Teaching and Learning with Drama: Principle Five

Principle five is to teach through dramatic inquiry.

I feel that I have a spotty understanding of “inquiry” as an approach to teaching and learning – I’ll explain my prior experiences with it and maybe you can comment for me on whether I am understanding it correctly or not.

My first introduction to the idea of authentic inquiry came from a scientific research institute (SRI) I helped conceptualize and lead one summer when I had the opportunity to be a teaching assistant to my undergrad teaching methods professor. Although I did not realize it at the time, the experience was full of authentic inquiry (I think). The students who attended the SRI  began the week by reflecting on their prior knowledge and building together a shared base of “old knowledge” based on conducting experiments and investigating and interpreting results as a group. Then, each individual selected a topic of personal interest to them and created inquiry questions to guide their research into the topic and design of an experiment to shed more light on potential answers to their questions.

After my SRI experience, the word “inquiry” faded back into the background for me and more or less meant the same thing as “inquisitive” or “questioning.” While this is part of inquiry, true inquiry (as I understand it, at least) goes past asking questions to seeking answers through a design of one’s own making (or a process determined with a group of equally-invested peers). The inquiry is authentic because the students move past sharing “old knowledge” – knowledge that is already known to the teacher or someone, somewhere in the world – to creating “new knoweldge” – shared understandings that were unknown prior to engaging in the inquiry methods.

Principle five takes inquiry a step further and promotes teaching through dramatic inquiry. My understanding is that dramatic inquiry may differ from scientific inquiry in that in dramatic inquiry, answers to questions are sought by engaging in active and dramatic exploration as a class, whereas in scientific inquiry, a scientific experiment is (often independently) designed to test hypotheses and arrive at a possible answer. Dramatic inquiry requires students to collectively engage in imagined worlds together and dispel reality for short or long periods of time to explore characters and plots from different perspectives.

To engage students in dramatic inquiry, it is helpful to create inquiry questions that draw students into active dramatic approaches. Good inquiry questions must (be):

• Open-Ended (as opposed to closed)
• Interpretive and inferential (as opposed to literal and factual)
• Why/How/What questions that encourage going beyond the text to interpret possibile motivations and/or explanations (versus who/when/where questions whose answers are easily located within a text)
• Socio-cultural (instead of affective – I love this one because it encourages us to get rid of questions such as “How did Romeo feel when he discovered Juliet wasn’t really dead?” and replace them with questions such as “How did Romeo’s relationship with Juliet affect his decision-making?”)
• Help students learn both “new” and “old” knowledge (that is, the questions help clarify piror knowledge and widely-accepted interpretations of plots for students to build on but also encourage students to go past that and create new understanding together, based on their own interpretations.)

All of these inquiry approaches tie back to the first characteristic listed above: they are open-ended. This trait is turning out to be both the most appealing and most challenging aspect of the active dramatic approaches to teaching & learning we are being introduced to in class this week. 

 

I love the idea of building off of student interpretations and having each class go in different directions based on what the students bring with them – the thought of how refreshing it would be, and how deep their potential learning could go is incredible! At the same time, however, I find myself wondering how I would keep things moving in the right direction to eventually expose all of my students to similar “old” and “new” knowledge so that they would all be successful.  

Inquiry learning happens in all four quadrants of teaching and learning with drama: instructing and directing, facilitating, collaborating, and dialogizing/transforming. I think that probably the most challenging of the four quadrants for me is collaborative inquiry, probably because good collaborators are able to “let go of their own ideas”(Edmiston, p. 4). This is challenging for me, as I imagine it probably would be for many students; however it is a necessary step if I ever want to reach the transformation quadrant. In order to be “transformed” people must engage in dialogue between competing perspectives and be made to see things from different points of view that challenge their previously-held ideas. Without collaborating effectively to accept and build on others’ ideas while being willing to let my own go, I will never reach transformation, and neither will my students.

Does anyone else have a hard time giving up their own opinions and perspectives and seeing things in a new way? I find this characteristic an unbecoming one in myself but admit it’s there. The only redeeming aspect (if there is one) is that I don’t resist seeing things from others’ point of view out of a disregard for others (in fact I wish I was better at seeing the world from others’ eyes and my interest in languages and cultures probably is born of the desire to train myself to do so more readily); instead it comes from a character flaw in myself: I can be extremely stubborn and single-minded. Sometimes I simply get hung up on the idea that my way is best or better than someone else’s. Clealry this is something I need to work on as a teacher! 

