Microteaching Task

NAME : FARHAN ABDURRACHMAN

NIM : 171230103

CLASS : TBI 6C

Speaking and Listening through Drama

book on ‘speaking and listening’ that guides teachers into ways of enriching communication in the classroom. There is now a general recognitionamong teachers that in spite of the good intentions behind the inclusion of speaking and listening within curriculum skills, the normal culture of the classroom is such that any practice in these skills is limited by the narrowness and rigidity of that very culture: teachers use the language of the teacher in the classroom and listen to their pupils from their position of authority; and, in turn, the pupils respond in their role as ‘pupils’ and, if they listen to each other, they are attending as one ‘pupil’ to another ‘pupil’, their roles defined and confined.

An analysis of the language used in the classroom would inevitably reveal a mixture of teacher ‘instructing or questioning’ and pupil ‘answering’. This is not the best context for expanding ‘speaking and listening’ skills. For us drama is the most exciting way of teaching. We see the making of fictions, the joint work of a teacher and class, as the most creative and powerful way of teaching and learning, with all participants involved as both teacher and taught. Pupils learn from the teacher and each other and the teacher learns from the pupils as the piece develops. 

A new drama will become revealed in its potential and in its current limitations by the class at its first usage For speaking For listening

Use Teacher in Role to stimulate Use Teacher in Role to model and support and promote response that is natural Build confidence Allow space for those who are not yet confident Allow ownership of the work to Help pupils understand the focus of the the pupils through their contribution work Help them look at another’s Develop empathy and the ability to see contribution to interpret it the value of others’ contributions Promote the asking of questions by Value non-verbal communication all participants Require thinking before speaking Promote understanding through listening

How to Approach Speaking and Listening through Drama

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. 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.

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?

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-told in a specific place (coming down the mountain path) at a specific time (within minutes of a significant event) and from the child’s point of view, not a dispassionate onlooker or observer of events

How to Begin Planning Drama

In this chapter we are going to describe and analyse the main components of

planning in drama. On this journey we will visit a number of key planning

decisions and approaches. These are:

● How to begin a plan

● The frame of a drama – first example ‘The Governor’s Child’

● The frame of a drama – second example ‘The Wild Thing’

● How did this drama evolve?

● The ingredients of planning

● Learning objectives

● Strong material

● Roles for the pupils

● Tension points – risks – theatre moments

● Building context and belief-building

● Challenges and decision-making

But before we begin this journey a word of warning to those who are new to this way of working: ‘If I was making this journey, I wouldn’t start from here!’ Planning brand new dramas is complex and, while we hope to unravel some of the complexity in this chapter, the best starting point is using tried and tested dramas first. That is why we have included 14 dramas in this book. When you feel comfortable with the approach, the planning becomes more accessible.

The frame of a drama

We are using the idea of a frame as a way of seeing key decisions in planning. It is originally defined by Erving Goffman (Goffman, 1975) as the way a situation develops, or in our case is constructed, to give particular viewpoints and ways of understanding the meaning of that situation. The frame is a dynamic, interrelated and complex weaving of all the other ingredients. It has pre-text, which is derived from the stimulus material In planning a drama we have to write the main frame, the scenario, in a way that indicates the relationship of the component parts and how the interactions provide tension and potential. For example, the frame of ‘The Governor’s Child’

How did the ‘The Wild Thing’ drama evolve from initial ideas?

Looking at Maurice Sendak’s book Where the Wild Things Are led to ideas about possible roles and situations to explore with the pupils. The book has always held a fascination because of its depiction of boys’ behaviour. There is a direct link to PSHE objectives. To translate this to a drama, the first idea was: how might Max’s mother feel if she went to his room and found him not there? The mother is mentioned in the book but never appears herself; there is just the meal appearing in the room at the end of the story. The next stage was to develop some sense of his mother, her handling of Max and her attitude to him. Learning resides in this, the parent–child relationship, something all children know about but is infinitely variable in levels of success and quality.

