And asked all of you if you would take a few minutes and use the chat and share some of the features of today's community and why it might be a challenging time to communicate scientific information. So if you would, No was kind enough to put that question in the chat for you, why is it a challenging time to communicate scientific and health information? So Allison starts with mistrust in medicine. Absolutely And that's a double edged sword. More patients have access to more information than ever before, but that also means that they might not trust the information that they have. Katie mentioned a lack of critical reading skills and also want to give credit to folks who are teaching those critical reading skills, all of our librarians in the community. It is hard to teach this right now as the presence of AI becomes more prevalent in all of our work. That can be really challenging to cut through what's real and what's not. And I see Judith mentions patients relying on social media, relying on the community. The thing is, many patients have always relied on their communities to evaluate health information. One of the things that's hard is that information is ubiquitous. There's more of it, and it's also harder to tell what information is credible. And so we know that that can be challenging. Kathy mentioned of the political climate that might have some questioning of science, and certainly that's one of the things that's far Allison also mentioned cultural barriers. And that's absolutely true. The way that communities interpret and make sense of information we know is different across identities. It's different across other kinds of perspectives, and so we want to make sure that as we're thinking about information, we're not just thinking about it in the context of, I've shared a message with you. You get the message, call it good. But instead looking for those places of interpretation that we know happen. Katie mentioned historical mistreatment. And I want to underscore that, as well. As many of you know that I've just brought students back from a trip to Poland where we visited Auschwitz, and you really get to see firsthand there are some of the atrocities that come from using communication as a tool for evil. And so certainly that's been a place where we've seen challenges in communicating information because if I don't trust the medical community, I'm not going to participate in research, and that can sometimes be a challenge to making sure that our data reflects all of the communities we're trying to serve. And you mentioned health equity, and I think that that's also an issue. We have obviously varying levels of health literacy in our communities. Again, part of our responsibility, I think, as public scholars, for those of us who work in the university community is to help our communities think about how to make sense of that information in the context of their cultural backgrounds because we know that that's an important part of not only patient adherence, but trust in the system. Yeah, you've got lots of really hard hard things that are shaping our approach to thinking about communicating with the public. One of the things that I'll mention as that scholars are not traditionally taught to do this. Many of us are taught to write academic research papers. We are perhaps taught to maybe write a policy brief, let's say, you might be taught to adapt your information for policymakers to some extent, or let's say if you're a physician, you're taught to write for other physicians, but not necessarily to think about translating your information to the public. One of the things I want to mention as we move on is that what I'm talking about here isn't just watering down information. I think that that's a metaphor that you hear people use a lot. Well, I don't want to water down my science. What we're talking about is really translating or distilling your message down to the key elements to help our community make decisions. I'll talk a little bit more about what that might look like. In 2017 and this task force started well before 2017, the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine released a report that is available publicly if you just Google this title, you'll find it called Communicating Science effectively a research agenda. I want to draw your attention to this particular quote, which connects really closely to a cognitive bias that we all have called the Information Deficit model. The information deficit model, as I mentioned, it's a cognitive bias that says, if people just had more information, they would make better decisions about their health or about science. We know that that's not true. More information doesn't necessarily lead to better decision making. This is how the National Academies responds to that. They say, people rarely make decisions based only on scientific information. They also take into account their own goals and needs, knowledge and skills, and values and beliefs. The example that I use very frequently, so my apologies for folks who have heard this before, but If you think you are one of these people that only makes decisions based on science, I'd like to encourage you to think about the last time that you talked yourself out of exercising. We all know the research that says exercise is good for us and that we should do it. But we have great strategies that we use to talk ourselves out of exercise. I need to spend time with my family. I've got too much work to do. I did it yesterday, so I deserve a break today. It's not just