Teaching and Learning with Drama: Principle Four

Principle four of teaching and learning with drama is learning to share power with students.

Power is constantly at play in educational settings. Usually, it is a given that the teacher has more power than the students and this is the way things remain. However, in using active drama approaches for teaching and learning, it is not enough to simply be active and dramatic; the teacher also must to learn to give over her power to her students. According to Edmiston:

As teachers we may choose to regard young people as subjects with individual lives rather than as statistics or objects to be managed, to treat them with dignity rather than as problems, and to value them as equals rather than as inferiors. More challenging, we have the power to treat youngsters with respect even when they may disrespect us or devalue their peers”(p.1).

Upon reflection on today’s activities in class, I realize that age is not really a valid reason for giving power to one individual over another, even in a classroom setting. Every student has as much to share as his teacher does; just because he may have less knowledge about a topic does not mean he doesn’t have relevant life experiences that can help contribute to the rest of the class’s understanding.

Just as age should not determine who has the power, neither should personality. It is a constant challenge to encourage all students to participate in the dialogue of a class. All teachers have had the experience of trying to draw out and engage the shy, reserved student while downplaying the over-eager contributions of students who often have louder voices and are less inhibited.

I’m ashamed to admit that over time, I am sometimes guilty of going straight to my eager participants to arrive at the correct answer more quickly and move forward with instruction rather than taking the time to encourage equality among all voices in my classroom.

This is problematic in two ways: first, I am overlooking the possibly insightful contributions of my more timid students and second, I’m teaching in a way that doesn’t promote authentic conversations if I am asking questions that have a predetermined answer. This ties back to the first principle of teaching & learning with drama: Have authentic conversations. One characteristic of authentic conversations is that a large majority of the questions that are asked by the teacher are ones that she doesn’t know the answers to. Clearly if I am so rushed to have a student identify the “right answer” and move on, something is missing at a deeper level.

Creating a respectful, emotionally safe community of learners is essential to level the playing field among the students in a class and encourage the active participation of all. When shy students sense that their ideas will be accepted, they are more likely to voice their opinions. This shift in who participates in the classroom can even help teachers to see their students in a new light and change previously-held negative assumptions about their abilities or attitudes towards learning.

Drama is one easy way to facilitate sharing power with students because it can be done naturally when the teacher takes on a role of a character with less authority than the rest of the students, thereby giving them more power in comparison.  Edmiston writes:

They [Students] will inevitably relish playing with having more power than a teacher: that increases their feeling of investment and ownership in whatever tasks they may do…that might include discussing, showing, and writing recommendations…”(p. 5).

I am often intimidated of giving over power to my students. On the spectrum of super-controlling to super-not, I unfortunately have traditionally fallen on the super-controlling end of things. I’d like to say that this is because of my age and years of experience; and to some extent this is definitely true. I have started to give over more control to my students and give them more choices than I used to when I first began teaching four years ago. However, I still have a long way to go in creating a classroom community that values equality and equity among all. I am at the point where conceptually I understand and value these ideals but practically am uncomfortable implementing them.

Reflections on “Excellence in Teaching” by Heathcote

Upon reading another excellent article for my drama class (titled “Excellence in Teaching” by Heathcote), I had to share the quotes below that stood out to me and my reflections on them.

“I must…have the ability to see the world through my students, and not my students through it” (p. 18)

Heathcote discusses how sometimes a child or a class has the capacity of showing you a whole new way of looking at a situation that you would never have thought of on your own. In looking through my students’ eyes, I can gain valuable insight into what motivates and interests them, what confuses them, and what is valuable to them. Conversely, by looking at my students through the lens of the world, I may unfairly judge or characterize them and fail to allow them a new chance to prove themselves each day in my classroom.