The ingredients of planning

Let us take the elements of a drama we have been referring to above and look at them separately with other examples. Creating a drama is very much like cooking. It is easy to serve up a fast food meal, which has very little quality and goodness, but it is a more detailed, careful and thorough process to create a quality meal from scratch with good ingredients. Our ingredients include the following

Strong material

We need a stimulus to learning, to focus the exploration. This my be a piece of writing with key learning points, that are usually unresolved by the writer of the original material. These often lie in the PSHE curriculum area. Let us again look at our drama ‘The Wild Thing’ from Where the Wild Things Are. Maurice Sendak shows us Max, a boy who is very imaginative, but whose behaviour is very wild.

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 listening, 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. True speaking and listening for learning is effective ‘talk’, not two separate activities, as the phrase ‘speaking and listening’ suggests; it is an oral language interaction, which, at its best, is complex, demanding and truly creative. Learning is a social activity and thus talk is its real source.

Dialogic teaching

This is one of the most interesting, potentially powerful and new concepts being promoted in educational circles in the UK. It is the result of extensive work by Robin Alexander and others (Alexander, 2000, Alexander, 2005). This

approach to oracy in the classroom raises the profile of talk, speaking and listening, from the poor relation of English in the National Curriculum, to become the central focus, the pivot of learning across the curriculum.

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.

What does dialogic teaching demand of the teacher?

Drama certainly demands these as well. One of the key changes that drama brings is a different position for the teacher. When the teacher uses role herself she is able to dialogue in a very different way with the pupils; she leaves

teacher talk behind. If the teacher is the young boy, Daedalus, who has taken his father’s secret project design, without his permission, and the pupils are the family servants, then they have important decisions to make about what they do with this knowledge. They will talk to Daedalus in a way that they can never talk to a teacher.

So the teacher is able to talk and interact with the pupils in many ways and with many purposes. The teacher engages with the class and their contributions help build the fictional world. The magical world of the fiction and the parallel real-world that we exist in can help each other, so that the language the pupils use in the drama can be looked at from the real world when we stop the drama.

How is listening of high quality taught through drama?

Drama is the creation of meanings in action and pupils have to struggle all the time to make sense of what is going on around them so that they can engage with it. They have to make sense of the fictional situation as it develops. Unless pupils listen they do not know what is going on. The teacher can provide surprises, 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. This is because each pupil has to make sense of what the teacher and the rest of the pupils are gradually building up around them.

How to Use Drama for Inclusion and Citizenship

This chapter is concerned with the relationship between inclusion and drama as a pedagogical approach. We look at the expectations for schools to be inclusive and the demands made upon them to fulfil these expectations. We look at how drama, through its idiosyncratic approach, facilitates inclusion. We then make the link to the Citizenship curriculum and how drama’s approach to inclusion is an intrinsic part of this area. 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.

Secondly, the subject content of dramas can have specific learning potential to give a voice to groups whose ideas may not be heard easily in the real world. More of this later. So inclusion will always be found in drama’s approach to learning and it may also be part of its subject content.

What can drama offer in terms of inclusion?

● Drama offers ‘new opportunities to pupils who may have experienced previous difficulties’ (Ofsted, 2006, p. 7).

● Drama takes account of pupils’ varied life experiences and needs by using fictional contexts and roles which enable pupils to explore the underlying issues safely.

● For some pupils drama may offer experiences that are different to those they experience in the real world, for example taking the role of the outsider or the role of the one in charge. In drama we are dealing with the ‘as if’ world. In this fictional world we can behave ‘as if’ events are taking place and ‘as if’ we are there. It is a world that the teacher and the class create and fill with people and events that do not exist but are analogous to the real world.

The concept of drama and keeping pupils safe There is a perception of drama dealing with issues in a safe way because it uses fictional contexts. It is almost as if by shifting to the fictional, a safe emotiona distance is automatically created. We must remember that pupils have no choice about attending school; they are required to attend, whether they want to or not and there are consequences for pupils and parents if they do not do so. This puts them in a particular power position when they attend a lesson because they may well be ther reluctantly. It becomes critical for the teacher from an ethical (and survival) point of view to negotiate how we as a class can make it work for us. On one level, the teacher must make the content interesting and appropriate for the pupils, that is, it should be related to their needs and structured in such a way as to grab and hold their attention.

