How to teach speaking and listening through drama
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.
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 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.
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.
Teaching from within Moving in and out of role – managing the drama and reflectingon it, 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 is happening and givethe pupils a chance to think through what they know and what they want todo. This OoR working is as important as the role itself. In effective drama, children can actually feel the ‘as if’ world as real at cer-tain points. The teacher must make sure that if the drama does engage in thatway, the pupils know it is a fiction at all times, especially by stopping andcoming out of role frequently. That is also a protection.
Disturbing the class productively Discovery/uncovering – challenge and focusThe ownership also arises out of the way the teacher operates. The teacher’sfunction is to provide challenge and stimulus, to give problems and issues forthe 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 thendisturb that comfort productively.
Responding to your class The art of authentic dialogue – needing to listen – two-way responsesT he class working as a community is the key to the use of drama as a teachingmethod. This is another reason that the class have more ownership.This community is made most effective by the teacher participating in role.The art of teaching and learning should be a synthesis from a dialecticalapproach. If a teacher runs drama without using TiR there tends to be a lack ofdialectic because the teacher produces the structure that the children engagewith, but the teacher can only manipulate it from outside that structure.
The teacher–taught relationship In all teaching situations there exists a power relationship between the learnersand the teacher. If the class decide as a group they do not want to learn and they wish tomake your attempts to teach them impracticable, they can do it. The power in the classroom lies with the class. Of course, it does not look like this when theclass are responding and contracting into the tasks set by the teacher butshould some or all decide not to, the cohesion can be broken. In drama thispower relationship is made overt. We must start from the point of view that ifthe class do not want the drama to work then it will not.