My next quote comes after Heathcote reflects on the importance of a teacher knowing herself fully in order to be able to effectively relate to her students. Heathcote’s obervations are quite personal, assuming that working on oneself leads to teaching in a more authentic manner:

“I see working at myself as the ability to examine the journey of my life, to constantly review it, and to perceive where I’m at in it. I forsee my death and I look forward to it, not in a morbid sort of way, but by constantly recognizing my humanity” (p.23)

The reason this is relevant? Heathcote goes on to explain why it is so important to know yourself as a teacher with more eloquence than I can:

“Teaching demands that we give ourselves fully to the task in hand. To do this means that we must be complete and completely self-knowing”(p.23)

This is an idea reinforced by Dr. Edmiston’s text on the first principle of teaching with drama (which I wrote about here) when he says:

“as teachers, we’re not destined to teach like other teachers, even when we admire their approaches”(p. 2).

This is a reminder that I think I often need, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s true of a lot of teachers. Somehow when I attend new classes or professional development sessions I walk away with the message that I need a complete overhaul of everything I do in my classroom and I should replace all of my standbys with the new things I’ve been exposed to. While it’s great to challenge myself to try out new strategies and methodologies with my students, the quotes above go a long way in reassuring me that it’s O.K. to be true to yourself as a teacher and to do the things that work for you. The important thing is not to confuse knowing who you are with becoming rigid and inflexible, or someone who is incapable of entertaining the possibility of another way of doing something.

Teaching and Learning with Drama: Principle One

I am taking a graduate course this week on the topic of using drama in the classroom. My instructor is Dr. Brian Edmiston, and he has a pretty interesting personal background – originally from Ireland, then England, and finally residing here in the US.

One thing I can say for sure- I will not be bored this week! Today, for example I was drawn into about 6 hours of authentic inquiry through dramatic play and performance, something that is rather uncommon in the K-12 classroom (particularly at the secondary level) and practically unheard of in higher ed.

I’m still trying to wrap my mind around what it must be like to be in his shoes as the instructor – to have planned a plethora of potential activities but really just wait to see what we bring to the table and build off of our contributions and ideas to try and meet the objectives he’s set forth. While it must be incredibly challenging, I bet he’s not bored either!!

The goal of the course is to become comfortable with and knowledgeable about active dramatic approaches to teaching and learning and to plan how to use these tools in my classroom.

After today’s class I’m excited to see what the rest of the week holds! Today we learned a lot about Edmiston’s first principle of learning through the use of drama: that learning is active, dramatic, and centered around authentic conversations.

The first thing I noticed when I entered the classroom was a lack of desks or tables. Instead, there was a circle of chairs. Most of the day we didn’t even use those; rather, we were up and moving around 75% of the time, or lounging on the ground cross-legged. The idea of being active can be conceived of as two-fold: there is physical activity and mental activity. Both are important but physical activity more clearly demonstrates who is engaged and who is not. Students get pretty good at faking mental engagement early in the game, but, if you force them to never quite settle in and get comfy in a desk it’s difficult to maintain a veneer of engagement.

In addition to being active in our learning, we discussed how learning is dramatic. One idea I had never thought of before is how dramatic playing is necessary for children to learn empathy and self control. As children role-play they view the world from other’s perspectives and “try on” ways of being and acting that are different from their own experiences. This is critical in helping children to behave more empathetically.

Finally, learning takes place when students and teachers engage in authentic conversations. It took me awhile to wrap my mind around what he meant by this, because we were drawn into so many imaginary play experiences that I thought perhaps authentic conversation was only when we were all completely dispelling reality and engaging in the pretend world we had set up. One of my favorite parts of the day was that Dr. Edmiston took little breaks by stepping out of the imagined setting to negotiate the direction of our plot from time to time by saying things such as “shall we pretend that it’s easy to save the girl who has been trapped underneath the rock in the cave or should we have some trouble with it?” and then we would all decide as a group and step back into the narrative as if nothing had happened – it was just like how I remember playing with friends as a child! And, by the end of the day, I came to realize that even these conversations were authentic; the inauthentic thing would have been for the teacher to pose a question, hear our answer and then go a different direction altogether.

Authentic conversation is difficult to facilitate because it involves a genuine exchange of ideas so that everyone is making new meaning together based on the ideas being shared, listened to, and built upon. Although the teacher may facilitate such a conversation, s/he does not ask questions that s/he already knows the answers to for the purpose of evaluating student comprehension; rather, a large number of the questions posed by the teacher and studetns are one(s) that s/he doesn’t know the answer to (Edmiston, p. 6). In this way, questions are planned to help students reflect and to encourage dialogue among learners, not as a way of assessing them (although this may be a nice benefit that the teacher can also garner from such interactions).

