Part One: How to Approach Speaking
and Listening through Drama
1.
How
to Begin with Teacher in Role
Why use teacher in role?
The most important resource you have as a
teacher when using drama is yourself. One of the best ways to do that in drama
work is to be inside the drama. Therefore, the key teaching technique that is
used, namely Teacher in Role (TiR). For example, a trainee was talking out of
role to a class to explain that they were about to meet a girl who was having
trouble with her father and needed their help (see ‘The Dream’ drama based on A
Midsummer Night’s Dream). The class were calling out and not listening properly.
She was talking over them and trying to teach without getting their full
attention. Then she explained that they could ask questions of one of the roles
from the story and that she was going to become that role when she sat down.
She picked up a ribbon with a ring threaded on it and put it round her neck as
the role signifier.
Teacher as storyteller
The teacher
as a storyteller is something all primary school teachers will recognize. The
teacher’s role will be to communicate the text in a lively and interesting
manner, holding their attention and engaging their imagination. 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.
The relationship between story and drama in education is a complex and dynamic
one. It means a known narrative can still be used, the knowledge of the
narrative is not a barrier to its usage.
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. Before the drama session, decide
what attitude you are going to take when questioned by the class. You are going
to be telling them a story but it will be as if they had just met you and it
will not be the voice of the narrator re-telling someone else’s story but in
the present tense as if it is happening now. Of course, all these things are
possible from the text of a book; however, the pupils will be defining what is
important, which are the most important questions to be asked and how to handle
the mood of the storyteller, whose views on the events may be very different
from those of the audience whom he addresses. Be clear about his attitude
towards being left behind, what has happened and how he feels about it. Then
run the hot-seating.
Teaching from within
Moving in and out of role – managing the drama and reflecting on it
We are
describing using role as ‘teaching from within’ because the teacher enters the
drama world, but it is very important to step out of the fiction often and not
let it run away with itself. When using TiR, the teacher is operating as a
manager as well as participant and must spend as much time stopping the drama
and moving out of role (OoR) to reflect on what is happening and give the
pupils a chance to think through what they know and what they want to do. This
OoR working is as important as the role itself. It manages the role and
therefore the drama; it manages the risk, establishes where the class is and
helps pupils believe in the drama. It provides time and space for the teacher
to assess and re-assess the learning possibilities.
Example how
you as the teacher have the opportunity to negotiate how the role behaves with
the class. This also shows a step from hot-seating to role-playing as a
demonstration with a small group. As with all of this section of the book, we
are using an example from drama based upon ‘The Pied Piper’ (see Toye and
Prendiville, 2000, p. 225).
The class in
groups of five have created tableaux as families taking part in bread-making in
the kitchen. They then adapt the picture when a rat invades the space. You set
up going into role with one of the groups that you know will handle the
situation well. OoR you gather the rest of the class round: You will be able to
influence what happens when we stop the action. Otherwise you watch and the
members of this family group can role-play. You will find out who I am from
what I do and say.
OoR is very important
as a way of negotiating the intent and meaning of the role and is the way the
teacher can best control and manage learning. For the class are both an
audience and observers of their own activities. When the drama is stopped they
can describe, recap, interpret, think through, consider next moves and
understand what is the significance of their work.
Disturbing the class productively
Discovery/uncovering – challenge and focus
The teacher’s
function is to provide challenge and stimulus, to give problems and issues for
the class to have to deal with. The drama is developed through a set of
activities that build the class role, which is usually a corporate role. The
key is how children are given information. They can be handed it on a plate or
they can be given opportunities to uncover/discover/be surprised by
information.
Responding to your class
The art of authentic dialogue – needing to listen – two-way responses
The class
working as a community is the key to the use of drama as a teaching method.
This community is made most effective by the teacher participating in role. The
art of teaching and learning should be a synthesis from a dialectical approach.
As the class feed back their responses and make possible development of the
role’s importance the teacher must respond appropriately and therein lies the
skill of the ‘subtle tongue’ and the possibility for authentic dialogue.
The teacher–taught relationship
In all
teaching situations there exists a power relationship between the learners and
the teacher. The learners are bound together as a group merely by being the
learners and, of course, as there are more of them than there are of you, they
hold the power. If the class decide as a group they do not want to learn and
they wish to make your attempts to teach them impracticable, they can do it.
The power in the classroom lies with the class.
