Drama Tuesday - How do you plan for teaching Drama
/Changing times but consistent approaches
In sorting through some images in my photo library I found a photo of the first planning tool that I used as a drama teacher. Long time passing in the previous century, our class visited a Friday morning class at Perth Modern School. The teacher, Juliana Kuperis, shared with us her system of lesson planning. In a folder, she had a collection of self-made lesson starter cards (as you can see, reproduced using ink stencils). The cards could be shuffled into different combinations. Collected from a range of sources, these cards included, stimulus ideas for improvisation; prompts for shaping an improv; reminders about voice projection.
This toolkit accompanied me into my first teaching appointment and was developed and extended as I taught. It was rudimentary but taught me the value of organisation (after all these years, I thank you Juliana).
Early in my teaching I found and used the kit based on the ideas of Viola Spolin. (still currently available on Amazon and similar: ISBN-13: 978-0810140073 ISBN-10: 0810140071
My battered version is still part of my library and is useful and valued (though i still twitch when teachers describe drama activities as games As useful as Spolin was in helping us, the troubling connotations of the word “games” trivialising important learning lingers).
I still use many of the activities and approaches derived from Spolin’s work and it is great to revisit the card file system.
Of course, the world of technology has superseded card systems - although I did use for a number of years and recommend to students The drama Game File (https://dramaed.net/the-drama-game-file/) developed by Jonas Basom with accompanying CD-ROM (remember them!). The advertising blurb still says (perhaps a little disingenuous) No previous drama experience is required. The kit includes drama terminology, activities, activity cards for students. It is well organised. This kist is now available digitally
Of course there is nothing to say that you couldn’t make your own card system - or equivalent in digital worlds.
Remember: A toolkit is just that – as a drama teacher there are choices to be made
The amount of material on the internet when you search for drama teaching ideas is a blessing and a curse.There are so many drama teaching ideas out there. The issue is always which ones work. A more important question is:
Which ones are suitable for my students at this moment in the learning journey?
Which ones are age and developmentally appropriate?
which ones will promote the needed learning at this point in the students’ progression?
Or even, which is best for this particular student now?
If teaching is the knowing and caring intervention in the learning process for a particular group of students, then what is my thinking process as a teacher in choosing activities?
In my current approach, i have a series of drama teaching and learning strategies that are the equivalent of my initial card systems. The beauty of a system of strategies is that you have a tool that is adapted le to the text and context of your lesson. In using strategies you draw on your paradigmatic experience. That doesn’t preclude innovation and de novo thinking (inventing a new idea or approach). But it is efficient and must be used in collaboration with an understanding of progression – how student learning develops over time.
There is a fundamental truth about teaching. What matters is not the activity but the choice of activity to match the student(s).A system helps organise the choices that a teacher makes. But what is essential is the human factor – a teacher makes choices. That is the first rule of planning for drama.