I’m only about half-way through my reading for tomorrow’s class so I better get back to it, but I wanted to take a break and tease out some of these ideas while they are fresh in my mind. Some of these ideas seem to overlap with the idea of the flipped classroom that I’ve seen referenced on twitter lately…the idea that you flip your classic instruction and homework so that students do “instruction” as homework – through video lessons or podcasts, for example – and then are engaged in typical homework activities in class instead – one of which could be dramatic play and performance.

I can imagine doing this in my own classroom by finding relevant video resources to teach students a new grammar structure and then conducting a brief review in class the next day followed by challenging students to use the structure to create a dialogue which they later perform for peers. Following each dialogue with questions and answers from me and their peers would make it a more authentic experience and students would of course be both active and dramatic in the creation and performance of their dialogues.

P90X Round 2!

Hi all!

Just a quick post to get out there in the realm of the public that I am apparently crazy and have decided to re-try P90X with the chin-ups and the nutrition plan! It’s high time I learned to be better about my diet and nutrition and I’m looking forward to this challenge (and think that summer will be a great time to take it on given the plethora of fruits & veggies available to me at the farmer’s market!) Please check in and ask me how I’m doing from time to time- I’d welcome the accountability!

Spring Break!!!

After a few looooong weeks of standardized testing and lead-up to break, I am finally on spring break! Here’s to a week and a couple of weekends to rest, recharge, reflect, and get some work done!! I’m hoping to accomplish the following during my break this year:
-Catch up on grading
-Create speaking prompts & listening formative & summative assessments for current unit, to assess after break
-Spring Cleaning at home, including switching winter/spring wardrobes and minimalizing a bit, as well as cleaning out the kitchen cabinets!
-Take some time to read good books, go get some pampering at a salon (gift card!) and sleep in or stay up late. Just relax and enjoy

Are you on break? If so what are you going to do? If not, when’s your break (if you have one)?

High Quality Professional Development

Disclaimer: This post is long and mostly me reflecting on my professional development today; however, I think it’s worth a read, especially if you’re interested in how professional development is organized for teachers or if you’re looking for resources on teaching reading to high school students.

Today was a professional day for me. I had the chance to listen to two great women, Chris Tovani and Samantha Bennett, talk about teaching reading to high school students. The best part of the day? Both women are still working full-time in classrooms in addition to traveling the country to teach other teachers about how to be more effective when it comes to helping students grow as readers.

This may seem like a small point, but, I’m convinced that there is something to be said for finding speakers for professional development days who still spend the majority of their time in the classroom. It is so different to listen to a practicing, classroom teacher than to listen to someone who used to teach and left it to pursue another career in education. This is not to say that educational consultants cannot be effective presenters in schools; I’ve been to some great sessions led by consultants, and I admit to even having entertained a daydream or two about pursuing such a career myself.

But….teachers are a tough crowd, and it’s important that they feel their time is being used well when it comes to professional days. If they don’t buy in to the presenter’s topic or approach, or if they feel that they cannot identify with where the speaker is coming from, it is very likely that as an administrator, you’ll see teachers filling seats in an auditorium but tuning out the speech in favor of getting a pile of papers graded or catching up on some lesson planning.

I, for one, found myself 100% engaged in today’s sessions and tracking with the things I was hearing. I think that this is in no small part due to this feeling of : “This speaker knows what it’s like; she’s a real teacher and therefore she gets it and I don’t have to worry she’s going to give me unrealistic goals or pat answers to tough questions.”

The other element to today’s professional development that I loved was that we didn’t just talk about teaching; we saw it. Chris planned meticulously for two hour-long sessions with a group of about 25 students in one of our freshmen global history courses. After a keynote to the whole staff about reading and strategies, 2-3 representatives from each department spent the rest of the day in a workshop.

First we were prepped to watch Chris teach and then the students arrived and we observed two lessons. We took notes but were not to talk to each other or the kids. We were flies on the wall as we watched how she got the first lesson started, gave the kids a task and let them work and then visited each table and had one on one conversations with individuals to extend their thinking about the texts they were reading and annotating. After the first hour-long lesson we had a break and then debriefed about our observations. Next, the students returned for an afternoon lesson and they tied what they had read and annotated in the morning to the task of writing. Again we observed and then debriefed after.