2. How
to Begin Planning Drama
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. Then we assemble all the ideas that make up the frame for
a drama.
In planning a
drama we have to write the main frame, the scenario, in a way that indicates
the relationship of the component parts and how the interactions provide
tension and potential.
The ingredients of planning
Our ingredients include the
following.
Learning objectives. The
learning can be in any of five areas:
1. Language Development – the medium of drama and hence the key impetus to Speaking
2. Listening (see ‘How to Generate Quality Speaking and Listening’ p. 41).
3. Spiritual, Social, Moral, Cultural, Personal – there is usually this capability in any drama.
4. Content – the curriculum, focused on any subject – we have highlighted possibilities in our examples for English, History, Technology, Art, Geography.
5. Art Form drama – the more the class do drama the more they understand the form and the more they can manipulate and help shape the work.
6. Thinking Skills – drama models the mental moves that underpin our thought processes: actions and consequences, being logical about decisions, giving reasons and arguing positions. The very reflective nature of the work, going out of role to examine the meaning of situations and events in the drama, promotes metacognition.
1. Language Development – the medium of drama and hence the key impetus to Speaking
2. Listening (see ‘How to Generate Quality Speaking and Listening’ p. 41).
3. Spiritual, Social, Moral, Cultural, Personal – there is usually this capability in any drama.
4. Content – the curriculum, focused on any subject – we have highlighted possibilities in our examples for English, History, Technology, Art, Geography.
5. Art Form drama – the more the class do drama the more they understand the form and the more they can manipulate and help shape the work.
6. Thinking Skills – drama models the mental moves that underpin our thought processes: actions and consequences, being logical about decisions, giving reasons and arguing positions. The very reflective nature of the work, going out of role to examine the meaning of situations and events in the drama, promotes metacognition.
The drama conventions, strategies and techniques
There are
many techniques for structuring the stages of a drama. They may: create context
, build belief in the roles and therefore the drama, focus learning, help
explore a situation and deepen understanding, and help to reflect on the
meaning of the event.
3. How to Generate Quality Speaking and
Listening Authentic dialogue – teacher and pupil talk with a difference
What is speaking and listening ?
Speaking and listening is the most important
communication form that human beings use. Developmental speaking and listening,
will help pupils build their language, their understanding, their ability to
handle their own world, making sense of it and who they are in it.
True speaking
and listening for learning is effective ‘talk’, not two separate activities, as
the phrase ‘speaking and listening’ suggests; it is an oral language
interaction, which, at its best, is complex, demanding and truly creative.
In schools
too often speaking and listening is seen as question and answer, usually the
teacher questioning and the pupils answering. What we see in classrooms is very
often the IRF approach, where the teacher initiates, a child responds and a
teacher gives feedback. This approach limits the pupil’s speaking and listening
engagement with the teacher, as well as preventing engaging with, and listening
to, other pupils. We need to see pupils initiating the talk much more with
pupils asking questions rather than the teacher.
Alexander
promotes dialogic teaching as the most powerful form of talk in the classroom.
He identifies its key elements as:
1.
Collective:
teachers and pupils address learning tasks together, as a group or as a class;
2.
Reciprocal:
teachers and pupils listen to each other, share ideas and consider alternative
viewpoints;
3.
Supportive:
pupils articulate their ideas freely, without fear of embarrassment over
‘wrong’ answers; and they help each other to reach common understandings;
4.
Cumulative:
teachers and pupils build on their own and each other’s ideas and chain them
into coherent lines of thinking and inquiry;
5.
Purposeful:
teachers plan and steer classroom talk with specific educational goals.
How is listening of high quality taught through drama?
In drama we
can get new levels of listening because of the pupils’ interest in the
problem-solving of the drama itself. In order for drama to work the teacher has
to listen very closely as well, to see where the pupils are, to pick up what
the pupils are offering and use it within the drama.
4. How
to Use Drama for Inclusion and Citizenship
Drama’s
inclusion is embedded, first, in its dialogical approach to teaching and
learning. This is reflected in two contracts that form part of its rubric.
These are:
1. Everyone will take part, including the teacher both in and out of role.
2. We will treat members of the group with respect by listening to them and allowing them to express their views without fear of derision or humiliation.
1. Everyone will take part, including the teacher both in and out of role.
2. We will treat members of the group with respect by listening to them and allowing them to express their views without fear of derision or humiliation.