that scientific information that we use to make decisions, but it's our experiences, it is our values. We can talk ourselves in and out of lots of scientific information, even if we know it's good. Keep that in mind as we approach thinking about why these more improv based techniques might get us past some of that. I want to talk a little bit about these improv based techniques that we've been using. I think it's helpful to level set a little bit on the definition of Improv and what we are doing here at IU and a number of other institutions across the country. So Applied improvisation draws on the principles and practices of improvisational theater to enhance and transform relationships in other kinds of spaces. This is not a new concept. The applied improvisation network, which is a professional organization of individuals who use improv based techniques to teach, has been around for just over ten years. So folks have been using these methods for a long time. Improv has been used in a host of fields to address some of the challenges that individuals within those fields face. And I'll give you an example. Doctor Barbara Tints, who is the former president of the Applied Improv network has studied the use of Applied improv in disaster relief contexts, and that stands to reason, every moment that you're in doing disaster relief is an opportunity to improvise and collaborate with others. We know that this has been successful in other spaces. My colleagues and I here at IU Use these techniques and have studied these techniques, particularly to teach biomedical PhD students and faculty, as well as medical students, residents, and physician faculty, to communicate in policy and advocacy context and with the general public. We have also had the benefit of serving as partners for a number of years with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, which is a center you may have heard of in part because it bears Alan Alda the actor's name. And Stony Brook has been very successful at using these techniques as well. So I want to stand on the shoulders of giants in the field and say this is not new. But I think that the way that we're approaching at IU is new, and I want to talk about that because one of the things that we've done is really woven these perspectives throughout the continuum of training from our trainees and students all the way to our faculty. And I think that it is that consistency that makes the approach that we're using unique. When you think of when you think of Improv, most of the time, folks think of comedy. You might think of the television show whos line is it anyway or Second City, which is the comedy troupe that hatched the careers of many Saturday night live stars like Tina Fay or Jordan Peel. But Improv applied Improv and Improv is a theater technique was actually developed by Viola Spolen, who was a theater artist and educator in Chicago at the turn of the century. And she was a student of Neva Boyd, who is American sociologist, and this is a picture of Viola Spolen on your screen. Together, they worked with Jade Adams Hull House in Chicago, providing educational opportunities for working class people and immigrants in the surrounding neighborhood. Boyd and Splen's work really taught us that there is much to be learned about ourselves and one another by leaning into instead of resisting the unknown. That's one of the places where I think that improv becomes a really helpful tool for teaching communication about science and health, because so much of what we talk about is not certain. I think that that's one of those places where our faculty members, our physicians, our scientists, colleagues struggle is talking about uncertainty with folks in the community. When when we implemented some of our improvisational theater techniques at IU, we really started with four principals or tenets, and I'll show them here on your screen and then I'll talk about each one. When I talk about each of these tenets, I want you to think about them as a mindset or a way of approaching communication that might be different than what you've traditionally thought of. We'll walk through each of these and then I'll give you a quick demo. The four principles are yes and, which is probably the one you've seen most frequently. The second is bring a brick, not a cathedral, which is a little bit of a metaphor, and I'll talk about that. The third is follow the follower, and the fourth is make your scene partner look good. You'll notice that there's some theater language in these that will unpack a little bit. L et's start with yes, and. When improvisers start a scene, they have the idea that they are accepting the reality that their scene partner is bringing to them. If Steve and I were in a scene together and I offered Steve a glass of milk, Steve doesn't have to like milk or drink milk, but Steve needs to accept that milk is now in the scene. He can do whatever he wants with it. There's Steve with his glass of milk. And so Steve likes milk. This is great. But no, does not like milk. One of the places where I think this is particularly helpful when I'm talking with my colleagues in science and in medicine about this concept is thinking about the conversational realities that our patients bring to the exam room. If we are talking with a patient who might be hesitant to vaccinate their child, One of the realities of that space is that fear is in the room, that fear that comes from maybe reading some things online or talking to community members. I think for those of us that are