As teachers, we all know that students need examples and modeling of what to do in order to be successful once we let them go to work. Basically, today, I was given the rare opportunity to become a student and watch as Chris and her assistant Samantha modelled to me how to teach reading more effectively and tie it to writing.

A few of the ideas that I will take away from my observations of Chris & Samatha’s teaching are below:

• The people who are reading, writing, and talking in a class are the ones who are doing the work and therefore doing the learning. The less I talk, the more active my students become in their own learning.
• As a follow up to the point above, it is very important to be aware of the minutes I spend up in front of kids talking versus the minutes kids spend working independently, with a partner, or in small groups. At the bare minimum, this ratio should be 50-50, but it would be better to strive for limiting my direct instruction to about 1/3 of a given class period so that students can be actively working and learning for 2/3 of the class. Action Plan: Ask a colleague to observe me in class and time the minutes I talk vs. the minutes kids are working; then, strive to improve the ratio by implementing a ‘workshop’ model more regularly.
• “Rigor” is not the same thing as “hard.” Activities which are rigorous are challenging but not overwhelming; hard ones can be discouraging to the point of making a student want to give up. Rigorous tasks lead students to feel stretched but efficacious; hard ones frustrate them and often result in a sense of failure. To be more rigorous in my instruction, I may have to sacrifice some of my content and go deeper with fewer topics to ensure students have the opportunity to wrestle with meaning and grow.
• It is very important to have students reflect on their learning. Exit slips, debriefing sessions, and journaling are just some ways of doing this. The reflection answers the question “so what?” for the student and “what’s next?” for the teacher. The more that students reflect, the better sense I will have as a teacher about what they need next to built upon their understanding and move forward. Action plan: Build in a routine for closing my class periods – I already have a set routine for how to startclass but often just let the period run out without tying up loose ends (apart from assigning homework). Bonus Suggestion: once I have a regular exit strategy, build in commenting back to kids – for example: Have them reflect on a question on an index card or post-it, collect them as they exit and then respond to student thoughts with a brief written comment. Start the next class by handing back comments to them as they work on that day’s warmup. Keep the written dialogue going each day from class to class so that even if you don’t get a chance to call on a student on a given day they are still getting feedback from you in a different way.

Today was a day that I really appreciated as a classroom teacher. It was valuable not only for learning about teaching reading but just about the metacognitive aspect of teaching and learning in general. I was able to reflect as an educator on my own practice, engage in dialogue with colleagues, and set goals for myself on how to try some new planning, instructional, and assessment strategies in my own classroom teaching.

I would strongly recommend the book I read it but I don’t get it by Chris Tovani to anyone struggling to figure out how to teach reading effectively to secondary students. Furthermore, if your district is looking for a professional development speaker in the area of literacy, I would urge you to explore inviting Chris and Samantha to your school to work with your teachers. I learned more today than I have at any conference or from any other speaker I’ve heard since entering the profession and can’t wait to start implementing some of these ideas!

 

What motivates us? Part I

A couple of weeks ago, we had a faculty meeting to discuss some of the changes that Senate House Bill 5 may bring about in our lives as teachers, including the possibility of moving from our current lock-step salary schedule raises to compensation based on merit pay. While nobody quite knows what would constitute “merit” yet, especially for a language teacher like me who doesn’t fall within the core curriculum, most people expect the merit of a teacher to be judged at least in part on the test scores of her students. My principal read us a passage from the book Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us by Daniel H. Pink that refuted some of the commonly held assumptions about pay and motivation. The passage he chose to read was interesting enough that one of our 21st century skill coaches decided to follow up with a book club invitation surrounding the text and I decided to check the book out from the library. So far I’ve read the introduction, chapter one, and part of chapter 2 and, while our book club discussions won’t begin until after spring break, I am already wanting to process some of what I’ve read. I hope to do so here on this blog to share what I’m learning with others who are interested in the topic of motivation, particularly as it pertains to the classroom.

