Assalamualaikum. Wr. Wb.
This article is the summary of the book on the
title "SPEAKING AND LISTENING THROUGH DRAMA 7-11" By : FRANCIS
PRENDIVILLE AND NIGEL TOYE"
By : Rani Irawati (171230095)TBI 6-C
Microteaching summary
How to Approach Speaking
and Listening through Drama
How to Begin with Teacher in Role
a.
Why use teacher in role?
Teacher has to give
the explanation or knowledge interactively and have to understand easily. So,
one of the technique is as a role of the text. For example, the teacher begin
to role with explain about drama.
b.
Teacher as Storyteller
Teacher must be a
storyteller to explain the text of drama clearly. It will helps students
imagine and understand how the story contained in the text. Then, students also
must be involve themselves to role a play agree with the text. Whether, the
student ask some question base on teacher explanation.
c.
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. This not only provides the teacher with some security in
knowing what is going to be asked, at least initially, but also allows
some minutes to refine the planning, so that the teacher can be specific
in answering their questions.
d.
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. It provides time and space for the teacher
to assess and re-assess the learning possibilities.
e.
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.
f.
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.
g.
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 class have more ownership.
h.
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.
How to Begin Planning
Drama
a.
How to planning 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. For example, the frame of ‘The Governor’s Child.
b.
The ingredients of planning
Creating a drama is
very much like cooking. It is easy to serve up a fast food meal, which has
very little quality and goodness, but it is a more detailed, careful and
thorough process to create a quality meal from scratch with
good ingredients. Our ingredients include the following.
c.
Learning objectives
Learning is often
focused through a key problem or issue for the children to tackle (Dorothy
Heathcote’s ‘man in a mess’). This helps hand responsibility for learning
to the pupils themselves. The learning can be in any of five areas: (language
development, (spiritual,social,moral,cultural,personal), content, art form
drama, thinking skills).
d.
Strong material
We need a stimulus to
learning, to focus the exploration. This my be a piece of writing with key
learning points, that are usually unresolved by the writer of the original
material.
e.
Roles for the pupils
The class need to be
framed up as a community, where the class work together supporting each
other and working for the same aims. This builds their ability to
communicate with and understand each other, the best basis for all learning.
f.
Tension points – risks – theater moments
Tension provides the
momentum that pushes the class, demands a response, engages them. It
involves taking calculated risks.
g.
Building context and belief
Use of TiR can interest and build belief. The right choice of
pupil roles helps that, especially if meaningful activity can be given to them
to establish the roles, or the situation and place is properly realized and
created for the imagination, as indicated in the previous paragraph.
h.
Decision-making – key developments in the
drama which provide the class with challenges.
Many teacher decisions
are built into the plan as givens, otherwise there will be no clear
direction for the learning. As with many art forms, the constraints of the
piece are critical to the quality of the product.
i.
The drama conventions, strategies and
techniques
There are many
techniques for structuring the stages of a drama. Variety of activity for
the class is important but each chosen technique must fit the moment and
do a particular job.
j.
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. In our team, one member may have the beginning
of an idea and sketch that idea out, but usually turns to another member
of the team for feedback and a planning discussion.
k.
Road testing the first version
Participants in dramas
offer us as the teachers insights into ways of using an established
structure. Once we have the beginnings of a drama we need to try ideas
out.
l.
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.
m.
What about endings to dramas?
The class must always
go away feeling they have achieved something. They need to have solved the
problem. If a final resolution is possible, for example, as a result of
the forum, Max realizes he must think of other people, then let them win,
but the class must have worked hard for it in putting the case across to
him. You, in role as Max, will feel the pressure if they apply it well and
can begin to signal that you do see you might be wrong always to think of
yourself, that you are listening for the first time.
How to Generate
Quality Speaking and Listening
a.
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.
b.
Dialogic teaching
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.
c.
What does dialogic teaching demand of the
teacher?
Drama certainly
demands these as well. One of the key changes that drama brings is a
different position for the teacher. When the teacher uses role herself she
is able to dialogue in a very different way with the pupils; she
leaves teacher talk behind.
d.
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. The focus of the problem or
dilemma that the pupils face embodies the nature of the language.
How to Use Drama for
Inclusion and Citizenship
a. What can drama offer
in terms of inclusion?
Drama offers ‘new opportunities to pupils who may have
experienced previous difficulties. 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.
b.
The concept of drama and keeping pupils safe
It would be simplistic
to believe that just because we work within fictional contexts, using
fictional roles and events, that the experience for pupils is therefore
immediately safe from the negative and destructive emotions of real life experiences.
I
c.
Having a voice in society
If we plan for pupils’
ideas to be part of the drama lesson and we are creating a safe
environment for this to happen, we are in effect giving them a voice
to express their understandings and perspective on the world in which they
live.
d.
Having no voice in society
What these pupils
think, say and do often bears no relation to each other. They come into
the drama lesson wary of saying what they think and reluctant to express a
view or make suggestions that may be challenged by the majority
or dominant group.
e.
The relationship between inclusion and
citizenship
If drama by its very
operational values is an inclusive way of working and if the contents of
some dramas are in themselves examining the nature of the outsider, then
Citizenship and PSHE are an integral part of the drama experience.
f.
How to approach Citizenship and PSHE through
drama: practising being part of a society
Drama’s relationship
to citizenship works on two levels, as a methodology that demonstrates aspects
of citizenship in action and when the content is specifically focused upon
issues of citizenship.
g. Drama as citizenship
in action
The class work as a whole group, dividing into sub-groups for
some tasks, but experiencing their class as a democratic community.
h.
