MICRO TEACHING

How to Approach Speaking and Listening through Drama

1.    How to Begin with Teacher in Role

·      Why use teacher in role?

One of the best ways to do that in drama work is to be inside the drama. Therefore, at the centre of the dramas that we include in this book, is the key teaching technique that is used, namely teacher in role . Many times we have watched trainee teachers with a class of children struggling to get attention when giving instructions in traditional teacher mode. Yet, as soon as they move into role, they obtain that attention more effectively.

·      Teacher as storyteller

The teacher as a storyteller is something all primary school teachers will recognise. The teacher’s role will be to communicate the text in a lively and interesting manner, holding their attention and engaging their imagination. In making judgements about the quality of this method of teaching, the critical questions will be around whether the content of the story interests the class and holds their attention, whether the delivery of the teacher. The connection between the teacher as storyteller and the teacher using drama, lies in the fact that they both use the generation of imagined realities in order to teach.

·      Preparation for the role

In preparing to be this kind of storyteller the teacher must have made particular decisions about this child. Begin by asking the class out of role what they want to ask the child and the order of those questions. This not only provides the teacher with some security in knowing what is going to be asked, at least initially, but also allows some minutes to refine the planning, so that the teacher can be specific in answering their questions.  

·      Disturbing the class productively

The drama is developed through a set of activities that build the class role, which is usually a corporate role. We have to help them into the drama, making them comfortable, and then disturb that comfort productively. In setting up the drama we are doing what Heathcote calls ‘trapping.

2.    How to Begin Planning Drama

In this chapter we are going to describe and analyse the main components of planning in drama. On this journey we will visit a number of key planning decisions and approaches. These are:

Ø How to begin a plan

Ø The frame of a drama – first example ‘The Governor’s Child’

Ø The frame of a drama – second example ‘The Wild Thing’

Ø How did this drama evolve?

Ø The ingredients of planning

Ø Learning objectives

Ø Strong material

Ø Roles for the pupils

Ø Tension points – risks – theatre moments

Ø Building context and belief-building

Ø Challenges and decision-making

     There is even an intermediate stage in planning and that is to take parts of different dramas and remake them as new ones. Clearly the teaching/learning objective will drive the shape of the drama, but the engine that drives the drama needs fuel and that fuel is a piece of strong material, a creative idea, and that is more inspirational than an objectives-led design. This material – a book, a piece of literature, a picture or some other subject matter, fiction or non-fiction – will give us one or more of the elements of a good drama, a role or roles, an interesting context or a dilemma.

·      The frame of a drama

Goffman uses ‘frame’ to refer, essentially, to the viewpoint individuals will have about their circumstances and which helps them to make sense of an event or situation and to assess its likely impact upon themselves as individuals. Translated into terms of process drama as a genre of theatre, we could say that Goffman’s frame constitutes a means of laying in the dramatic tension.

·      The ingredients of planning

a.    Learning objectives

The learning can be in any of five areas:

Ø Language Development – the medium of drama and hence the key impetus to Speaking and Listening .

Ø Spiritual, Social, Moral, Cultural, Personal – there is usually this capability in any drama.

Ø The very reflective nature of the work, going out of role to examine the meaning of situations and events in the drama, promotes metacognition.

Ø Comparing the drama version of the story and the original myth.

Ø Clearly the contact points have learning areas related to them.

b.    Strong material

c.    Roles for the teacher

d.   Roles for the pupils

e.    Tension points – risks – theatre moments

f.     Building context

g.    Building belief

h.    Decision-making – key developments in the drama which provide the class with challenges

·      The drama conventions, strategies and techniques

There are many techniques for structuring the stages of a drama. Variety ofactivity for the class is important but each chosen technique must fit the moment and do a particular job. They may:

Ø create context

Ø build belief in the roles and therefore the drama

Ø focus learning

Ø help explore a situation and deepen understanding

Ø help to reflect on the meaning of the event.

·      Planning as a collaborative activity

We also recommend that you plan with at least one other person. Planning for true learning is a social activity and needs to have more than one mind brought in to develop its full potential. In our team, one member may have the beginning of an idea and sketch that idea out, but usually turns to another member of the team for feedback and a planning discussion. This functions as a means to bounce ideas, to see flaws and to provide insights into the potential for learning. The complexity of drama means a multiplicity of possible learning outcomes. .

·      Types of drama

There are two main types of this sort of classroom drama that have evolved ‘living through drama’, where the pupils face the events at a sort of life rate in the here and now, and ‘episodic drama’, or strategy-based drama, where the class are led by the teacher in creating situations and events through specific techniques or strategies and where chronology is more broken

·      What about endings to dramas?