The relationship between inclusion and citizenship

If drama by its very operational values is an inclusive way of working and if the contents of some dramas are in themselves examining the nature of the outsider, then Citizenship and PSHE are an integral part of the drama experience  The QCA booklet on Citizenship for the primary age groups defines the area as follows:

The PSHE and Citizenship framework comprises four interrelated strands which support children’s personal and social development. The strands are:

● developing confidence and responsibility and making the most of their

abilities;

● preparing to play an active role as citizens;

● developing a healthy, safer lifestyle; and

● developing good relationships and respecting the differences between people.

5. How to Generate Empathy in a Drama

What is empathy?

In this chapter we would like to examine the relationship between drama in education and the concept of empathy. Drama is often promoted as a teaching and learning methodology that generates empathy in pupils, yet there is little debate about exactly what is meant by this idea. The word empathy is sprinkled liberally throughout education documentation and literature. For example, the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) documents that are, at the time of writing, being trialled in the UK make reference to empathy (SEAL, 2006).

These attitudes and feelings are key to children developing the right social skills, to be able to relate to others. Drama makes one of its greatest contributions in modelling and generating this sort of learning. For drama to operate most effectively we need to understand what is happening and how we most effectively create the conditions for empathy to thrive.

However, even the most superficial engagement with this idea uncovers deep-seated problems with it in practice.

A working definition of empathy

Let us begin with a less metaphorical definition of empathy than ‘standing in someone else’s shoes’ and therefore one that is more behaviour-specific. We need a definition that not only belongs to the real world but can be replicated inside the drama lesson. Pupils will then be able to empathise without having to bear witness to or have the actual life experiences of those to whom they arE directing their empathy. In this way we protect pupils from actual real life experiences and yet generate the opportunity to empathise with those caught

up in these experiences

Empathizing does not entail just the cold calculation of what someone else thinks and feels … Empathizing occurs when we feel an appropriate emotional reaction, an emotion triggered by the other person’s emotion, and it is done in order to understand another person, to predict their behaviour, and to connect or resonate with them emotionally. (Baron-Cohen, 2003, p. 2)

An example of structuring drama for empathetic response Let us use these ideas to analyse how empathy might be generated using as an example ‘The Workhouse’ drama. The class have been enrolled as government commissioners. Their task is to visit and report upon workhouses.

How to Link History and Drama

A problematic alliance

For drama there is a fatal attraction with history as a source for its content. Drama as a medium with which to engage with the past is established in theatre, film, literature, radio and television. In fact one of the Key Elements in the History National Curriculum is the interpretation of history So it is not surprising that the teacher using drama should engage the class through the use of roles, contexts and symbols from the past. In view of the fact that the use of drama to teach history is not straightforwardit is important for the teacher that a conceptual framework be adopted that balances the tensions between the medium and the content, between fiction and fact.

As was discussed in Chapter 5, the phrase ‘to stand in someone else’s shoes’ is one often used to describe the concept of empathising and it is never more liberally tossed about than in the History and Drama curriculum. We have already indicated that teachers should be wary of using it. If we believe that ‘standing in someone’s shoes’ is adopting their perceptions, feelings and understandings of the world then we are forgetting the social and psychological distance between us now and those who have lived in the past. While dressing up in costumes is a very popular history/drama experience, we must be guarded about what we think children may learn by the experience Using drama to make meaning of the past

Let us begin by looking at three elements of historical enquiry:

● A concern with facts

● A concern with reasons

● A concern with meanings

Historians are interested in making deductions and inferences about sources and then selecting and combining sources to create accounts of the past. Historical imagination is filling the gaps when sources are incomplete. In drama we are particularly interested in the last element. It is here that drama synthesises story and past events If we are asking pupils to take on roles of people from the past we need to frame this task in such a way as to respect the need for authenticity and to give them roles that will enable them to look at the past in a way that respects the work of the historian. Of course, the research is not just a task for the teacher but one that can be shared with the pupils in lessons introducing the topic and before the drama work takes place. The drama then has an assessment function, as knowledge gained in the research activities will be exposed during the drama. Setting up a historian’s frame The drama begins as a history lesson, with the idea of taking on roles in the lesson introduced from the beginning. The pupils’ first role is of high status and expertise:

In the drama you will have several roles, one of them will be historians and at other times you will be the people we are concerned with in this drama – that is, the poor street children of the 1870s in London. Let’s start with your role as historians. Before we do, you need to tell me:

What is a historian?

What do historians do?

