Classroom
As
Theatre
Presented by Wavelength
Whole Schools Institute 2010
Meridian, Mississippi
Theatre has many elements that make up a production:
· Literary Elements: plot, theme, character, language and style
· Technical Elements: scenery, props, costumes, lights & sound
· Performance Elements: Acting
What can the world of theatre share with those who work daily in a classroom?
And what is that actors know how to do that can expand the expression a teacher can give to his or her lesson plans? This workshop will address these questions, and begin the process of seeing one’s classroom as a “stage” on which learning takes place.
Actors and teachers are both communicators. Actors train to master their crafts. Their vocal and physical instruments are trained to be flexible, toned, and full of energy. They know how to access their emotional lives to bring depth to their roles. They take their responsibility of knowing their scripts inside and out seriously. They are open to the unexpected. They allow the audience to experience empathy with the characters they portray. They are story tellers who have learned to trust their creative impulses, risk new ways of expressing themselves, and use their imaginations to consistently deliver performances that are fresh and stimulating.
Teachers also play roles. In addition to playing the role of Teacher, they are also called upon to play the roles of Producer, Director, Stage Manager, Set Designer, Audience and Critic in their classrooms.
Great actors, just like great teachers, know what they want. They know their script, and how to break it down into playable moments, always with the goal in mind of conveying the theme set out by the playwright. Teachers’ “scripts” are their lesson plans and they too must know how to deliver the lesson so that the greatest impact is achieved, and the day’s lesson is learned and assimilated by the audience of students. The teacher’s goals for that day are met when the audience is caught up, engaged in learning, and can demonstrate they know the content of the lesson.
TOP TIPS FOR TEACHERS
1) Discover Your Voice & Body
2) Generate Energy & Surprise
3) Know Your Text
4) Create the Space
5) Encourage Risk-Taking
6) Use Your Imagination
7) Say “Yes-And!”
Tip #1 - Discover Your Voice & Body
What then is (the) education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered. . .gymnastic for the body, and music for the mind.
Plato – Greek Philosopher
Teaching is a profession like acting that is dependent on speech and effective communication. The voice is an essential tool in engaging students, and vocal artistry is a skill that can be learned. We’ll examine pitch, pace, volume, resonance, and vocal range which includes strength, flexibility, variety, emphasis, drama and the use of silence.
Teaching takes stamina. It requires a body that is warmed up, flexible, expressive in gesture, aware of non-verbal messages given and received, and able to express itself clearly. Does your body say what you mean, and mean what you say? There are personality actors, and then those who transform themselves physically to meet the demands of the character. The former use their own persona with all its idiosyncratic expressions and mannerisms and are cast in roles that honor those expressions. Other actors approach characters by transforming themselves from the outside-in and transform their instruments into new physical embodiments for a character.
Tip #2: Generate Energy &Surprise
“Feynman was an exuberant teacher in every way. His enthusiasm and curiosity spilled over onto those whom he held captive in his orbit. He thought the quest to know the laws of the universe was the most exciting adventure a person could undertake. “I’m an explorer,” he once said. “I like to find out.” The natural world was to him wonderful, beautiful, and an object of endless play.
- Kay Redfield Jamison describing Physicist Richard Feynman
Exuberance
When an actor loses enthusiasm for a character they’re playing, or no longer is connected to the material, they need to find a new way to experience the material afresh. One way is to use the technique of Emotional Recall.
Emotional Recall is a technique that encourages us to recall a time in the past which corresponds to the necessary feelings or experience we wish to convey in our present situation. If we wish to regain a sense of passion for our subject, we can use emotional recall to draw the energy and enthusiasm up within ourselves.
* Relax physically.
* Elicit an emotion similar to what is required in text, preferably something that happened a long time ago.
* Recall and recreate all the physical circumstances of the occasion. Recall the details of the place where the event occurred, the time of day, how everything looked, who was there and how they appeared. The ability to recall, and more importantly, to re-experience the sensory impressions of the incident is of primary concern. Activate the senses recalling smells, tastes, sights, sounds, tactile experiences. Imagine concrete sensory details, and small specifics.
The finest teachers offer up the work with generous servings of energy, passion, enthusiasm, fun, and humor – not necessarily as the antidote to hard work but because those are some of the primary ways that hard work gets done.
Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put students on the Path to College
By Doug Lemov
Doug Lemov suggests that joy is a “key driver not just of a happy classroom but of a high-achieving classroom.” Actors take note of the unexpected in a play, ways they can surprise themselves on stage with finding new ways to express their characters, and new ways in which they relate with fellow actors. The audience changes and with each performance an element of surprise is always present.
Spontaneity, humor, impromptu moments delight an audience and fill us with joy and wonder. A well-timed joke, humorous interchange, spontaneous interaction or unexpected connection with another provides a context in which an audience, or classroom, is opened up to new possibilities.
Tip #3: Know Your Text
The script needs to be captivating and known inside and out by the actor for them to be responsive and available in the moment to their creative impulses. If they’re worrying about knowing their lines, they cannot tap into their creative unconscious to allow for moments of inspiration, and very little spontaneous artistry is going to occur. So too a teacher must know their subject matter, be familiar with the content so thoroughly, that the teachable moments that arise are readily responded to spontaneously. Teachers, like actors, need to memorize their scripts; i.e. the daily lessons.
When you bring a story to life and create a performance using the students as characters in the story, you’ll need to cast the actors, have them identify the beginning, middle and end of the story, and create the “beats” – the actions – they will take to tell the story to the class. Monologues, interviews and soliloquies are also useful methods to explore characters, and can lead into two and three person scenes.
Within a play, the theme that runs through the piece corresponds to a Lesson Unit. The plot of the play can be seen as the Lesson Plans ~ the journey that gets you to your goals and holds the action.
The theme is the overarching idea of the artistic piece, what ties it together.
The plot happens in six stages and includes Beginning/Middle/End of the piece:
· initial incident
· preliminary event ~ back story, or what took place before
· rising action
· climax
· falling action
· denouement or conclusion ~ the “unraveling”
The characters consist of the protagonist, antagonist and supporting players within the action.
The exposition answers who, what, when, where.
The language of the play and characters indicates Socio-economic class, education,
sensibilities and demographics.
The technical elements include scenery, props, costumes, lights, sounds and make-up.
The performance bring everything together and is portrayed by actors using their voices, bodies, emotions and movement to give life to words on the page.
Tip #4: Create a Space
The most important thing is to create an environment where there’s an absence of fear about learning something new. Your own learning process has to continue. . . You can’t teach well unless you’re learning yourself.
Robert Alexander
Founder, Living Stage Company
We try to foster an atmosphere where we feel safe enough to fail.
Will Ferrell
Actors learn to move around a set, find business that justifies their blocking and movement, and use props in various ways. Spencer Tracy suggested all an actor really needs to do is learn their lines and not bump into the furniture.
You set the stage for your students’ learning. Everyday you determine what kind of atmosphere your students will walk into, and how they will act and carry out their roles as learners. You may not be able to create skylights and change the physical environment of your classroom, but you can provide the “mental windows” for students to let their imaginations explore subject matter. You create a safe space by fostering an atmosphere of trust, both externally and internally.
Imagine your perfect classroom – see it clearly. See/hear/smell/taste/feel – how is it like the classroom you currently have? What do you need to do to create that space? What keeps you from having the classroom you really want? What do you want on your walls? How do you want your desks arranged? How can you create a space in which you can get anywhere in the room without a word while you are teaching?
Tip #5: Encourage Risk-Taking
I was willing to take risks (in the classroom). I took a rope and hung it from my ceiling and told them, ‘When I grab this, everybody freezes. Or I’m going to vomit all over you. Because you’re making me seasick! You get kids thinking by making them responsible for their own education. (If) you’re not making them responsible, you’re not making them be creative.
Ed Burns, Writer & Producer HBO Series “The Wire”
Model risk-taking for your students, and dare to bring in different ways to engage your students. Improvisation can help you gain and sustain students’ attention, expand their creativity, self confidence, and help them develop their emotional and social intelligences. Theatre is a collaborative art, and invites trust in one’s own creative impulses. You cannot create until you trust yourself and are willing to take risks and even fail. Then you work to get it right, and you’re setting the example for the students of what it means to be willing to work and learn until the desired goal is reached.
Tip #6: Use Your Imagination
Brain studies have shown that imagining something in vivid detail can fire the same brain cells that are actually involved in that activity.
Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence
Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Anne McKee (2002)
“There is no use trying,” said Alice; “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Lewis Carroll
When students are encouraged to imagine themselves in new ways, they experience an opening up of their worlds. Theatre grounds the experience and though we might not ever experience it “in real life,” as Picasso said, “Anything you can imagine is real.” The imagination is accessed through connecting with the senses, which opens up the neural pathways to learning.
Giving the audience “too much” is over-acting, doing too much work in the classroom can be over-teaching. Give the audience, i.e. your students, more room to imagine and let them do the work. If the teacher is doing too much of the thinking and doing, the students grow more and more passive.
You have the power to transform your students everyday. As the writer George Eliot said, “Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.”
Tip #7: Say “Yes-And”
Saying “Yes!” to another’s creation, and adding on your own idea is the foundation of improvisation. To say “no” to what another offers on stage is considered “blocking” and stifles all creative impulses from happening. As soon as we say “yes” to another’s gift on stage, (and every thing a fellow player says is a gift), the scene moves along.
When you “listen” with all your senses to each student, support them in their learning preferences, and encourage them to express themselves in whichever ways best reflect them, you are sending a message of acceptance and encouragement.
We all know people who think and express themselves with the words, “Yes But” or “No but” Improvisers know that those words block interaction and stifle imaginative responses, while “Yes-And” says, “Yes, I hear what you’re saying, AND here’s my idea or opinion.”
“Yes-And” invites responses that help you build a classroom of trust and acceptance, while bridging conflict at the same time. When you think, “Yes-And” you are actively engaging students with the message, “I hear what you’re saying (or asking) AND here’s an idea that might help you understand more clearly, or express what you’ve learned in a new and creative way.”