Speaking and Listening Through Drama
1. How to Begin with Teacher in Role
Why use teacher in role?
Learning demands intervention from the teacher to structure, direct and influence the learning of the pupils. 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).
This chapter will set out approaches to TiR and give examples of how it works. Many teachers see TiR as a difficult activity, particularly with older children in the primary school. However, it is our experience that when a teacher takes a role he or she becomes ‘interesting’ to the children, so that there are less control problems because they become engaged. 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 recognize. Good teachers slip easily into it and use it frequently. In its most observable guise it occurs when teaching the whole class and engaging them with a piece of fiction. The pupil’s role will be dominated by listening and this will be interlaced with questioning, responding and interpreting the meaning and sense of the fiction. 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 judgments 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, i.e. voice, intonation and interpretive skills, are good and, where relevant, whether accompanying illustrations have impact and resonance.
In preparing to be this kind of storyteller the teacher must have made particular decisions:
1. Begin by asking the class out of role what they want to ask the child and the order of those questions.
2. Before the drama session, decide what attitude you are going to take when questioned by the class.
3. 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
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.
The requirements of working in role
The teacher, working in this way, 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.
Disturbing the class productively (Discovery/uncovering – challenge and focus)
The ownership also arises out of the way the teacher operates. 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.
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 is another reason that the classes have more ownership. 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.
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. Five basic types of role and mostly can be illustrated from the ‘The Dream’ drama: The authority role, the oppose role, the intermediate role, the needing help role, the needing help role, the ordinary person.
2. How to Begin Planning Drama
The frame of 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 .Pre-text: Max is sent to his room for misbehaving, chasing the dog with a fork, Context: Where: Max’s room (mainly) When: Key moment his return from his adventures Tension/problem: Max is wild in his behaviour, is selfish and is missing Role for children: Agents from ‘Lost & Found’
Signs: The pirate ship, the den, the fork and the dog bowl, the pix of Max and Mum
TiR: Max and Mum
The ingredients of planning
Learning objectives
Strong material
Roles for the teacher
Roles for the pupils
Tension points – risks – theatre moments
Building context
Building belief
Decision-making – key developments in the drama which provide the class with challenges
In any drama there will only be one or two main decisions that have to be taken by the pupils; by main decisions we mean where the direction and outcome of the decision is crucial. Inexperienced practitioners often think that they must give the pupils a decision at every turn, what to do next, whom to meet, where to go. This will lead to chaos, with too many possibilities to manage. There are teacher decisions and pupil decisions and we have to be clear about the timing and nature of both, why one should be the teacher’s and why another should be the pupils’.
Planning as a collaborative activity
Road testing the first version
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. Of course, most dramas have a mixture of the styles, but the younger or more inexperienced a class, the more ‘living through’ will dominate to create the tensions and challenges more directly.
Drama starters
An idea from ‘Romeo and Juliet’
An idea from ‘Macbeth’
An idea from ‘Danny Champion of the World’ by Roald Dahl
An idea from ‘The Hobbit’
How to Generate Quality Speaking and Listening
Authentic dialogue – teacher and pupil talk with a difference
The importance of speaking and listening in the teaching/learning process is the most important communication form that human beings use. Really effective racy, 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. It has to be an interaction with others where both sides are contributing. When a pupil is speaking and listening properly, he or she is able to see how each contribution arises from what has already been said.
How to dialogue with a class so that it is collective, reciprocal, supportive, cumulative, purposeful
The teacher intervening as teacher, but also as other roles within the drama
How drama produces listening of high quality
Do the Speaking and listening levels in the National Curriculum do justice to the levels of talk pupils can achieve here?
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