The most difficult thing can be resolving a drama satisfactorily in the time and to the satisfaction of the class. This is to some extent in the planning but mostly in the handling of the drama. The class must always go away feeling they have achieved something. They need to have solved the problem.

3.    How to Generate Quality Speaking and Listening

·      What is speaking and listening ?

Teachers are encouraged to generate this sort of work. Giving a higher status to talk in the classroom offers motivating and purposeful ways of learning to many pupils, and enables them and their teachers to make more appropriate choices between the uses of spoken and written language.

·      Dialogic teaching

English pupils, in this characterisation at least, are individuals struggling to survive in the crowd. The context within which mistakes are admissible, as in the Russian classrooms, greatly reduces this element of gamesmanship. This explains the apparent paradox of why, although the climate of Russian classrooms tends to be viewed by Western observers as authoritarian, even oppressive, Russian pupils are eager to answer questions while in the supposedly more democratic climate of English classrooms they may be reluctant to do so.

·      What does dialogic teaching demand of the teacher?

One of the key changes that drama brings is a different position for the teacher. If the teacher is the young boy, Daedalus, who has taken his father’s secret project design, without his permission, and the pupils are the family servants, then they have important decisions to make about what they do with this knowledge.

·      How is listening of high quality taught through drama?

Drama is the creation of meanings in action and pupils have to struggle all the time to make sense of what is going on around them so that they can engage with it. They have to make sense of the fictional situation as it develops. Unless pupils listen they do not know what is going on. The teacher can provide surprises, challenges, interesting people to meet in the forms of teachers in role; pupils can provide models of language use for each other because lead pupils begin to take initiative and provide input.

4.    How to Use Drama for Inclusion and Citizenship

These are, so inclusion will always be found in drama’s approach to learning and it may also be part of its subject content. Let us begin with defining what we mean by inclusion. In the United Kingdom the Office for Standards in Education Educational inclusion has a broad scope. It is essentially about equal opportunities for all pupils, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, background and attainment, including special needs or disability.

·      What can drama offer in terms of inclusion?

Ø Drama offers ‘new opportunities to pupils who may have experienced previous difficulties’. Drama takes account of pupils’ varied life experiences and needs by using fictional contexts and roles which enable pupils to explore the underlying issues safely.

Ø For some pupils drama may offer experiences that are different to those they experience in the real world.

·      The concept of drama and keeping pupils safe

There is a perception of drama dealing with issues in a safe way because it uses fictional contexts. It is almost as if by shifting to the fictional, a safe emotional distance is automatically created. It would be simplistic to believe that just because we work within fictional contexts, using fictional roles and events, that the experience for pupils is therefore immediately safe from the negative and destructive emotions of real life experiences. In teaching, whether working inside or outside fiction, we need to be constantly aware of the need to treat pupils in ways that demonstrate respect for persons and awareness of their particular social and emotional in that learning situation.

·      Having a voice in society

If we return to the central idea in drama of creating an ‘as if’ world we see that it is a world that is, at least in part, created by the participants through their ideas. As we have seen in the planning section, good planning creates gaps and spaces for pupils to input their ideas. If we plan for pupils’ ideas to be part of the drama lesson and we are creating a safe environment for this to happen, we are in effect giving them a voice to express their understandings and perspective on the world in which they live.

·      Having no voice in society

What these pupils think, say and do often bears no relation to each other. We cannot leave our real-world selves outside the door of the classroom and consequently there is a dynamic relationship between how we think and behave in the fictional world of the drama and how we think and behave in the real world. One can imagine that more secure pupils whose self-worth is high will present a more congruent view of these three factors. This may be because of the risks involved in disclosing those feelings and beliefs, there may be issues of status or conformity which prevent saying what they feel and acting how they see fit.

·      The relationship between inclusion and citizenship

The PSHE and Citizenship framework comprises four interrelated strands which support children’s personal and social development. The strands are:

Ø developing confidence and responsibility and making the most of their abilities;

Ø preparing to play an active role as citizens;

Ø developing a healthy, safer lifestyle; and

Ø developing good relationships and respecting the differences between people.

·      Drama as citizenship in action

So any whole class drama carried out in the methodology represented in this book is strong on the model of democracy, corporate learning, responsibility and tolerance.

·      A drama for teaching about citizenship

If we want the pupils to experience a particular political idea or social situation, the fictional world of drama can provide that situation efficiently and with an immediacy that reality cannot provide.

5.    How to Generate Empathy in a Drama

·      What is empathy?

And later describe these learning outcomes for 7- and 8-year-olds They will continue to build on their capacity for empathy and on their awareness and management of feelings, particularly fearfulness in relation to meeting new challenges . Empathy, like drama, is framed in the particular and so we need to move from broad-brush emotions to their demonstrable particularity. Drama works by focusing upon the particular and moving from the particular to the general. To understand drama’s relationship with empathy we need to deconstruct the process of empathetic behaviour and see how this is replicated in drama.

