Micro teaching

How to Approach Speaking and Listening through Drama

How to Begin with Teacher in Role?

Why use teacher in role?
 One of the best ways to do that in drama work is to be inside the drama. Therefore, at the centre of the drama that we include in this book, is the key teaching technique that is used, namely teacher in role (TiR). Many teachers see TiR as a difficult activity, especially with older children in primary school.  However, it is his experience that when a teacher takes his role to be 'attractive' to children, so there is little control problem.  Many times we watch teachers who are trained with classes as children struggle to get attention while giving instructions in traditional teacher mode.  However, once they move into roles, they get that attention more effectively.
 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.

Teacher as storyteller
       The teacher as a storyteller is something all primary school teachers will recog￾nise. 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 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 usages 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 conse￾quences, 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 con￾sistent 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 exam￾ple. How the class respond to this event is not known and it is at this point that they become the writers of the narrative.

 Preparation for the role
       In preparing to be this kind of storyteller the teacher must have made particu￾lar 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. 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

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 happening and give the pupils a chance to think through what they know and what they want to do.  The relationship developed by the teacher with the class is dependent on the movement between these two worlds. TiR changes the nature of the contract entered into by the class. What is that contract? It is ‘the imaginative contract’:
It is not, I will teach you by telling you what you need to know – the style of much classroom teaching.
It is not, I will present a play before you and you will watch me, as the actor con￾tracts with an audience.
 It is not, Listen and I will tell you a story. It is my story and you must not interrupt it.
It is, You will become a playmaker, an author with me and will be a part of the story that I start and we create together. The result is to make the creative community.
 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 judi￾ciously 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.

 Disturbing the class productively
  Discovery/uncovering – challenge and focus
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 activi￾ties 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

 Responding to your class
     The art of authentic dialogue – needing to listen – two-way responses
The art of teaching and learning should be a synthesis from a dialectical approach. If a teacher runs drama without using TiR there tends to be a lack of dialectic because the teacher produces the structure that the children engage with, but the teacher can only manipulate it from outside that structure.
h) The teacher–taught relationship
There are five basic types of role and mostly can be illustrated from the ‘The Dream’ drama.
1)      The authority role
2)      The opposer role
3)      The intermediate role
4)      The needing help role
5)      The ordinary person

 How to Begin Planning Drama
Planning brand new dramas is complex and, while we hope to unravel some of the complexity, the best starting point is using tried and tested dramas first. There is even an intermediate stage in planning and that is to take parts of different dramas and remake them as new ones. We cannot establish a simple procedure for an order of planning. Clearly the teaching/learning objective will drive the shape of the drama, but the engine that drives the drama needs fuel and that fuel is a piece of strong material, a creative idea, and that is more inspirational than an objectives-led design. This material – a book, a piece of literature, a picture or some other subject matter, fiction or non-fiction – will give us one or more of the elements of a good drama, a role or roles, an interesting context or a dilemma.

How to Generate Quality Speaking and Listening
Authentic dialogue – teacher and pupil talk with a difference
What is speaking and listening ?
Speaking and listening is the most important communication form that human beings use. Really effective oracy, developmental speaking and listen￾ing, 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. When a pupil is speaking and listening properly, he or she is able to see how each contribution arises from what has already been said.

Dialogic teaching
In schools too often speaking and listening is seen as question and answer, usually the teacher questioning and the pupils answering.  Too often talk is this ‘recitation’ (Alexander, 2005, p. 34) where teacher speaks most and pupils listen or only answer questions. The resulting classroom games include:
guessing what is in the teacher’s head – pupils avoiding having to answer the question
 linguistic tennis – where it is about getting rid of the ball quickly not about developing an exchange of ideas
point scoring – getting the answers right or getting them wrong and feeling a failure.
          Talk, being central to the development of the brain, must be a priority for teachers. Alexander promotes dialogic teaching as the most powerful form of talk in the classroom. He identifies its key elements as:
 Collective: teachers and pupils address learning tasks together, as a group or as a class;
Reciprocal: teachers and pupils listen to each other, share ideas and consider alternative viewpoints;
 Supportive: pupils articulate their ideas freely, without fear of embarrass￾ment over ‘wrong’ answers; and they help each other to reach common understandings;
 Cumulative: teachers and pupils build on their own and each other’s ideas and chain them into coherent lines of thinking and inquiry;
Purposeful: teachers plan and steer classroom talk with specific educational goals.

How is listening of high quality taught through drama?
The teacher can provide sur￾prises, challenges, interesting people to meet in the forms of teachers in role; pupils can provide models of language use for each other because lead pupils begin to take initiative and provide input. 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. 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.

How to Use Drama for Inclusion and Citizenship
 We will begin by defining what we mean by inclusion. We will then present a model of how drama relates to inclusion and describe a particular drama session which aims to ‘promote tolerance and understanding in a diverse society’ (Ofsted, 2006, p. 7). Drama’s inclusion is embedded, first, in its dialogical approach to teaching and learning. This is reflected in two contracts that form part of its rubric. These are:
1.       Everyone will take part, including the teacher both in and out of role.
2.      We will treat members of the group with respect by listening to them and allowing them to express their views without fear of derision or humiliation.

      How to Generate Empathy in a Drama
  The components of empathy
The idea of a ‘cognitive’ stage and an ‘affective’ stage in the empathetic process is taken from the writings of Alan Leslie in his work at London University, as summarised by Simon Baron-Cohen (2003, pp. 29–30).
-  Component One – the cognitive component
-  Component Two – the affective component
    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 structure drama for empathetic response
-   Building the cognitive component
-    Framing the affective component

  How to Link History and Drama

• There are tensions between history and drama but they can be resolved byadopting a conceptual framework that is clear about the learning intention
• Research is a key element in planning roles from history
•  Using a variety of sources helps to support the validity of the work
• It is important to be clear about what you mean when you use the word empa￾thy in relation to drama and history teaching
•  Using signifiers, not full costume, when taking on a role allows you to come in and out of role
•  Reference to modern day parallels allows you to make the connections between then and now

 How to Begin Using Assessment of Speaking and Listening (and Other English Skills)    through Drama
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. (Clark and Goode, 1999, p. 15)

What is the purpose of the assessment?
To:

•  give feedback to the pupil
•  report to another teacher
• report to a parent

As we have indicated, the first is vital. 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.
How do we collect data more formally?
Asessment 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 researchers of the dialogue in their classrooms. Educational research is becom￾ing more encouraging of detailed description of events, particularly when looking at classrooms in the action research method we are advocating. We must gather and record the critical incidents and chart whatever we notice. Teachers can work in pairs and observe each other's lessons to record what they see. Some Preparation, Planning and Assessment (PPA) time, which teachers in England are entitled to, could be used for this purpose. To set this up properly, the senior management team need to become involved in plan￾ning a whole school strategy for the assessment and development of speaking and listening.