Name: Falasifa Ajda

Nim:171230111

How to Approach Speaking and Listening through Drama

1 How to Begin with Teacher in Role

 At the centre of the dramas  is the key teaching technique , namely teacher in role (TiR).  Many teachers see TiR as a difficult activity, particularly with older children in the primary school.  The teacher takes a role he or she becomes ‘interesting’ to the children. They obtain that attention more effectively. The teacher as a storyteller is something all primary school teachers will recognise. Good teachers slip easily into it and use it frequently.  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.

In preparing to be this kind of storyteller the teacher must have made particular decisions about this child. 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.  ‘teaching from within’ used 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  It manages the role and therefore the drama.

To make the TiR most effective, we need to look at educational drama from the point of view of the ‘audience’,  This will help us shape up the TiR elements particularly  In drama the pupils are making sense actively. It involves the ‘audience’ in the process of the play-making.  The community is made most effective by the teacher participating in role.  It can be a meeting point at which creation takes place.As the class feed back their responses and make possible development of the role’s importance the teacher must respond appropriately.

 In all teaching situations there exists a power relationship between the learners and the teacher.  If the class decide as a group they do not want to learn and they wish to make your attempts to teach them impracticable, they can do it. There are five basic types of role drama:

The authority role: The role is fair, applies rules and governs properly.

The opposer role:  The response to it can be difficult to handle if it becomes too strong. 

The intermediate role:  Caught between opposing sides and can appeal to the empathy in the class to help them out of the predicament. 

The needing help role: The best way to get empathy from a class , putting them in a position of responsibility.

The ordinary person:   The teacher being ‘the one who does not know’, a very powerful position of ignorance that teachers cannot ordinarily occupy. 

2. How to Begin Planning Drama

The best starting point is using tried and tested dramas.  There is even an intermediate stage in planning and that is to take parts of different dramas and remake them as new ones. 

 The frame is a dynamic, interrelated and complex weaving of all the other ingredients. It has pre-text, which is derived from the stimulus material. In planning a drama we have to write the main frame, the scenario, in a way that indicates the relationship. 

 Learning is often focused through a key problem or issue. 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, and Thinking Skills.  We need a stimulus to learning, to focus the exploration. 

Tension provides the momentum that pushes the class, demands a response, engages them.  Tension can be planned in, but needs to be seized on according to how the class react.  

Context Usually having one main location helps the drama to be properly focused.  The planning decision reinforced the importance of the depictions on the walls so that they can also then be used more at other stages of the drama. 

 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 realised and created for the imagination, as indicated in the previous paragraph. 

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. There are many techniques for structuring the stages of a drama. 

 Planning for true learning is a social activity and needs to have more than one mind brought in to develop its full potential. Participants in dramas offer us as the teachers insights into ways of using an established structure. The beginnings of a drama we need to try ideas out.  

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.

The most difficult thing can be resolving a drama satisfactorily in the time and to the satisfaction of the class. This is to some extent in the planning but mostly in the handling of the drama.  They need to have solved the problem. If a final resolution is possible. 

3. How to Generate Quality 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’.

This approach to oracy in the classroom raises the profile of talk, speaking and listening, to become the central focus, the pivot of learning across the curriculum.  Too often talk is this ‘recitation’ where teacher speaks most and pupils listen or only answer questions. The resulting classroom games include: guessing what is in the teacher’s head, linguistic tennis, and point scoring. Talk, being central to the development of the brain, must be a priority for teachers.

It demands changes – in the handling of classroom space and time; in the balance of talk, reading and writing, in the relationship between speaker and listener. Drama certainly demands these as well. The teacher working through drama is intervening as teacher.

In drama we can get new levels of listening because of the pupils’ interest in the problem-solving of the drama itself. In order to carry out all of these speaking activities they are, of course, inevitably developing their listening and we see this in all its powerful and active modes, listening that is: open, sensitive, reflective, receptive, supportive, attentive, collective, creative.  In order for drama to work the teacher has to listen very closely as well, to see where the pupils are. 

This comes from the third hour-long session of this drama with a class of mixed 8- and 9-year-olds. The teacher is taking the role of Daedalus and another adult the role of Icarus at the beginning of this. The class are enrolled as the servants of Minos the King.

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 that everyone will take part, and we will treat members of the group with respect by listening  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. 

The drama teacher plans dramas with these devices in order to shift and adjust the emotional proximity of the class in relation to the social event they are examining. If we return to the central idea in drama of creating an ‘as if’ world we see that it is a world that is, at l ast in part, created by the participants through their ideas. 

We cannot leave our real-world selves outside the door of the classroom and consequently there is a dynamic relationship between how we think and behave in the fictional world of the drama and how we think and behave in the real world.

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.

The pupils can  be  involved in the school itself and learn about responsibility by taking part in school activities and institutions. To a limited extent they can have experience in the community as part of their school experience. They can make trips out or relevant visitors can be brought in to make pupils aware of the important structures and ideas that community involves. 

The rules of drama embody key democratic values. These are: he class work as a whole group, every member may speak and contribute to the development of the drama, all members must respect the other members, stop the drama at any point to consider and discuss what is happening, debate may happen, and reflect together on the meanings we are forging.