What skills do they need?

In order to help the class to look at the photograph sensitively we give them a role that carries both power and professional distance. The discussion of the role of the historian is a preparation for this. This imposition of high status and expertise is designed to engage the class with a sense of responsibility for the task ahead and leads into the introduction of the first piece of historical evidence, the photograph. This may generate further research and it may not be resolved. However, it may also draw the pupils’ attention to the fact that girls did live on the streets and were taken into Barnardo’s homes. This in turn raises the opportunities for further research outside the drama lesson.

7. How to Begin Using Assessment of Speaking and Listening (and Other English Skills) through Drama

We went through a very interesting and useful process in beginning this chapter. The two of us were initially unclear as to what exactly a chapter on drama and assessment would contain. We have in our work used many approaches and many ideas for the philosophy and practice of assessment. The result of the hour-long discussion, much of it focused through looking at drama work with pupils on video, was that we had the powerful sort of dialogue, exchange of ideas, challenge of assumptions, that we are putting forward in this book. The conversation confirmed to us the centrality of speaking and listening for developing learning for all of us. It was a model in itself of why talking through ideas, understanding our thoughts through discussion, is so valuable.

As a result, we had a much clearer idea of how we see assessment, and the chapter reflects that thinking.

What is assessment?

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)

We are looking at how best to obtain the information on the students’ abilities in Speaking and Listening.

Drama is not just about speaking and listening, but the creation of a fiction, where the art form of drama is essential and the success of that enterprise depends on valuable interaction between all participants The currency of drama is speaking and listening and in its nature it is swift, fleeting and ephemeral. When trying to assess it we do not get a piece of tangible 

evidence in our hands. So how can we assess this process?

Some teachers say we should not be assessing speaking and listening at all because it is too complex a process. In addition, teachers often do not know the speaking and listening programmes of study and particularly the Speaking and Listening attainment levels of the English National Curriculum in any significant way. Where speaking and listening is assessed, there is a tendency to assess it not as an interactive situation, but as a very narrow construct, something that is not actually speaking and listening at all – the class talk. A talk by one pupil to the rest of the class does not usually involve dialogue, except, perhaps, at the end when there might be questions. In what sense is a talk like this speaking and listening?

It is easier to assess, of course, because it is an isolated target, one person delivering a set structure in front of the teacher and class, a performance. This is not what we want to assess; we are interested in the fluid and often powerful exchanges that a drama brings

How do we collect data more formally?

It is not easy and not necessarily useful to assess with reference to fixed lists of criteria. The approach has to be more than ticking a set of boxes, because if we do that we are often going to miss the point. The power of the language exchange is contextual. (See the example we look at later in this chapter, p. 87.)

A simple starting point might be to grasp the level of comprehension of a passage read to the class. One way of doing this is to go into role as a character from the book and take questions from the class. You will get a better understanding of what the class have understood than if you ask them questions about the passage. You can note afterwards key exchanges and contributions by members of the class.

Assessment 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 as researchers of the dialogue in their classrooms. Educational research is becoming more encouraging of detailed description of events, particularly when looking at classrooms in the action research method we are advocating. Capturing the samples of speaking and listening There is readily available technology that can record work and allow us to consider it at greater length after the event, particularly video recording. This is an approach we have been taking for a long time now; it provides evidence that we use to assess our own performance as teachers working in drama. Again, if teachers are paired to do the assessment, one can handle the camera while the other teaches. Some teachers object to the use of video recording on the grounds that it distorts the drama process. Our experience is contrary to that. If it is used frequently and if it is negotiated with the class, they soon forget the camera and the work continues in its spontaneity. In fact, if anything, we find that it helps raise the status of the work and aids concentration levels Pictures and captions

There are other models of recording what is created, using the current technology

to freeze moments of the drama. We can take digital photographs and project these onto a white board, where children can annotate what it means, showing their ideas by adding captions or notes of the speech by their roles, bubbles with the thoughts their roles might have at the moment, etc. If we go lower tech, drama techniques can be used to help the class themselves assess what is important. The class can look back over a drama and key moments can be recreated as tableaux. These can be added to with captions summing up what the picture means. This can help self-assessment by the children or peer assessment, when reflecting on their contributions to the drama work, because they are critically analysing what is important about what they have done.