Introduction

Perhaps most surprising to me so far in my reading is how recent and still uncertain our understanding of what motivates us is. The first scientists to study motivation and record seemingly counterintuitive results were Harry F. Harlow, as recently as 1940, followed by Edward Deci twenty years later in the 1960s. Up until this time, we pretty much believed in two types of motivation: biological (the urge to satisfy hunger, thirst, or carnal urges) and extrinsic (rewards & punishments that the environment delivered for behaving in certain ways). We mostly thought that incentives would lead to an increase in motivation while punishments would lead to a decrease. We believed that the majority of motivations were external in nature and that human behavior was easily predictable and even controllable.

While this was true for some tasks and settings, it was fairly easy to prove it wasn’t always the case. Harlow planned an experiment to test the motivation of monkeys solving puzzles. He put the puzzles in the monkeys’ cages to get them familiar with them in advance of the experiment & planned to begin motivating them with raisins and other external rewards to solve the puzzles. But then something strange happened: the monkeys began to play with the puzzles on their own seemingly out of curiosity, and got pretty good at solving them. They seemed to actually like spending their time solving the puzzles, even with no reward. And, what was more, when Harlow began to reward the monkeys for their puzzle-solving, assuming they would perform even better, they did just the opposite: they made more errors and solved the puzzles less frequently And thus, the idea of instrinsic motivation was born – Harlow uncovered what he called the third drive in which the performance of a task provided intrinsic reward – that is that the joy of the task is its own reward (p. 3-4).

Remember, prior to Harlow’s experiments & findings, scientists only operated under the assumption that there were only two drives that motivated behavior: biological motivation to meet basic human needs and extrinsic motivation provided by one’s environment. So, this idea that there was a third and seemingly illogical source of motivation was huge news to the scientific community and people largely ignored it until 20 years later when Edward Deci conducted experiments with human beings whose findings supported those of Harlow.

….there is much, much more (truly I’m barely scraping the tip of the iceberg of the introduction here) but this post is getting long, so I will leave off until next time when I share some ideas from chapter 1 of Drive.  In the first chapter of his book, Pink likens the evolution of our understanding of human motivation to the changing of computer operating systems over time to demonstrate why we are in dire need of an “upgrade” in how we seek to motivate individuals in educational and business settings.

Until next time…what are some things that are intrinsically motivating to you? Do you do anything just for the joy of it without receiving any sort of prize or reward? Why do you do it? Share in the comments!

I’m Back. Not Better than Ever, but Back.

As I write, amoxicillin is trying to shut down the bacteria causing an upper-respiratory infection in…well, my upper-respiratory area. I am not feeling 100% or even close, but, I am back. I’ve been doing my typical fall-off-the-edge-of-the-earth-during-the-school-year thing of late and am trying, once again, to step away from the ledge and get some balance back.

This is no monumental post, but, I have been thinking about my blogging tendencies lately and why I am so hot/cold, off/on and decided I needed some instruction and/or inspiration to get back on the horse. A few months ago I marked a tweet as a favorite that linked to this Learn WordPress.com Tutorial and had been meaning to give it a look, so, today, home sick, I gave it a go.

I especially enjoyed step 3: get focused, which encouraged the blogger to figure out why they were creating a blog, and what their passions are, and how the two might be linked together. As they mention, it’s no mistake that the most successful blogs have a purpose and stick to it.

I think that this leads me to my point: I lack a purpose in my blogging and that is why I find it hard to stick with. I don’t have a specific audience in mind, nor a particular idea to impart, and, as a result, my content is random and doesn’t feel like it is “for” anyone.

So. Goal = set my purpose. Focus on a topic that ignites my passions and will be engaging to others who share that passion and go from there. I’m a little too out of it to go into details right now, but I will be back to share some ideas soon. Here’s to turning in early so my body can fight this infection, my head can clear, and I can return soon with some focused, purpose-ful writing!

Sub Plan Template

I’m writing from my hotel room while my sub is hopefully successfully navigating my sub plans at school. My personal day is great so far- slept in, read my google reader lazily this morning, attended a session on coding for kids that got me thinking about some of my planning/learning processes in my classroom, and exercised before grabbing some lunch with Justin between his sessions. Next up is reading for grad class but first I wanted to stop quickly to post a link to my sub plans template that I promised earlier this week -so here it is!

Check out how I plan for a sub in my classroom! Maybe some newbies out there will benefit from a suggested structure – but definitely make it your own and adjust as necessary -this is just one way to create sub plans! Please feel free to take and use for yourself as is, as well.