If we want the pupils to experience a particular political idea or social situation, the fictional world of drama can provide that situation efficiently and with an immediacy that reality cannot provide. Whilst the fiction also protects the pupils into learning at the same time and allows all avenues to be explored without the real consequences that we indicated above. 

5 How to Generate Empathy in a Drama

 The word empathy is sprinkled liberally throughout education documentation and literature. This theme focuses on developing children’s knowledge, understanding and skills in four key aspects of social and emotional learning: empathy, self awareness, social skills and motivation.

 Pupils will then be able to empathise without having to bear witness to or have the actual life experiences of those to whom they are directing their empathy. In this way we protect pupils from actual real life experiences and yet generate the opportunity to empathise with those caught up in these experiences.  

The first stage of structuring for empathising is the cognitive stage. It has three components: The role, The attitude and the  purpose. This representation of the cognitive stage of empathising has been contracted with the class the strategy is enacted. Its success is generated by the constraints imposed on the roles, the context and the events leading up  in other words, the pre-text.

The second stage of structuring for empathising is the affective stage. The three components this time are the pupils’ role, the context, and  Events leading up to their debrief of the Workhouse Master 

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.

While placing the pupils in a positive, problem-solving and high status role (government commissioners) gives them the power to make judgements about people’s circumstances from a positive point of view, it is also possible to generate empathy for the dispossessed.  

The role(s) for the teacher is a part of structuring for an empathetic response. It is unable to empathise enables the pupils to witness their shortcomings and therefore have a sense of how disabled they are without these skills. All this sounds very manipulative and it is. They will have opportunities to develop empathy and work out what others are feeling'.

6.  How to Link History and Drama

For drama there is a fatal attraction with history as a source for its content. People represent and interpret the past in many different ways, including: in pictures, plays, films, reconstructions, museum displays, and fictional and nonfiction accounts. 

Schools across the country plan days of ‘visiting the past’ by dressing up and sometimes actually going to historic sites in their costumes. Alternatively, schools will suspend the usual timetable and devote lessons and other activities to a particular period in time. 

Three elements of historical enquiry: A concern with facts, reasons and meanings. Historians are interested in making deductions and inferences about sources and then selecting and combining sources to create accounts of the past. Historical imagination is filling the gaps when sources are incomplete. In drama we are particularly interested in the last element. It is here that drama synthesises story and past events. 

Essentially history is story; it began as oral history and is a shared story of society. In using drama we are using a dense form of teaching, because the currency of drama is language, listening and speaking, and we have a cross-curricular approach that will touch upon learning objectives from several areas of the curriculum. 

In English pupils have the opportunity: To use technique and present a spoken argument, sequencing points logically, To understand different ways  and respond to criticism. In this way drama confronts pupils with the ideas, beliefs and values of people from the past. 

The drama begins as a history lesson, with the idea of taking on roles in the lesson introduced from the beginning.  This imposition of high status and expertise is designed to engage the class with a sense of responsibility for the task ahead and leads into the introduction of the first piece of historical evidence, 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. They must decide upon the following things: ask of the name, condition, situation, and what happened to you. Without the agreement of the group , drama will not work.

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. If the dying embers of a fire are the centre of the picture.

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. 

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. Their stories that are raised in the history drama – exclusion, poverty and survival. 

7. How to Begin Using Assessment of Speaking and Listening (and Other English Skills) through Drama

The result  focused through looking at drama work with pupils on video, was that we had the powerful sort of dialogue, exchange of ideas, challenge of assumptions, etc. As a result, we had a much clearer idea of how we see assessment, and the chapter reflects that thinking.

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. The intended audience of assessment feedback should always include the students themselves. 

Drama as a context for speaking and listening. Negotiating and co-operating,  Expressing imaginative ideas when contributing to the drama work development, Taking and using effectively the opportunities,Modifying, Controlling effectively oral and aural communication, Responding with enjoyment, contributing effectively.

To give feedback to the pupil,  report to another teacher and report to a parent. Pupils need to know what they are doing, how they can improve and to be encouraged in speaking and listening, after all it is the primary communication skill. 

 Assessment of Speaking and Listening has been formative and informal.  Our approach is not to produce league tables, but to give a snapshot of pupils’ communication skills in order to recognise achievement and to chart possible development. In the formative role of assessment we need to be feeding back to the pupils during and after the drama.  

A starting point might be to grasp the level of comprehension of a passage read to the class. Take questions from the class.  Describe what we see and teachers need to operate as researchers of the dialogue in their classrooms.  We must gather and record the critical incidents and chart whatever we notice.

We must learn to read body language, including facial expressions during the drama.  That will show how they have listened. 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. 

Video recording provides evidence that we use to assess our own performance as teachers working in drama. If teachers are paired to do the assessment, one can handle the camera while the other teaches.  Analysing video recordings of drama we need to look at issues relating to: the language used, the non-verbal communication, proximity to the teacher, and  the empathetic and affective tendencies of pupils. 

We can take digital photographs and project these onto a white board, where children can annotate what it means, showing their ideas by adding captions or notes of the speech by their roles.  These can be added to with captions summing up what the picture means.