How to Give Notes in Improv: A Coach's Guide

Giving notes after an improv scene is one of the harder coaching skills, and it's not talked about as much as it should be. Most improv training covers what to do in a scene. Very little covers how to talk about it afterward in a way that actually changes what happens in the next scene.

Bad notes produce silence, defensiveness, or performers who nod and then do exactly the same thing they were just doing. Good notes produce a visible shift in the next scene, sometimes within minutes. The difference is almost entirely technique.

The Core Problem with Most Notes

Most post-scene feedback is evaluative rather than actionable. "That scene was flat." "You weren't committing." "The game wasn't established." These are observations about what went wrong. They are not instructions for what to do differently.

A performer who hears "you weren't committing" knows they failed. They don't know what committing would have looked like in that specific scene, what moment was the one to commit harder into, or what physical or vocal change would produce the result you're describing. They'll try harder in the next scene, which usually means they'll be tense and effortful rather than committed, because "commit more" doesn't have a concrete physical referent.

The standard to aim for: a note should be specific enough that a performer can, in the next 30 seconds, make a physical, vocal, or behavioral choice that implements it.

What Good Notes Look Like

Specific moment, specific choice

Instead of: "You kept blocking your partner."

Try: "At about the 90-second mark, your partner said it was your anniversary. You immediately changed the subject. If you'd stayed with that for one more exchange, let it be real for a moment, the scene would have had something to hold onto."

The performer now knows exactly what happened, when, and what a different choice would have looked like. They can replay the moment in their head. The note is useful.

What to do, not what not to do

Negative instructions are harder to act on than positive ones. "Don't pace" leaves the performer with nothing to do with their feet. "Plant your feet when you're listening and move only when you're making a point" gives them a behavior to replace the pacing with.

For almost any note about a bad habit, there's a version of the note that describes the desired behavior instead. Find that version.

One note per scene, two at most

A performer who receives five notes after a scene can't act on any of them, because they're now thinking about five things. They'll go into the next scene trying to monitor five variables simultaneously, which is incompatible with being present in a scene.

Choose the highest-leverage note. If fixing one thing would fix two others, that's the note. Give it and stop.

Notes on the Group vs. Notes on Individuals

When a scene had a specific structural problem that one person caused, it's tempting to give the note publicly to that person. This often backfires: the performer feels called out, the group feels the tension, and the overall safety level of the room drops slightly.

For notes about individual habits or choices, a short private conversation after the session is usually more effective. The note lands without an audience, the performer can respond honestly, and you can have a real conversation rather than a performance of receiving feedback.

Reserve public individual notes for things that are immediate, specific, and phrased as observations rather than judgments. "In that first exchange, you turned away from your partner when they made the offer. What were you thinking about at that moment?" opens a conversation. "You keep turning away from your partner" shuts one down.

How to Discuss What Worked

Many coaches skip the positive feedback or give it perfunctorily ("good energy, but..."). This is a missed opportunity. Naming what worked specifically helps performers understand what to repeat, and it models the same level of precision you're asking for in the critical notes.

"When you named the object in the second beat, that was the moment the scene found its game. The audience felt it. What were you thinking when you did that?" This tells the performer what worked, explains why it worked, and invites them to understand their own process, which makes them more likely to reproduce the choice deliberately rather than accidentally.

The Tone That Makes Notes Land

Notes given from a position of shared problem-solving land differently than notes given from authority. "I'm trying to figure out why that scene lost energy in the second half" opens an inquiry. "The scene lost energy in the second half because you stopped finding the game" delivers a verdict.

Both might be saying the same thing. But the first one invites the performer into the analysis, which means they're more likely to arrive at the insight themselves rather than receiving it passively. An insight that comes from your own thinking is more likely to change behavior than one that was handed to you.

Notes After Games Like PowerPoint Karaoke

Structured games like PowerPoint Karaoke make notes easier to give because the format provides a shared reference point. You and the performer both saw the same deck, the same moments where something landed or didn't, the same decision points. "On slide three, when the chart appeared, you looked at it for three seconds without speaking. Then you recovered well. What happened in those three seconds?" is a very specific and useful note, possible only because both of you watched the same thing happen in real time.

This is one of the underrated coaching uses of structured games: they create a shared objective record of what happened, which makes notes more precise than notes on open scenes, where the coach and performer may remember different things.