used to making decisions based on objective data, it's really easy to say that the best way to combat that fear is with good information. Again, I'll remind you of that information deficit model that we know that that doesn't work. And so one of the things that we try to help our colleagues focus on is the values that they share. I think that that's one of the things that's an important part of this conversation is that in the case of this parent who's concerned about vaccinating their child, the value that that parent shares with that physician is wanting to keep their child safe. How do we start that conversation with we both share this value? I think that's a powerful place to start from. I'm happy to talk about more about how we've use these models to help folks practice conversations when we're talking about vaccine hesitance. The second improv principle that I want to encourage you to take with you today is bring a brick, not a cathedral. Again, I mentioned before, this is a metaphor, so I hope that the image will help you remember it. Oftentimes when we approach difficult conversations, we approach them with a fully formed plan, an idea of how we hope things should go. Think about the last time you had a difficult conversation or an argument with your spouse or significant other. You probably approach that conversation saying, I know what they're going to say, and then I'm going to say this, and they're going to say this, right The thing about approaching that conversation from that fully formed plan is that it doesn't leave you open to building something new together. Bring a brick not a cathedral is a metaphor that essentially says, instead of coming with that cathedral with that fully formed plan for the conversation, what if we each came with a pile of bricks and worked together to build the cathedral? And through that metaphor, you can see that we're creating shared meaning of a conversation together. That means coming to that conversation with a level of openness that we may not have traditionally had in that space. When we think about translating this for the science or health context, we're talking about the idea that some of my colleagues may want to approach, and I'm with them on this. Having a can slide deck. We're busy. We have the set of slides we use every time. And encouraging us to think about how that can slide deck might limit opportunities for conversation for creating shared meeting together, and that starting with a last formed plan could offer an opportunity to engage and connect with the audience differently. The third principle today is follow the follower. I like this one. Again, I hope the image helps sear it in your brain for you. In Improv, swollen often speaks of the notion of the ensemble, which is a group of improvisers who function collectively together. They follow one another's cues, and ensemble members who have practiced together often know what the strengths of their conversational partners are and can amplify those or can tee up a colleague to share an idea or a perspective. This kind of connection, I think comes from a mix of interpersonal connection, hyper focus that comes from some of the improv games that we play and trust. The thing is, those three things, interpersonal connections, focus on the other and trust are really hard to build fast. But that's what we ask physicians and scientists to do in a tweet in a 15 minute encounter with a patient to build trust quickly. And so one of the things that we know from playing some of these improv games with our colleagues is that by tuning in, by turning their attention outward, that you can create that trust more quickly. And there are specific strategies that we engage our physicians and scientists to do. One of them, for example, is metacommunicating, talking about talking. And that talking about talking. Asking a patient, what are your preferences about the way that I communicate with you? Who did you bring with you to support you today? Those kinds of approaches are really focused on drawing on the experiences of the patient to make the interaction meaningful and to create that level of trust. The fourth one is make your scene partner look good. I've got some jazz musicians here as an example to take with you. When we're in an improv scene together, there's no star of the show. That's one of the tenets of improv, that it's every actor's job to make the other person's scene partner look good. And when we're communicating about something serious like we were during the pandemic, it's easy to get frustrated, because we have very different goals sometimes than our colleagues do. But part of what making your seam partner look good means in the context of science and health communication is looking for those values, those passions that we share, even though we might have different approaches to the way that we think about solving a problem. Starting from that place of, there are some goals that we have that we share and then building on that together. The other thing that I think make your scene partner look good means is the idea that you want to give someone the benefit of the doubt. If we take that vaccine hesitant parent that I mentioned earlier, that parent not necessarily have all the information they need, or they may not be ready to accept that information. Thinking about how you can work together to move the needle in the right direction is one of the strategies that we talk about, when we're talking about making your scene partner look good. So with that in mind, what