Speaking and Listening through Drama 7-11

Francis Prendiville, Nigel Toye

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781446236932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

?This book is special. It proposes a style of drama that liberates teachers and children from traditional dialogues...The dramas, each linked to a literacy text or wider theme, are amazing...I would recommend buying this. It challenges, but rewards with a new level of classroom dialogue? -

Literacy Time

?This new book for teachers is timely and full of good ideas. It demonstrates the value of drama as a means of achieving education that stimulates creative and critical thinking while also engaging the emotions? - Teaching Thinking & Creativity

Showing teachers how to use drama to promote speaking and listening for pupils, including those who find learning difficult, this book describes, analyses and teaches how to use role play effectively and looks at how to generate a productive dialogue between teachers and pupils that is both powerful and enabling. The authors present innovative methods for teaching across the curriculum which are genuinely inclusive and can help to motivate reluctant learners.

The ?how to? section of the book describes a range of strategies and approaches:

o how to begin with ?teacher in role?

o how to begin planning drama

o how to generate quality speaking and listening

o how to use drama for inclusion and citizenship

o how to generate empathy in drama

o how to link history and drama

o how to begin using assessment of speaking and listening (and other English skills) through drama

The second section includes full lesson plans that have been tried and tested with pupils, complete with detailed guidance on how to structure the work and how to play the teacher roles. Each is linked to literacy, the wider curriculum, PSHE and citizenship.

The book is a valuable resource for primary teachers in training and in practice.

Part One:

How to Approach Speaking and Listening through Drama

1	How to Begin with Teacher in Role

Why use teacher in role?

The most important resource you have as a teacher when using drama is yourself. Learning demands intervention from the teacher to structure, direct and influence the learning of the pupils. One of the best ways to do that in drama work is to be inside the drama. Therefore, at the centre of the dramas that we include in this book, is the key teaching technique that is used, namely teacher in role (TiR). This chapter will set out approaches to TiR and give examples of how it works.

Many teachers see TiR as a difficult activity, particularly with older children in the primary school. However, it is our experience that when a teacher takes a role he or she becomes ‘interesting’ to the children, so that there are less control problems because they become engaged. Many times we have watched trainee teachers with a class of children struggling to get attention when giving instructions in traditional teacher mode. Yet, as soon as they move into role, they obtain that attention more effectively.

For example, a trainee was talking out of role to a class to explain that they were about to meet a girl who was having trouble with her father and needed their help (see ‘The Dream’ drama based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream). The class were calling out and not listening properly. She was talking over them and trying to teach without getting their full attention. Then she explained that they could ask questions of one of the roles from the story and that she was going to become that role when she sat down. She picked up a ribbon with a ring threaded on it and put it round her neck as the role signifier. When she sat down as Hermia, they were focused entirely on her and were listening very closely, putting hands up to ask questions and taking turns in a very orderly way. They were interested in her problem, which was her father’s insistence on deciding whom she should marry. The trainee was not doing anything different apart from using role and committing to it very strongly. She looked far more comfortable.

The trainee was using the simplest form of TiR, hot-seating the role, where the class meets the role sitting in front of them and can ask questions. TiR creates a particular context and can raise the level of commitment and the meaning-making. It can ‘feel real’ even though it is not.

You are not effective as a teacher if you do not at some point engage fully with the drama yourself by using TiR. Remaining as teacher, intervening as teacher, side-coaching, structuring the drama from the outside, and/or sending the class off in groups to create their own drama must at best restrict and at worst negate any opportunity for the teacher to teach effectively. It is far more effective for the teacher to engage with the drama form as artist and be part of the creative act.

It is very useful in a Literacy lesson for the teacher to use roles from the text. The very fact that you take on a key role can provide important ways of defining and exploring the text. How does hot-seating open up the ideas and issues of a story to the children? Let us look more closely at the Hermia role. It can be used with 10- or 11-year-olds as a way of introducing Shakespeare or for other objectives.

Negotiate with the class that you are going to be someone with a problem. This can be done by narrating an opening:

The teenage girl with a paper in her hand burst angrily into the room.

Then sit down on the chair and stare at the piece of paper:

What am I going to do about this? How dare he. He can’t do what he wants. He’s not me. How does he know what I want to do?

Go out of role:

What did you learn about her and why she’s angry?

Having discussed the first entry you then give the class a chance to find out whether their speculations about her are correct or not by asking questions.

Here is another way that the role could be introduced. Set it up like this:

I am going to become someone else to begin the next piece of work and all you have to do is look at her and see what you think is going on.

Sit on the seat with a piece of paper in your hand reading it silently to yourself.

How stupid he is. He writes me a letter and thinks I like him and I will like him even more just because he likes me. He knows I like somebody else. I’ll never like him, let alone love him. I will have to tell him – again. But he won’t listen. Especially as my dad thinks he’s really nice and is encouraging him. He doesn’t know him.

Notice that the piece of paper means something different in each of the above situations. In the first it is the note from her father, Egeus, outlining her situation (she is under threat of death if she does not follow his wishes). In that case it will have a seal and look official. In the second instance it is a letter from Demetrius declaring his love for her and her blindness in seeking Lysander’s love. It will look different and might be accompanied by a little gift, a token like a ribbon or a necklace.