A drama for teaching about citizenship
We can see from a
summary of the drama that a number of citizenship issues are immediately
contextualized and presented to the children. Drama ensures that they have
to explore them and get involved in them, to challenge and seek solutions
in a number of ways.
How to Generate
Empathy in a Drama
a.
What is empathy?
The word empathy is
sprinkled liberally throughout education documentation and literature.
b.
A working definition of empathy
The connection between
empathy, learning and drama, for if we can through the acting out of imagined
realities generate empathetic behavior in pupils, they can not only learn from
each other but also examine and refine their empathetic skills.
c.
The components of empathy
Components of the empathy, there are two : the cognitive
component and the effective component.
d.
Can we plan for generating empathy?
We can generate
empathy through structuring roles and creating a drama frame where it is
likely to happen. 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.
·
The role of the pupils
·
The role of the teacher
How to Link History and Drama
a.
A problematic alliance
For drama there is a
fatal attraction with history as a source for its content. Drama as a
medium with which to engage with the past is established in theater, film,
literature, radio and television.
b.
Dressing up to go back in time
One popular method of
‘empathizing’ in the teaching of history takes the form of dressing up in
costumes from the past. Schools across the country plan days of ‘visiting
the past’ by dressing up and sometimes actually going to historic sites in
their costumes.
c.
Using drama to make meaning of the past
As a teacher planning
a history-related drama this does not mean abandoning facts and reasons.
We need to research our history and bring the fruits of that research to
the lesson.
Three elements of
historical inquiry:
·
A concern with facts
·
A concern with reasons
·
A concern with meanings
d.
Balancing the tensions – stories and history
Much of drama in
education operates from creating fictions and telling stories. Of course
this is not necessarily in conflict with history as we can
approach individuals’ viewpoints in history as their stories of the past.
Essentially history is story; it began as oral history and is a shared
story of society.
e.
Setting up a historian’s frame
The drama begins as a
history lesson, with the idea of taking on roles in the lesson introduced
from the beginning. The pupils’ first role is of high status and expertise:
In the drama you will
have several roles, one of them will be historians and at other times you
will be the people we are concerned with in this drama – that is, the poor
street children of the 1870s in London.
*Let’s start with your
role as historians. Before we do, you need to tell me:
What is a historian?
What do historians do?
What skills do they
need?
f.
Meetings with teacher in role
It is important to
find out what the class will ask you; by doing it this way you can get a
sense of what they are interested in and at the same time feel
prepared for the initial couple of questions.
g.
Meeting the boys in the photograph
Part of the process of
setting this up is the modelling of roles by the teacher before asking
pupils to take on this responsibility. They will have seen you taking the
work seriously and you need to make clear the demands that will be made
upon those who decide to do it.
h.
Setting up the boys
Away from the rest of
the class (you might do this at a break time or lunchtime), those who have
decided to be the boys meet with you.
i.
Whole class participation – a sculpture of
children living on the streets
In this drama each
frame takes the class closer to the children who are the subject of our
historical investigations. The next task is to engage the whole class as a
sculpture of the children living on the streets.
j.
Whole class improvisation
We can use the
sculpture and thought-tracking work as a starting point for a whole class
improvisation or ‘living through’ part of the drama. The class remake the
sculpture and this time TiR enters into the work which now takes on a
‘living through’ mode of working.
k.
History as a metaphor for now – the global
dimension
It is important that we
make the connections between issues in history where they remain issues
for us over time. The issue of street children is an example of one of
these. In Life on the Streets: Children’s Stories the BBC
published stories of homeless or underprivileged children from St
Petersburg, La Paz and Delhi. Their stories echo the issues that are
raised in the history drama – exclusion, poverty and survival.
How to Begin Using
Assessment of Speaking and Listening (and Other English Skills) through Drama?
a.
What is assessment?
The primary aim of
assessment is to provide information about the development and achievement
of those involved in the teaching and learning situation. Assessment
records evidence related to students' abilities, both actual and potential,
and charts their progression.
b.
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.
c.
What is the purpose of
the assessment?
To: give feedback to
the pupil, report to another teacher, and report to a parent.
d.
Formative assessment – honoring what children
can do
In the formative role
of assessment we need to be feeding back to the pupils during and after
the drama. We might stop a drama and say to everyone, Can you see
what Nafisa’s question made the Soldier say? That is very important here. Let’s
see what the outcome is. Then we are building esteem and boosting
achievement.
e.
How do we collect data more formally?
Assessment in this
context is the detailed study of episodes of speaking and listening. We need to
describe what we see and teachers need to operate as researchers of the
dialogue in their classrooms. Educational research is becoming more encouraging
of detailed description of events, particularly when looking at classrooms in
the action research method we are advocating.
f.
Other issues to consider
We have to manage the
exchanges in a drama so that the naturally dominant voices in the classroom
learn to listen and we allow others space to talk. However, there is an
unhelpful myth about speaking and listening that speaking is the major partner,
with the accompanying vain aim for classroom talk that all must contribute
equally.
g.
Capturing the samples of speaking and
listening
There is readily
available technology that can record work and allow us to consider it at
greater length after the event, particularly video recording. This is an
approach we have been taking for a long time now; it provides evidence that we
use to assess our own performance as teachers working in drama. Again, if
teachers are paired to do the assessment, one can handle the camera while the
other teaches.
h.
Talk for writing – the wholeness of
communication
In a school with a
strong policy on speaking and listening there will be major gains in other
areas. We can get clear evidence for assessment of the effectiveness of
speaking and listening, particularly the latter, from other forms of
communication like writing or art work. In addition the writing itself can
benefit.
