Stephen Davidson and Monica Gaga introduced the idea of accommodations to me in 2020 and it's something I've been incorporating into my classes ever since. I had always included a loose check-in at the start of class when a group was meeting each other for the first time but there are a couple of aspects of accommodations that are more thought-through and systematised.

Accommodations go hand-in-hand with boundary setting as a way to keep a teaching space open and communicative. In essence, it's asking each student in turn if there's anything they want the class to know in order to get the most out of the time we're about to spend together. Perhaps they are the parent of a young child and might need to periodically shut off their Zoom camera to attend to them? Perhaps they've just had a bad day and don't have high energy levels? The key point is that if a student thinks it's relevant, then it IS relevant.

Is there anything we need to know, anything we can do to make this a more enjoyable space to be in for the next two hours?

I think this is such a generous and important question to ask at the start of class. Students can answer verbally to the whole class or (if we're online) put it in the chat or send a private message to me as the instructor. I often follow Stephen & Monica's example and say that an accommodation can be physical, mental or emotional - it's often worth thinking through all three - you can be happily focussed in the moment but have bad back pain, for example. Or feel fine physically, and excited to be in class, but acknowledge that you're having trouble concentrating after a bad night's sleep.

They key to all of this is that accommodations change. Week to week, day to day, sometimes hour to hour. That means that you need to leave time to check in EVERY class. It's a great way to build an open and honest atmosphere at the very beginning of each session, allow your students to land and provide a bit of comfort and structure.

Whereas something like boundaries - if or how you want to be touched, topics and themes that you don't want to address in your improv - will remain fairly consistent week to week (although it's probably worth returning to those periodically too), accommodations will vary wildly. That was the big revelation for me. That you can't tick a box at the beginning of week one and then assume that nothing is going to change. Human beings aren't like that. We're a process, we're a continuum, we wake up each day a brand new person.

Being serious about accommodations means that every version of you still gets to play.