·      A working definition of empathy

We need a definition that not only belongs to the real world but can be replicated inside the drama lesson. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, suggests that ‘empathizing is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to them with an appropriate emotion’.

·      The components of empathy

The idea of a ‘cognitive’ stage and an ‘affective’ stage in the empathetic process is taken from the writings of Alan Leslie in his work at London University, as summarised by Simon Baron-Cohen.

Ø Component One – the cognitive component. The cognitive component also allows you to predict the other person’s behaviour or mental state’

Ø Component Two – the affective component. This is an observer’s appropriate emotional response to another person’s emotional state’. Having recognised the emotional state of the person, the observer is moved to ‘alleviate their distress’. There is here a desire to do something, to take action, and therefore empathy is not just about recognising the emotional state of someone but also doing something about it.

·      Can we plan for generating empathy?

We can generate empathy through structuring roles and creating a drama frame where it is likely to happen. There are three parts to this process: the role of the teacher, the role of the pupils and the frame in which they are placed.

6.    How to Link History and Drama

·      A problematic alliance

For drama there is a fatal attraction with history as a source for its content. Drama as a medium with which to engage with the past is established in theatre, film, literature, radio and television. In fact one of the Key Elements in the History National Curriculum is the interpretation of history, People represent and interpret the past in many different ways, including: in pictures, plays, films, reconstructions, museum displays, and fictional and nonfiction accounts.

·      Dressing up to go back in time

One popular method of ‘empathising’ in the teaching of history takes the form of dressing up in costumes from the past. Schools across the country plan days of ‘visiting the past’ by dressing up and sometimes actually going to historic sites in their costumes. Teachers may even be locked into roles from the past , thinking, misguidedly in our view, this will generate ‘empathy’ in the pupils with people from history. While dressing up in costumes is a very popular history/drama experience, we must be guarded about what we think children may learn by the experience.

·      Using drama to make meaning of the past

In drama we are particularly interested in the last element. It is here that drama synthesises story and past events. As a teacher planning a history-related drama this does not mean abandoning facts and reasons. If we are to take on roles, some of these roles are people who actually existed in the past, then we must research these roles.

7. How to Begin Using Assessment of Speaking and Listening (and Other English Skills) through Drama

We went through a very interesting and useful process in beginning this chapter. The two of us were initially unclear as to what exactly a chapter on drama and assessment would contain. We have in our work used many approaches and many ideas for the philosophy and practice of assessment. To help our thinking and planning for the chapter we decided to bring in another perspective and met with a colleague, Tony Martin, from English teaching, a very respected and published practitioner, nationally and internationally. Before we met we gave him a draft of Chapter 3 on generating speaking and listening so he had some context.

·      What is assessment?

The primary aim of assessment is to provide information about the development and achievement of those involved in the teaching and learning situation. Assessment records evidence related to students' abilities, both actual and potential, and charts their progression. The intended audience of assessment feedback should always include the students themselves. We are looking at how best to obtain the information on the students’ abilities in Speaking and Listening.

Drama is not just about speaking and listening, but the creation of a fiction, where the art form of drama is essential and the success of that enterprise depends on valuable interaction between all participants. However, we must stress we are primarily looking at assessing speaking and listening, the focus of this book, and we are not providing in this chapter a framework for the assessment of theatre skills, the art form of drama, for personal and social development, nor other learning areas that drama can address. The currency of drama is speaking and listening and in its nature it is swift, fleeting and ephemeral. 

·      What do you look for?

Jim Clark and Tony Goode identify key ways that drama promotes speaking and listening: Drama as a context for speaking and listening:

Ø Negotiating and operating with others in the creation of drama work and the roles within it

Ø Expressing imaginative ideas when contributing to the drama work development

Ø Taking and using effectively the opportunities within the drama that require oral and aural communication

Ø Modifying, selecting and relating language and vocabulary to the changing roles, moods and situations in the drama work

Ø Controlling effectively oral and aural communication particularly in challenging sequences of drama work, e.g. questioning, dilemmas, unfair or emotional situations

Ø Responding with enjoyment and enthusiasm to the exploration of speech, gesture and sound

Contributing effectively to critical evaluation of their own work and that of others We would add to that:

Ø Reflecting on the meaning of the fiction both within and outside the drama. If we believe that drama offers all these opportunities to promote speaking and listening, we cannot neglect its assessment.

·      What is the purpose of the assessment?

To give feedback to the pupil, report to another teacher, report to a parent.  As we have indicated, the first is vital. Pupils need to know what they are doing, how they can improve and to be encouraged in speaking and listening, after all it is the primary communication skill.