In this case, again, you go out of role to talk about what the class have seen and heard:

How does she seem? What is the situation? Who are all these people she’s talking about?

In both cases, when the class have speculated enough, they will have questions to ask Hermia and you have an interesting way to begin to tell them the basic situation at the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

You can then answer the questions by playing the role of Hermia based on the way that the character is in the play. She’s obstinate, believes in herself and her love for Lysander, is adamant she won’t do what her father wants and will want the pupils’ help to influence her father and the Duke.

You can introduce the fact that her father is threatening to invoke the law, to have her put to death if she doesn’t obey him. You can set up the idea that in this society a daughter is expected to obey her father. This extreme social expectation and law makes the fiction like their reality but also different from it, something that helps drama create a useful distance, which helps the class reflect on their own beliefs and look at the drama world in a more balanced and thoughtful way.

All of this introduces an interesting set of issues which children at this age are beginning to experience and understand about their relationship with parents and about their relationship with the opposite sex. Even if the main aim of the work is not a study of the Shakespeare play, the role can be used to open up very important areas for personal and social education that the children can identify with. It will motivate them and produce some very strong engagement with Hermia and later, if you introduce them, Egeus, and Demetrius and Lysander, the rivals for her love. (See the full drama set-up in Part Two of this book.)

For another example of the simple use of hot-seating see the Tim the Ostler section in ‘The Highwayman’ drama. This can show important elements of how the children see the text, what their comprehension of it is. It provides a more stimulating way of approaching comprehension than questions from the teacher. This is partly due to the shift in tense. We are talking ‘as if’ it is happening now as against the past tense, which so often dominates classroom talk.

Teacher as storyteller

The teacher as a storyteller is something all primary school teachers will recognise. Good teachers slip easily into it and use it frequently. In its most observable guise it occurs when teaching the whole class and engaging them with a piece of fiction. 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. The teacher’s role will be to communicate the text in a lively and interesting manner, holding their attention and engaging their imagination. In making judgements about the quality of this method of teaching, the critical questions will be around whether the content of the story interests the class and holds their attention, whether the delivery of the teacher, i.e. voice, intonation and interpretive skills, are good and, where relevant, whether accompanying illustrations have impact and resonance. For many pupils the times spent listening to their teacher as storyteller will remain as significant moments in their education. The connection between the teacher as storyteller and the teacher using drama, lies in the fact that they both use the generation of imagined realities in order to teach.

The relationship between story and drama in education is a complex and dynamic one. It means a known narrative can still be used, the knowledge of the narrative is not a barrier to its usage. However, if the pupils are locked into the original narrative it is problematic. It is the negotiable and dynamic elements of the relationship between drama and narrative that liberate the pupils and the teacher from merely retelling the known story. A class can take part in a drama where all of them know the story, where none of them knows the story, or a mixture of both. As long as some fundamental planning strategies are observed, knowledge of the story is not a barrier to participation. Broadly these pre-requisites are:

1. An awareness of those elements of the story that will not be changed – and agreements about these must be made with the class at the beginning or during the drama, in other words, the non-negotiable elements of the narrative.
2. A willingness to move away from the fixed narrative to an exploration of the narrative. The use of drama strategies to explore events and their consequences, to look at alternatives and test them. In these periods the class develop hypotheses, test them and reflect upon them.
3. If narrative consists of roles, fictional contexts, the use of symbols and events then the teacher needs to hold some of those elements true and consistent with the story so far. For example, roles and contexts may already be decided but new events may be introduced, the delivery of a letter, for example. How the class respond to this event is not known and it is at this point that they become the writers of the narrative.

Let us illustrate these ideas with an example from ‘The Pied Piper’ drama (a drama we designed for 6-year-olds but have used with secondary pupils: see Toye and Prendiville, 2000, p. 225).

The Mayor has got the Pied Piper to clear the town of the rats but has broken his promise of payment and in revenge the children have been led up the mountain. You put the pupils in role as the townspeople making their way up the mountain when they meet TiR as a child coming in the opposite direction. He is limping and carries one of his shoes. (In many versions of this story the child is a ‘cripple boy’. This is patently inappropriate and unnecessary. The child who couldn’t keep up because he had a stone in his shoe functions just as well in the story and avoids the stereotype of the disabled child not keeping up with the ‘fit’ children.) This provides the background to a simple hot-seating of the child.

Ask the pupils what would they like to ask the boy. They might want to ask him his name. They certainly will ask him why he is coming down the mountain and what has happened to the other children.

Preparation for the role

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. 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. The questions will, to a certain extent, be predictable because they are largely generated by the circumstances of the drama so far and the role the class has taken, which will be that of anxious parents.

Before the drama session, decide what attitude you are going to take when questioned by the class. You are going to be telling them a story but it will be as if they had just met you and it will not be the voice of the narrator re-telling someone else’s story but in the present tense as if it is happening now. There is no book symbolising the re-telling of someone else’s words. This is your story re-to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Strategies/Techniques for Use in the Dramas
• Part One: How to Approach Speaking and Listening through Drama
• Part Two: The Dramas
• References
• Bibliography
• Index