“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, at
the centre of the dramas that we include in this book, is 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. The trainee was using the simplest form of TiR,
hot-seating the role, where the class meets the role sitting in front of them
and can ask questions. TiR creates a particular context and can raise the level
of commitment and the meaning-making. It can ‘feel real’ even though it is not.
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. 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
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. Be clear about his attitude towards being left behind,
what has happened and how he feels about it. This interactive storytelling has
an immediacy and urgency and is working at a different level of discourse from
the read story, and yet it is still storytelling.
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 thedrama
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. Let
us look at an example to see how you as the teacher have the opportunity to
negotiate how the role behaves with the class. 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. When the drama is stopped they can
describe, recap, interpret, think through, consider next moves and understand
what is the significance of their work.
The
requirements of working in role
The
teacher, is an important stimulus for the learning. It is not necessary to use
role throughout the piece of work. It can be used judiciously to focus work at
strategic points or to challenge particular aspects of the children’s
perceptions whilst other techniques and conventions are used to support the
work and develop it. In order to make the TiR most effective, we need to look
at educational drama from the point of view of the ‘audience’, an audience who
in this instance are participants at the same time. This will help us shape up
the TiR elements particularly according to how the audience is seeing things.
Here are two responses to considering the ‘audience’ position. This is why this
sort of whole group drama has so much learning potential. It involves the
‘audience’ in the process of the play-making, at the same time providing the
teacher with ways of influencing directly the situation and the meanings.
Disturbing
the class productively
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. We
have to help them into the drama, making them comfortable, and then disturb that
comfort productively. The fact that, as in any good play, the class discover
things as they go along provides the possibility of productive tension. In
setting up the drama we are doing what Heathcote calls ‘trapping [them] within
a life. The result of constructing the situation thus is that they can then
discover what it all means. There, and in the resulting choices and decisions,
lies the learning potential, borne out in an exciting challenge.
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.
in drama we have the possibility of shifting the power when we are inside the
fiction because we may choose a role that has low status and has little power.
It can result in a different kind of dialogue from the usual teacher/pupil one
and this can be very attractive to pupils. There are five basic types of role
and mostly can be illustrated from the ‘The Dream’ drama, they are: The authority role, The opposer role, The
intermediate role, The needing help role and The ordinary person.
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. Then we assemble all the ideas that make up the frame
for a drama. The way that planning drama is a creative and dynamic activity,
not done by just following a set of procedures. The frame is a dynamic,
interrelated and complex weaving of all the other ingredients. 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.
·
Language Development – the medium of
drama and hence the key impetus
to Speaking and Listening.
·
Spiritual, Social, Moral, Cultural,
Personal – there is usually this capability in any drama.
·
Content–the curriculum, focused on any
subject.
·
Art Form drama
·
Thinking Skills
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 reflect on the meaning of the event.
Planning as a
collaborative activity
Planning
for true learning is a social activity and needs to have more than one mind
brought in to develop its full potential. This functions as a means to bounce
ideas, to see flaws and to provide insights into the potential for learning.
There are two main types of this classroom drama: ‘living through drama’, where
the pupils face the events at a sort of life rate in the here and now, and
‘episodic 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.
3. How
to Generate Quality Speaking and Listening
What is speaking and listening ?
Speaking and listening is the most
important communication form that
human beings use.
Really effective oracy, 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: Collective, Reciprocal, Supportive, Cumulative
and Purposeful. Drama shares the elements listed above,
and it promotes pupils’ thinking because of the quality, dynamics and content
of talk that can develop. Why is drama so powerful in promoting good talk? It
is about pupils having the desire to speak rather than being required to speak.
Drama gives the pupils plenty of opportunities to think through speaking and
listening. It promotes speech from the pupils because they want to speak, not
because they are being asked to speak. Drama sets up more fluid situations with
more possibilities.
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.
Secondly,
the subject content of dramas can have specific learning potential
to
give a voice to groups whose ideas may not be heard easily in the real world.
What
can drama offer in terms of inclusion?
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. 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.
The concept of
drama and keeping pupils safe
It
can called by keeping pupils safe because it uses fictional contexts. It is
almost as if by shifting to the fictional, a safe emotional distance is
automatically created. We must remember that pupils have no choice about
attending school; they are required to attend, whether they want to or not and
there are consequences for pupils and parents if they do not do so.
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.
In the drama lesson the individual’s responses have
three components: What we think (thoughts), What we say (utterances) and What
we do (actions).
5. How
to Generate Empathy in a Drama
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 (2003, pp. 29–30).
Component
One – the cognitive component : understanding the other’s
feelings and the ability to take their perspective’
Component
Two – the affective component : This is an observer’s
appropriate emotional response to another person’s emotional state’
The cognitive stage
The
first stage of structuring for empathising is the cognitive stage. In the
example given it has
three components, they are: The role, The attitude of Martha and Martha’s
purpose.
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
In using drama, we are using a dense form of
teaching, because the currency of drama is language, listening and speaking. We
have a cross-curricular approach that will touch upon learning objective 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 programmes of study and particularly the Speaking and Listening
attainment levels of the English National Curriculum in any significantway.
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:
·
How do we promote better speaking and
listening unless we assess and
reflect on the changes in pupils’
handling of the medium.
·
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?
·
Jim Clark and Tony Goode identify key
ways that drama promotes speaking and listening:
Drama as a context for
speaking and listening
·
Negotiating and co-operating with others
in the creation of drama work
and the roles within it
·
Expressing imaginative ideas when
contributing to the drama work development.
·
Taking and using effectively the
opportunities within the drama that
require
oral and aural communication.
·
Modifying, selecting and relating
language and vocabulary to the changing
roles,
moods and situations in the drama work
·
Controlling effectively oral and aural
communication particularly in challenging sequences of drama work, e.g.
questioning, dilemmas, unfair or emotional situations
·
Responding with enjoyment and enthusiasm
to the exploration ofspeech, gesture and sound
·
Contributing effectively to critical
evaluation of their own work and that of others.
In conclusion, we know that assessing
and recording speaking and listening is a demanding task, but we would contend
that is no more demanding than other assessment if it is approached in the
right way. Furthermore, we would maintain that the absence of evidence of
pupils’ speaking and listening in a school limits their progress in all areas
of literacy and is depriving them of a key entitlement.
What is the purpose of
the assessment?
To:
● give feedback to the pupil
● report to another teacher
● 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.
Drama and its attendant
speaking and listening has been shown to improve
the writing of
underachieving boys in a study in three local authorities in the UK:
Key findings
● The project has impacted not only
on standards of boys’ achievements in
writing, but on
teachers’/practitioners’ professional development and
capacity.
● The planning and teaching model
with the integration of drama and/or
visual approaches was
successful in promoting marked and rapid
improvements
in standards of boys writing.
Effects on speaking and
listening:
The project emphasised
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)
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