A Good Day

Well I walked out of school today on a cushion of air. When things go well (finally) it renews your faith in why you decided you might want to be a teacher to begin with.

(not my class...shhhh)

I planned and executed my first Drama class that was worked the way I wanted it to. I came up with a concept, planned it, executed it, used drama techniques I have learned along the way when I needed (in other words I was able to think on my feet), the students co-operated and got along well, and everything ran like clockwork. It was fantastic.

This may be a bit boring for non teacher's but here's how it went (for posterity).

I came home on Thursday night and realized I was supposed to run the Drama session the next day (I'm alternating weekly lessons with another teacher). I knew the theme was supposed to be spooky stories (Halloween is approaching after all). No idea what to do. I thought I might read them the first part of a spooky story and then they would have to come up with the ending. I went online to find spooky stories but they were too gory or long in many instances.



I opened "Structuring Drama Work" by Jonothan Neelands and looked for ideas. I found one which called Objects of Character which essentially means you give the students some objects that a character owns and they have to figure out who the person was. I thought that was interesting. Then I stumbled across one called A Day in the Life in which starts end of a story (or at a dramatic point) is given or created and the students have to work backwards to build scenes running up to that point. So...

It thought wouldn't it be interesting if I gave the students objects for a person who had disapeared and challenged them to figure out who the person was and then build the story up to the point in which they disappeared. And it worked!

I was worried they'd just come up with all kind of gore, screaming, fighting and mayhem so I we discussed some different reasons people might disappear other than being killed. Maybe they were on the run, kidnapped, or left volutarily without telling anyone? Then I showed them some objects and asked them what we could tell about the person by the objects they had left behind. All I showed them was a dictionary, a pen and a set of headphones. The ideas they had were really creative!

I separated them into groups and gave each group a bag with 4 objects in it. These objects were found in an apartment in which a person had disappeared. These were the only objects left and we knew nothing about the person other than they were gone.

They had 5 minutes to think about who the person might be.

They then had 5 mintues to create a tableau showing the moment at which the person actually disappeared. They would show this to the rest of the class and we would see if we could guess what was happening.

They would then have 15 - 20 minutes to create the story leading up to that point.

We would then present and the groups would get feedback.

It went brilliantly.

Key points things I did:

The warm up:
Doing a proper stretch and warm up for 5 minutes before starting was essential.

The mental set:
Bringing up some ideas about what could be done before starting. Also stating the obvious such as "Of course they could be horribly murdered but let's challenge ourselves to think of other possibilities" before starting. I learned this by watching the Drama teacher last week.

Time:
When doing my final acting class at University I was amazed at how little time we were given for tasks and how that helped us focus. The thing is we were adults so I think students need more or they basically freak out and start yelling and don't focus. 15-20 minutes is still short and the last thing you want to do is run out of time before they can come up with something good and work through their ideas.

Keep it simple:
Keep tasks simple and build on them class by class. I learned this through the Physical Education classes we're doing at school and by wathing the other teacher I'm working with there. I've been guilty of piling on too many ideas in too short a time in the past. It also makes more sense as the students need time to work on a specific task for awhile so they can engage with it and learn it before moving on.

I also realized that you are not meant to select 1 technique from each of the 4 sections of techniques in Structuring Drama and use them all in one lesson.

Performance and Feedback:
Once the performance is complete ask the students for a few things they liked about the scene and some suggestions to think about for improvement next time. Then give your own ideas. (This actually helps me think of thigns to say as the students bring up very valid points)

But there's more...

Also had a great grammar class in which I used erasable whiteboards with the students for the first time. I first observed these in a math lesson a last week. The math teacher gives each student and small whiteboard on which they can write answers with an eraseable marker. She asked them some questions and they wrote answers on the boards and held them up. They were reviewing things they had worked on previous to that class. This was amazingly effective as it was low risk for the students, they all got to have their answers seen by the teacher, and they DIDN'T SPEAK! They were quiet and focused (which is the hardest thing to get students to do). Then they continued with a focused lesson.

I took this and used it in Grammar. I put sentences on the whiteboard in the classroom and asked students to write down the nouns, verbs, or adverbs etc in the sentence. Then I could see who knew what, students were quiet and focused and they actually learned the aspects they dind't know once we talked about the answers. Brilliant.

All my other classes went well as well.... it was a good day.

I'm starting to feel like I might be able to do this job. I'm starting to love my school. I'm even starting to not feel so much like an alien in this country. All in all things have gone well.

Parent teacher night next week though. Should be fun.