What can drama offer in terms of inclusion?
Drama offers ‘new opportunities to pupils who may have experienced previous difficulties’ (Ofsted, 2006, p. 7). 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. For some pupils drama may offer experiences that are different to those they experience in the real world, for example taking the role of the outsider or the role of the one in charge.
Drama offers ‘new opportunities to pupils who may have experienced previous difficulties’ (Ofsted, 2006, p. 7). 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. For some pupils drama may offer experiences that are different to those they experience in the real world, for example taking the role of the outsider or the role of the one in charge.
He suggests three ways to deal
with a topic indirectly:
1. Enter the topic at an oblique angle to the main issue.
2. Put the pupils in a role that only obliquely connects them with the topic.
3. Use analogy for content.
1. Enter the topic at an oblique angle to the main issue.
2. Put the pupils in a role that only obliquely connects them with the topic.
3. Use analogy for content.
In the drama lesson the
individual’s responses have three components:
● What we think (thoughts) ●
What we say (utterances) ● What we do (actions)
5.
How to Generate Empathy in a Drama
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,
a.
Component One – the cognitive component : understanding the other’s feelings and the ability
to take their perspective’.
b.
Component Two – the affective component: This is an observer’s appropriate emotional response
to another person’s emotional state’ There
is here a desire to do something, to take action, and therefore empathy is not
just about recognizing the emotional state of someone but also doing something
about it.
The cognitive stage
The first stage
of structuring for empathizing is the cognitive stage. In the example given it
has three components:
1.
The
role – Martha represented by a pupil walking down the conscience alley.
2.
The
attitude of Martha as negotiated and agreed with by the class and teacher.
3.
Martha’s
purpose – to enter the workhouse and save the baby.
Can we plan for generating empathy?
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
Using
drama to make meaning of the past
Let
us begin by looking at three elements of historical enquiry:
● A concern with facts ● A
concern with reasons ● A concern with meanings
Balancing the tensions – stories and history
In
using drama we are using a dense form of teaching, because the currency of
drama is language, listening and speaking, and we have a cross-curricular
approach that will touch upon learning objectives from several areas of the
curriculum
7. How to Begin Using Assessment of Speaking and
Listening (and Other English Skills) through Drama
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. When trying to assess it we do not get a
piece of tangible evidence in our hands. So how can we assess this process?
Some teachers say we should not be assessing speaking and listening at all
because it is too complex a process. In addition, teachers often do not know
the speaking and listening programmers of study and particularly the Speaking
and Listening attainment levels of the English National Curriculum in any
significant way. Where speaking and listening is assessed, there is a tendency
to assess it not as an interactive situation, but as a very narrow construct,
something that is not actually speaking and listening at all.
Whatever the
difficulties, we must consider assessing speaking and listening for very good
reasons:
a.
How do we promote better speaking and listening unless we assess and
reflect on the changes in pupils’ handling of the medium?
b.
Are we being fair to those pupils who demonstrate ability in this area
if we do not honour their abilities, especially if they lack success in other
areas
c.
Jim Clark and Tony Goode identify key ways that drama promotes speaking
and listening:
Drama as a context for
speaking and listening
a.
Negotiating and co-operating with others in the creation of drama work
and the roles within it
b.
Expressing imaginative ideas when contributing to the drama work
development
c.
Taking and using effectively the opportunities within the drama that
require oral and aural communication
d.
Modifying, selecting and relating language and vocabulary to the
changing roles, moods and situations in the drama work
e.
Controlling effectively oral and aural communication particularly in
challenging sequences of drama work, e.g. questioning, dilemmas, unfair or
emotional situations
f.
Responding with enjoyment and enthusiasm to the exploration of speech,
gesture and sound
g.
Contributing effectively to critical evaluation of their own work and
that of others
The
purpose of the assessment, to give feedback to the pupil, report to another teacher
and report to a parent
Analysing
video recordings of drama we need to look at issues relating to:
● the language used ● the non-verbal communication ●
proximity to the teacher – who are the invisible pupils, the outsiders of the
drama who do not seem in any way engaged? ● the empathetic and affective
tendencies of pupils, their speech and their actions as they intervene.
Effects on speaking and
listening:
The project emphasized the importance of speaking and
listening as part of the writing process and, of course, used drama and role
play as central themes in developing writing. (UKLA, 2004, p. 18)
