Planning from the Drama Curriculum Guide

This section of the drama curriculum contains a step-by-step guide to using the curriculum, and a detailed description for planning dramas and developing collective creations.

How to Use the Drama Curriculum Guide

The following will support teachers in using the drama curriculum guide and approaching the development of dramas with their students.

Step One Read the introductory section of the drama strand.
Step Two Study the section entitled "The Yearly Plan for the Middle Years Drama Class". The chart entitled "The Process At A Glance" provides a concise overview of the planning process.
Step Three Study the drama curriculum for your grade, becoming familiar with:

the unit overviews
the foundational objectives
the model unit
the suggested activities (applies to Unit Three only).
Step Four Read the model units from other grades for more examples, ideas and assistance.
Step Five Read the "Looking at Plays" section. This offers specific ideas for guiding students through their experiences as playgoers and provides links between their own dramas and the drama/theatre which goes on around them.
Step Six With the "Yearly Plan for the Middle Years Drama Class" close at hand, structure your first short drama.

The Yearly Plan The Process at a Glance The Process in Detail Arts Education Planning Sheets

The Yearly Plan for the Middle Years Drama Class

Drama in Context and the Collective Creation

This section of the curriculum provides teachers with essential information for planning their middle years drama program and guiding students toward achievement of the foundational objectives. It includes a description of the recommended approaches and a step-by-step guide to realizing meaningful drama work with their students.

Drama in Context means, as it suggests, that dramas are structured to provide a context, a situation, or a metaphoric framework in which students and teacher work together. Within the dramas students and teacher assume roles and, taking with them their own unique set of experiences and perceptions, enter into a fictional world or imagined situation that they are prepared to accept and "live through".

Working within dramatic situations enables students to:

explore social situations and issues
stretch their thinking
extend their use of language
deepen their understanding of human behaviour
develop their abilities to express their ideas and feelings through dramatic art form
gain understanding about dramatic art form.

Middle years students will have experienced working within dramatic contexts throughout their elementary years and will have an understanding of how dramas work. They are now prepared to continue their exploration of ideas and dramatic art form within dramatic contexts and to extend their knowledge and expertise through a process of shaping, refining and polishing. This could lead to the development and possible performance of a collective creation.

The Collective Creation is a play or a collection of episodes or scenes which is developed by a group and intended for an audience. Each collective creation is unique to the group who creates it. There may be as many ways of developing a collective creation as there are collective creations themselves.

This curriculum recommends that middle years drama students work toward the development of a collective creation through a process which begins with the explorations in one of their contextual dramas. Few other approaches to the collective creation are as effective at tapping into student's thinking and feeling. This approach facilitates the exploration and expression of ideas through the widest possible range of drama (and other) strategies. Carefully structured dramatic contexts (and by the middle years, students themselves will take a very strong hand in the structuring of their dramas) allow students to make critical choices among the available strategies and processes which shape each episode of their work. Those episodes that the students think have most effectively communicated their ideas and insights are those which could be refined, polished and, perhaps, performed for others.

The development of collective creations from the students' own contextual drama work is particularly appropriate for the following reasons:

it affirms and extends students' previous drama experience
it continues to tap into interests, ideas and experiences of the students which are of importance to them
it continues to involve all students in the process of exploring and expressing ideas in many dramatic forms
it requires that students continue to work together "collectively"
it encourages and affirms student ownership of the work
it extends students' understanding of situations and issues
it can result in a performance which is relevant to the community because it reflects the students' own knowledge, experience and insights.

The following chart offers teachers a guide to planning dramatic situations and collective creations with their middle years drama students. It briefly summarizes the six recommended steps. Following this chart is a detailed description of each of the steps. This description should prove valuable to the teacher's understanding and application of the curriculum approaches.

The Process At A Glance

Step One
Choosing the Topic
By the time they reach the middle years, students will know that topics for dramas can arise from a number of different sources, and they will have interests and concerns that they want to explore in their drama work. It is important for teachers to provide avenues by which students may contribute their ideas to the choice of topics for their dramas. Teachers must also have the opportunity to propose topics and to help students identify a focus for topics chosen by the group. Participation in choosing topics for drama work contributes significantly to the sense of ownership and level of commitment as the work unfolds. Whether teachers use negotiation and consensus-building, brainstorming sessions or suggestion boxes, they will soon discover that their students are their best "ideas bank"!

Step Two
Structuring the Drama
Contextual dramas do require planning and it is important for teachers to become familiar with and use the process for structuring a drama. This process is described in the following section entitled "The Process in Detail". It is recommended that teachers will begin the year's work by structuring and working within a short drama (three or four episodes). This enables them to work in role and allows the students to work in roles of their own choosing, through different strategies and in a range of groupings. Beginning the year this way provides teachers with knowledge about their students' ability to work within dramatic contexts. It will give teachers who may not be experienced with this way of working a sense of how dramas "work".

Step Three
Working Within the Drama
Within dramatic contexts, teachers are challenged to undertake some unique functions and responsibilities. This guide will offer some tips on how dramas work and suggest a number of ways in which teachers may be required to function within them. Only experience, however, will provide answers to most of the questions which arise out of studying the yearly plan, reading the model units, structuring a drama and attempting to anticipate students' responses. Middle years students who have experience working within dramatic contexts may be able to contribute readily to the shape and direction of the work as it unfolds.

Step Four
Shaping and Refining the Collective Creation
Not all dramas will be developed into collective creations. However, when a class decides to extend the work from one of their dramas into a collective creation, they must be prepared to engage in a process of purposeful decision-making toward that end. They will be required to reflect carefully upon the drama through which they have worked, re-examine the focus of the work and be able to articulate clearly what it is they wish to communicate with their collective creation. They will have to identify those episodes of the drama which they believe best support their intention and commit themselves to refining and sequencing those (and, perhaps, some new episodes as well) into their collective creation. The teacher's responsibility as director of the collective creation begins here. A concept for the development of the play must be established by consideration of questions such as the following: What is this play about? How can it be structured so that our intention will be clear? What is the "glue" or the "central thread" that will hold our play together?

Step Five
Rehearsing and Performing the Collective Creation
If the students commit themselves to performing their collective creation, their work must be rehearsed and polished, whether the audience is to be another class of their peers, younger students, the whole student body, their parents, the entire community or a video camera. Their first collective creations may be as short as ten minutes in length. It is recommended that the collective creations of middle years students be rehearsed as improvisational pieces (works which are not scripted), that the teacher function as director, and that their play be produced using simple staging techniques; that is, without elaborate sets, costumes, lighting, etc.

Step Six
Reflection
It is very important that students are provided with frequent opportunities (both in and out of role) to recall, react to and describe their drama experiences. Reflection can take a variety of both public and personal forms. Whole group discussion, tableaux, prepared improvisation, drawing, writing in role, journal writing and other strategies can tap into students' thinking about their work. Times for reflection should be structured into each drama and should occur spontaneously as the work unfolds. Reflection must also occur as a summative or final experience for each drama and for each collective creation.

Teacher Note
During the middle years, students should have some opportunity to celebrate their drama work by refining, polishing and communicating it to a wider audience. The emphasis of this program, however, continues to be an "work in progress"; that is, on students learning to explore and express ideas within dramatic contexts, articulate the shape and direction of their dramas, and make progressively more purposeful use of the elements of theatre form in all of their drama work.