I'd like to do is take an opportunity to let you see what this looks like. So when we run trainings, when we run courses here at IU and are using these theater methods to teach scientists and physicians how to communicate together, I wanted to show you what an activity looks like. It's very experiential. One of the things that you'll often hear us talk about is the idea that communication is not necessarily like a t a traditional knowledge based course where you just read about communication and you get better at it. You've got to practice in order to get better at it. And that's really what these games or these activities help us to do. With that, I've asked a couple of my colleagues to serve as demonstrators for all of us today. I'm going to stop share so that we can pin our colleagues and I see them there, doctor Matt Holly, and Professor Mel Weiner. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Matt and Mel are going to demonstrate an activity, a game that we use whenever we teach these techniques. This will give you a sense of what this looks and feels like so that you get to be a fly on the wall in our classroom. I'll ask Nori to pin the three of us if you wouldn't mind to everyone's screen so that we can see Matt, myself and Mel. You pin. Okay. Great. Matt and Mel have agreed to demo this game called T traveler. For the first round, it looks like we've got Mel is going to be our time traveler. He's a perfectly smart person from 300 years ago, and Matt is going to be our present day person. They're going to do this very quick role play, and I'm going to give you a minute Mel to explain to Matt what a smart phone call is. He's from 300 years ago. What did you say, Matt? Flipped it, I flip it backwards? Yes. Okay. You guys know what you're supposed to do. All right. One of the things that we want to keep in mind, again, is that as you play your characters, you're perfectly smart people, you can ask questions of one another. But when you're thinking about this activity, we always start from this place of what is it about a smart phone call that makes someone excited to use the phone? I don't know about you all, but T Mobile is very happy to sell me the brand new fancy phone. They don't just sell it to me by telling me what the latest features are. The other thing I'll mention and this is one of the things we say in our classes frequently is that a minute is not long enough to explain modern telephony to anyone. You really need to think about what is it that motivates a person from 300 years ago to want to use a phone. With that in mind, I'll let you turn on your microphones and I'll put a minute on my clock and I'll tell you when you're ready. Melon Map, go ahead. Well, Mel, welcome to 2024. I wanted to take. I know, right? It's been a crazy couple of days here. But I want to share with you this wonderful device called a smartphone. And I know that you are probably maybe most familiar with talking to another person directly in front of them. That's probably how you communicate most often talking directly to them. Now, I want you to think about also the concept, let's say where you came from, if you wanted to communicate with another person who, maybe lived several hundred miles away, let's say you've got a friend who lives in Maine, and you wanted to communicate with them. Your only opportunity is probably to write a letter, right? I will take several days or months to get delivered. Well, in our current time frame, our technology has advanced so much where we can send messages through a system of wires that we're creating materials, like copper and aluminum that can be sent through electrical current. The the stone you held up. Yeah. This actually is the device itself. So, what happens is that we get so advanced that we can send these messages through space through satellites that orbit in like the moon. And these signals are uploaded and downloaded. And pursed. And these devices, we've got these little handheld devices where we can actually send and receive those messages. So in our current time, like, if you wanted to talk to your friend in Maine, you do in real time, face to face, hearing both their voice and seeing them. All right, Let's pause there. Great job. So Mel, I'm going to ask you to pay Matt a compliment. What's something that he said or did that you felt was especially convincing for you? I think it was especially convincing that he showed the phone first, so there was something that I knew we were talking about. Of course, raised questions for my 300-year-old self. But But yeah, that was to me a very good first connection. Great. Great. So I think what we'll do now is trade places. In this round, Mel will be the explainer. Matt will be the time traveller. Matt, you had a bumpy ride on your way here from 300 years ago and you've broken an arm. So you're in a little bit of pain. Let's start with that. I'll have you convince Matt to get an x ray. Again, a reminder, a minute or so is not enough time to explain how x rays work. We do this children. We convince them to get x rays all the time. Think about what questions might you ask Matt that would help him to feel more confident about the procedure. I'll put about a minute or 90 seconds on the clock. Mel the floor is yours. Matt, what happened to your arm? Oh, I just in so much pain. Scott Bacil makes time travel look so easy. Oh, my gosh. I feel so bad about that pain. That is terrible. Luckily, for you, though, you landed in a hospital on your time real journey. Yes, a place where we treat