Teaching Content Outrageously

How to Captivate All Students and Accelerate Learning, Grades 4-12

Stanley Pogrow

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470623442
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

A powerful instructional method for "hooking" students on academic learning

Drawing from a teaching model designed to banish boredom and student apathy, this book explains how dramatic practices can serve as powerful tools for enlivening lessons and captivating students, even the most resistant learners. Filled with intriguing classroom examples, Pogrow shows how any teacher can make use of dramatic techniques, such as surprise, humor, fantasy, role plays, games, and simulations to create standards-based content lessons that are riveting, effective, and meaningful. The author explains how to design such lessons into any content area.

Stanley Pogrow (San Francisco, CA), a noted authority on teaching practices for disadvantaged students, is professor of educational leadership at San Francisco State University, where he coordinates the Educational Leadership for Equity Program.

chapter ONE

Why Teach Outrageously in All the Content Areas?

Most teachers enter the teaching profession with an idealistic vision of impacting the lives of their students. They see themselves in a classroom in which their students hang onto their every word. It is of course a rude awakening when they actually first enter a classroom to teach, and find that they must fight for their students’ attention and interest. It is a battle that is often lost.

As many teachers realize, conventional approaches to content instruction, even approaches employing state-of-the-art, best-practice strategies, are often inadequate for serving the large percentage of students in public schools who are reluctant, superficial, or resistant learners. They are often inadequate for meeting standards-based content objectives, even in high-performing schools. If anything, the problem of student disengagement is becoming more prevalent due to a combination of social problems, such as poverty and the increasing availability of on-demand entertainment options for filling one’s time outside of school. Indeed, veteran teachers often report that it is increasingly difficult to hold students’ attention.

A major challenge for teachers is how best to motivate and engage students who are discouraged or underachieving their true potential. Underperforming learners, be they students born into poverty or from advantaged backgrounds, often do not see purpose in what they are taught and respond with boredom, apathy, and misbehavior. Conventional approaches to instruction have been inadequate in reversing the low achievement and high dropout rates now prevalent in all too many schools. Dropouts report that boredom is a major contributor to their decision to leave school. There are also large numbers of reluctant learners who do well generally but have lost motivation to learn in a particular content area. Examples include students who have decided that they are “mathphobic” or that science is not “cool.” Alternatively, they may find it impossible to understand selected key topics within content areas that are crucial to future success.

Student boredom and the resultant misbehavior are also major factors behind the high turnover rate among new teachers, who are simply unable to hold students’ interest and consequently have to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to maintain order. This inability is typically viewed as not having the skills to maintain discipline. However, the discipline problems themselves are symptomatic of teachers not having the stagecraft and presence to hold their students’ attention.

Indeed, little has changed since Charles Silberman documented the absolute boredom of students in the typical classroom in high-poverty schools in his classic book Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education (1971). The experience of walking through a high-poverty school is much the same today as it was thirty or a hundred years ago. The dominant expression on the faces of disadvantaged students is generally boredom or resignation. The same is true when teachers in all schools and in any content area teach particular lessons and units. But this need not be so! And that is why this book was written.

It is time to recognize that this era of on-demand, individualized, and YouTubed entertainment is producing as fundamental a shift in communication and learning patterns today as the printing press did 550 years ago. The key to teaching reluctant and resistant learners who have grown up with unsurpassed access to on-demand entertainment is to transform the classroom into a highly intriguing learning environment, to make it entertaining, dramatic, visually captivating, and a multisensory experience.

It is time to accept that we cannot always teach content conventionally! This approach does not work anymore for most students. Unfortunately, even if you agree with this sentiment, chances are that you teachers were not trained in how to produce highly creative unconventional instructional environments that can increase learning. Nor were you administrators trained to encourage the use of unconventional instructional approaches as part of a systematic approach to school improvement.

But even if you did want to create very dramatic learning environments, most of the published work on using drama and humor focuses primarily on using them to develop the literacy or self-expression skills of young children, to review and reinforce what has been learned conventionally, or to develop students’ artistic sense. All of these are important uses of dramatic techniques. However, they only scratch the surface of the potential of using dramatic instructional approaches.

MOVING FROM CONVENTIONAL TO OUTRAGEOUS TEACHING

The ideal is possible. We can transfix students even while teaching seemingly prosaic content. Later in this book you will read about lessons in which hard-core problem students and classes in the toughest schools were transfixed and hanging on every word and gesture of their teacher. When that happens, it is an inspirational and fun moment for the teacher as well. After even one such experience, student and teacher come to view each other differently—with mutual heightened respect and admiration.

