HOW TO APPROACH SPEAKING AND LISTENING THROUGH DRAMA

“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)