the ill in a big room. Let's be a big group. And we have a way of helping you get out of pain. And this way is by finding out what's going on in your arm. Have you ever seen a healed arm in your experience, did someone have one before you came? They would maybe, like, create some device to set it, but you just, like, you know, sometimes people it will work or it won't work or we have a device that helps you know before what will happen after the bone gets set. And the way it works is it takes a picture of your arm. Like not a painting would be the closest you probably know about, but it shows you what's going on with the shape of your arm. But this will surprise you from the inside instead of from the outside. Underneath the skin and everything. Underneath the skin and everything. It has vision that can go into dark spaces. All right, Let's pause there. Thank you. Mel, and Matt. Matt, can you pay Mel a compliment? What's something that Mel said that was especially convincing to you? You know, there's a place where people can go where that is solely focus on helping them feel better. Absolutely. Absolutely. The concept of a hospital. Yeah. Yeah. And he explained it in a way that was language that was familiar to you, right? He tried to use those that sort of metaphor, simile of like a picture, something that you're familiar with. Good. Please join me if you would in giving Mel and Matt a virtual round of applause. This is a really hard thing to do on Zoom, and I really appreciate it. One of the things that I'll notice as I was listening to Mel and Matt talk is the extent to which both of them attended to the other person's emotional state. For some of us, that comes really naturally. But in both of these cases, I cued them to the idea that we want to start with emotion first and deliver information second. In both cases Mel and Matt did that. That's a really important part of this process, thinking about what is the emotional state of the individual with whom you're communicating. How can you start from that place in order to build shared meaning together? I'm going to bounce back to my slides and talk a little bit more about what it is about these kinds of activities that I think make folks feel really excited to work together. One of the things that we know from these activities is that it creates a space where individuals feel comfortable sharing their experiences. I think that for many scientists and physician colleagues, the idea of sharing their experiences first seems a little antithetical. I'm here to deliver information to you. I'm here to give you a talk. I'm here to explain to you how this works. Why would I need to necessarily share or share emotion with you? And we know that emotion is a key part in processing information. So one of the reasons why this concept works is that it gives us an opportunity to attend to both the content level message, sharing information, and the relational or emotional level message, a tenet that has existed in communication studies since the 1930s. So these kinds of techniques give our scientists and physician colleagues the muscle memory that they need to bring up some of that emotional state first before delivering information. Again, I want to mention just like any other type of academic learning, some folks do this naturally. Some folks just prefer to communicate in this way. For other folks, maybe it depends on the context. Maybe in one context in the classroom, you're perfectly comfortable sharing your emotional perspective with your learners. But when you interact with a patient, you put that objective perspective on. I think part of what we want to encourage folks to do as we think about these experiential activities is offer folks an opportunity to think about when can you foreground information and background emotion? When can you bring emotion in in a place that is appropriate and helpful to the conversation? Again, keeping in mind that National Academies report that says, we don't just process information from an objective perspective, but we take that information and assimilate it into our own values, goals, and beliefs. For a few years, I have been working with my colleague, Jason Organ, who's a faculty member in Anatomy to develop these programs for the American Association of Anatomy, and I've been working with them since before the pandemic. One of the things that we know about faculty members in anatomy is that they often have opportunities to communicate with the public about the way that our understanding of our anatomical structures have changed over time. I think that that's sometimes surprising to the general public. A heart is a heart and the heart. But the way that we understand anatomy does change over time. And I think that the quotes from our participants are really powerful. I'll just underscore a few things that I see here on the screen that I'll mention. This is from a paper that I think is on our scholar works page, and you're welcome to go back and read it. But one of our participants said, I think, a course is really valuable for both scientists who want to communicate their science and for educators as they find ways to explain things in class. Again, we understand from learning theory, the relationship between emotion and learning, and these types of techniques offer us opportunities to consider them in the context of one another. I love this quote from one of the participants who said it's my responsibility to engage with an audience using storytelling and empathy. Again, knowing that