The big need is for a practical way to use dramatic approaches as a primary technique for teaching new content across the curriculum in grades 4 through 12—that is, to teach the content Outrageously. Outrageous Teaching is a powerful tool for all teachers to use to stimulate learning in those lessons and students for which conventional instruction is not likely to be effective. This book goes beyond conventional notions of using dramatic technique in education. The goal is to use dramatic technique, humor, and imagination in combination to create lessons that are so different from conventional instruction, and so far out, that the only words to characterize them are Outrageous and amazingly effective.

What is Outrageous Teaching and why is it so effective? Why is it able to captivate reluctant and resistant learners and squirrelly classes? Why is it able to stimulate high levels of learning in otherwise passive or confused students? Can drama and humor really be the basis of a large-scale tool for improving content instruction and increasing academic achievement? To understand what Outrageous Teaching is and why it is so effective, it is important first to understand dramatic technique, the base on which the method is built.

DEFINITION OF DRAMATIC TECHNIQUE

Some key components of drama are as follows:

“A composition . . . intended to portray life or character or to tell a story usually involving conflict and emotions through action and dialogue. . . .” (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary)

“Exciting, tense, and gripping . . . either in a work of art or in a real-life situation.” (Encarta World English Dictionary)

“‘A deed’ or ‘an action.’ So anytime you’ve acted something out, you’ve done drama!” (“The Play’s The Thing: Drama Definition,” retrieved from http://jfg.girlscouts.org/how/girlslife/dramadef.htm. Note: This site no longer exists. The quote currently appears at http://suzynarita.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_archive.html.)

“A collective experiencing, celebrating, or commenting, not on how we are different from each other, but on what we share. . .” (Bolton, 2001, p. 154).

On the basis of these definitions, this book views classroom use of dramatic technique as

Teacher actions that turn lessons into a collective experience by creating a story or context that produces excitement and other emotions central to acquiring and consciously processing the key content ideas and knowledge.

Although this definition includes what most educators think of as drama—that is, theatrical productions—it is a much broader definition that includes all aspects of artistic expression that performers—in this case, teachers—can use to create a dramatic tension that enthralls and draws in an audience—in this case, their students.

THE POWER OF DRAMA AS AN INSTRUCTIONAL TOOL

Dramatizing content instruction has tremendous potential for teaching students who have not been successful learners or are intimidated by a particular subject or type of content, because it taps into their deeply held emotions and beliefs, their imagination, their sense of life’s possibilities, and their role in the cosmos. As such, it is the most underused and powerful teaching technique in American education.

Philosophers as far back as Confucius and Aristotle have been fascinated with the power of drama as a teaching tool, as evidenced by the following quotes:

“I hear, I know. I see, I remember. I do, I understand.” (Confucius, 551 B.C.-479 B.C. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/confucius.html) “Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I will remember. Involve me and I will understand.” (Attributed to Aristotle by some and said to be a Chinese Proverb by others; originally retrieved from http://www.geocities.com/broadway/alley/3765/why.html—Note: This site no longer exists. In addition, another version of this quote has as the middle phrase, “Show me and I may remember.”)

Indeed, drama has been used as a teaching technique since ancient times. (See the history of drama use in Appendix A.)

Dramatic practices are also widely used in the modern classroom. Many teachers are already familiar with conventional techniques that engage students in role-playing, improvisations, games, and simulated experiences. These practices are most often used to “supplement” lessons previously taught—to develop particular skills, such as reading fluency; to deepen understanding of a particular content topic; or to review and reinforce learning. Although these practices are important, they barely scratch the surface of the potential of using dramatic technique as a teaching and learning tool.

The method featured in this book places great importance on the role of the teacher in incorporating dramatic practices into the design and staging of the original content instruction, rather than first teaching the content conventionally. The goal of these practices is to capture the attention of students at the onset of the content instruction, and to gain their willingness and commitment to fulfill specified content learning objectives.

DEFINING OUTRAGEOUS TEACHING

Most conceptions of using drama to teach content involve first teaching a lesson using conventional approaches and then using dramatic techniques such as student role-plays, reader’s theater, games, and simulations to review, reinforce, and deepen the learning. Although the conventional reinforcement approach to using dramatic technique is valuable, it tends to be inefficient. In other words, you are basically teaching the content objectives twice—first conventionally and then using dramatic technique to reinforce it. Why not just teach the content from the beginning using the more creative, enriched approach? That is the goal of Outrageous Teaching.