we as humans are built to tell stories together, having these narrative perspectives can be really powerful. Then the last one, the idea that this person needs to be mindful of how the vocabulary that they are comfortable with is not the vocabulary that the community not only understands, but appreciates, that sometimes the language that we use in academics, though it makes sense to us may actually discourage our community members from engaging with us. I love these quotes. Again, we've got some nice quantitative data as well to illustrate the ways in which our colleagues have been using these techniques to communicate with the general public. So with that in mind, I want to give us an opportunity to engage in some conversation together? And I just want to leave you with a couple of thoughts before we jump into conversation. Many of the problems that I think that we faced in the pandemic were actually while they were about health and science, they were also about communication, and I'm thinking of questions like, do audiences believe the information that we're sharing? Do people trust the public health officials that we're communicating with? Things were changing so rapidly. How do we adjust our message based on new information that we have? Not everyone has time for an improv class. I get that. But I hope that the four principles that I provided for you about building meaning together, that idea of bringing bricks and Cathedrals, making your scene partner look good, drawing on the reality of that conversational partner. What I'm advocating for here is a shift in how we think about communicating. They're designed to focus on being kind to ourselves and to one another and giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt as we're interacting. So, we know that some people are naturally better at communicating and I don't think that that changes depending on how stressful the situation is. We can't be expected to be at our best all the time, and I think that's especially true when information is uncertain. But as a scholar of communication as a teacher, I have to believe that communication can be learned. And like playing an instrument or playing a sport. We really believe that these get better through practice. As you approach your conversations, I want to encourage you to think about those principles that I mentioned, and I'll pull them back up so you can take a look at them together. We can think about maybe which of these principles you could apply to your own conversations or your own interactions with others. With that, I'll go ahead and pause and say, thank you for listening today, I'm going to pull up those four principles here so that we can talk about them together. I think Nori has a question that'll go in the chat for us here. I'm trying to watch the chat here. Our question then for the chat as we wrap up our conversation today is how might you incorporate one of the four improv principles into your own conversations? Even if you're not a person who talks about science and health information all the time, I think that these principles can apply to conversations lots of different spaces. I really appreciate your time and you're thinking through them. Looking. Doctor Blackman so good to see that idea of creating shared meaning through vocabulary, I think is a really important part of this process and Using examples that are culturally relevant. Thinking about how can we adapt our examples to the experiences and the reality of the individuals with whom we're communicating. Yeah, I love that. Allison mentioned earlier that she likes the brick metaphor. Thank you Allison and makes you listen and not think about what you're saying next. We actually have a specific activity that we do around that called first word Last, where we ask our participants to have a conversation with one another, but they have to use the last word that the person said as the first word in their next sentence. It's a really fun little activity to do. Again, makes you focus on listening to the whole thing before getting ready to speak. Yeah, Matt connected yes and to appreciative inquiry. Yeah, I think that that's important. I think it's easy to see yes, and two as can always say yes to everything and that doesn't necessarily mean that. Instead, it can mean that piece of accepting the reality. Asking your partner a question, if you disagree, that's not my perspective, but tell me how you got there. How did you get to that perspective so that I can better understand your thought process? Yeah, Kathy, thank you. Shifting focus to a process. This is one of the things I think that again, such an important communication principle that it's really easy to start from this place of, this is the information I want to share as opposed to, this is the relationship that I want to build. I think starting from that place of relationship can be really powerful. Rachel, thank you. Rachel is such an amazing faculty on campus, using yes and with students. Absolutely and clients. Thinking about what are the activities that you're comfortable with, what is it that brings you joy? Then how can you do more of that in your interactions with them? Yeah, and Melson not having to learn all at once. I think that this is also one of the things that's powerful about this method. What we're talking about is small conversational shifts. We're not saying throw the baby out with the bathwater, but saying here are just small shifts you can make in the way that you ask questions or the way that you approach sharing information and building relationships with others. That's great. I'm just reading the rest of the comments. T hank you all for your engagement. All right. I'm going to stop Share and see if there are questions from the audience. I know, Steve, you're going to help me with that, too, right? Right. So we want to encourage people to unmute and turn on your camera, if you'd like. We can go ahead and talk to each other too since this is all about improv, right? We might just have a conversation. That's right. I won't get it right every time. Well, one thing I'm wondering about as we have some people coming on board, are there opportunities on campus in the community to practice this stuff? Do you offer courses or where would people go or how does that happen? Absolutely. So I'll give you some examples on campus, and then I can also give you some reading to do and some other ways to engage with this content. So on campus, we offer a number of different ways to engage in this content. We offer credit varying courses for graduate students, undergraduate students across the training spectrum. We use these techniques when we are teaching patient writer communication in our intra doctoring course in the med school. We also offer a workshop series for faculty, staff, and learners who are interested particularly in building their communication skills with the public. That's offered through my office, Faculty Affairs and Professional Development. It's a short three workshop series, and it ends with an opportunity to practice using an on camera interview, so you get a chance to kind of put all the skills you've learned together into that one moment. We don't do anything with the interview. You get to take it home with you and you can virtually burn it if you want to. But it's just a way to sort of, you know, kind of performance based approach to thinking about put bringing those skills together. So we're really proud of that. If you're not on campus and you're interested in learning more about these concepts, I'll offer a couple of books. So Leonard and Yorton Rodo, who are the head trainers for Second City, wrote a book called Yes and that we actually use as a textbook in our classes. The students love it, and it really is a good way of seeing these improv principles in real life. The other book that I'd recommend is Alan Aldos book. If you saw my face, didn't mean I understood. His book is really outstanding and is a wonderful a little bit of a memoir about his experience with the PBS show Scientific American frontiers and talking about the work that he's done over the years, communicating science with the public. Even if you're not here physically here on campus, those are some books that you can read to learn a little bit more about these methods. And don't worry, folks if you didn't catch all those resources because what we'll do is put them into an e mail message that comes to you afterwards. That also includes an invitation to a short survey, an evaluation of your experience today. So we'll be able to provide that information later on. Did anybody who came on screen did you want to have a question or a comment? I know there was a comment in here from Judith about appreciating your vulnerability. Did you see that? Absolutely. Thank you. I would love to just underscore that a little bit more. One of the things that I think that is to me most powerful about these techniques is that it simulates the emotional experience we have when we have a tough conversation. Communication is embodied. When I get nervous, my heart beats fast, I get a little flush. That happens for all of us. When we practice communication in the ideal setting without being nervous at all, it's really easy to do it well. These types of activities simulate that vulnerability for us a little bit. And I think that that's important. Barnett Pierce is one of my favorite communication scholars, used to always say, if communication got us into this problem, communications got to give us out. I love that because I think it does illustrate the idea that when a conversation doesn't go well and sometimes they don't, you got to use communication to solve the problem together. And I think that these techniques give us some strategies for doing that beyond just saying, I'm sorry. I have to say, Krista, I heard you say earlier that these techniques really take into account the importance of the relationship, that that's a focus for a successful communication as a social worker. I always have to say yes, that's an important piece of what we're doing. Absolutely. This it's about ten till the hour. This is the time that we usually take a pause to thank our guests today for our conversation and give her a round of applause and allow those that need to go off to whatever else you need to do at the top of the hour and officially end our time. However, we will hang around for a few minutes because there may be some other things that folks want to talk about or have a little more chat, and we'll go up to the hour for folks that would like to stay. But if you are one of those that has to get to the next place, we thank you for coming. We doctor Longton, for giving us these ideas today and participating. Remember, this has been re. You're welcome to access that later share with others, or take advantage of the resources that she's provided, as we all work to improve improv, our communication skills. So thank you, Christa. We appreciate it. And thanks again to Matt and Mel for serving as our demonstrators today. I really appreciate it.