Outrageous Teaching it is not designed to replace all instruction. However, for those lessons and content objectives that a teacher has decided will be of greatest value, Outrageous Teaching is used as the primary teaching approach. It is how the content objectives are taught from the very beginning—as opposed to being merely a supplemental approach. In Outrageous Teaching, the teacher teaches the same lessons he or she would teach using conventional methods, covering the same content, but in a very different, far more compelling fashion. No lessons are added to a unit to incorporate Outrageous Teaching. Outrageous Teaching is thus the first classroom use of dramatic technique that does not require incorporating additional lessons to teach content in an enriched fashion.

Outrageous Teaching integrates humor, imagination, and dramatic technique to develop inventive storylines that provide a context that seems important to students in terms of how they think. For most of the lesson, students have no idea what the content objective is—even as they are learning the content. In the early parts of the lesson, a sense of suspense is created and students do not recognize what the teacher is trying to accomplish or the reasons for the teacher’s behavior. All they know is that whatever is happening seems interesting and strange.

The storyline also contains a dilemma that students are called on to resolve and, in doing so, to unknowingly, at first, learn and apply the formal content. The more Outrageous the storyline is, the better it is. (The specific techniques for creating such storylines and for planning Outrageous lessons are presented in Chapter 4, and examples of real lessons and storylines are presented in Chapter 5.)

This form of teaching is called Outrageous Teaching because although the same content objectives are being taught as in conventional teaching, the resulting lessons are different from and more imaginative than those taught by conventional teaching methods. Outrageous Teaching provides a whole new motivation and a new context for the student learning to occur in.

Outrageous Teaching is equally applicable across all content areas in grades 4 through 12, and equally applicable to all students and to all content objectives. The techniques are especially valuable for lessons in which all the other techniques a teacher has tried have failed to create student interest or understanding, or to engage resistant and reluctant learners.

Outrageous Teaching is a powerful tool that all teachers can employ to

• Increase simultaneously, in powerful ways, how much students learn and their interest in learning.

• Deepen understanding.

• Enrich the quality of school life for both teacher and student while creating new bonds between them.

• Involve students who previously have not responded to conventional instruction, whether across the board, in specific content areas, or in meeting specific content objectives.

Indeed, although Outrageous Teaching derives from the traditions of dramatic technique and humor, the methodology provides a practical way to operationalize other progressive conceptions such as constructivism and discovery learning.

Of course the best way to understand Outrageous Teaching is to observe an example of it. (All of the sample lessons and units in this book are highlighted.)

DWIGHT’S OUTRAGEOUS LESSON: INTRODUCTION

What does Outrageous Teaching look like?

Let me introduce a lesson taught by one of my student teachers, whom I will call Dwight, to a class of high school sophomores.

The Lesson Begins

The students file in, and once they are settled, the teacher announces that Dwight is home sick today but a special guest is coming to make them an exciting offer.

The visitor then arrives. He has a huge, bushy white beard; wears a tall, Amish-style black hat; is dressed in overalls; and carries a tree stump. He emphatically puts the tree stump on the floor and announces in a booming voice:

I am a master salesman and have heard that all of you in this room have wonderful social skills and would make great salespeople. I am here as part of a national search to find the next generation of salespeople to sell a new, exciting line of products, the next great product, a complete line of stumps!

By now the students have reco...

Table of contents

• JOSSEY-BASS TEACHER
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• ABOUT THIS BOOK
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• chapter ONE - Why Teach Outrageously in All the Content Areas?
• chapter TWO - Perspectives on Dramatizing Content Instruction
• chapter THREE - From Discipline to Outrageous Teaching: Classroom Use of ...
• chapter FOUR - How to Design Outrageous Lessons: Essential Steps
• chapter FIVE - Outrageous Lessons: Examples from the Classroom
• chapter SIX - Suspense and Surprise: Why Outrageous Lessons Work
• chapter SEVEN - Getting Started
• chapter EIGHT - So. . .Let’s Do It!
• APPENDIX A: THE ORIGINS OF DRAMA
• APPENDIX B: GAMES AND QUIZZES—SELECTED RESOURCES
• APPENDIX C: SIMULATION UNITS—SELECTED RESOURCES
• APPENDIX D: LESSON PLANS FOR THE SAMPLE LESSONS
• APPENDIX E: TEACHING OUTRAGEOUSLY IN THE EARLY GRADES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX