Something my elder brother successfully achieved at high school was taking responsibility for his own learning as a student. I think this requires a certain level of maturity and to be honest, I probably didn’t have it at the time, so I mostly did work for the teacher and rarely understood the wider implications of my learning.

So why did I become a teacher if I was such a lousy student? Although I had two elder sisters who were teachers ready to inspire me, I don’t think I ever really wanted to be a teacher per se. At the end of Year 12 my mother suggested I put down a Drama teaching course for security, as acting was and still remains an unstable profession in terms of available work. Teaching would be my way of getting my regular “fix” for Drama and a couple of decades later, I have never looked back.

Today, I envy those mature students in my classes who have the discipline to study for hours on end and write amazing essays, quietly wishing I was one of them in my day. I also have no shame in openly admitting to students where I stuffed up at high school in the hope they may not do similar, themselves. And for those students who think senior high is all about the grades, they are amazed sometimes to hear me say it just isn’t. My grades were so bad in Year 12, I am thankful the curriculum authority moderated my English examination score up, or I may have failed my final year! But, I fell on my feet and found a career for myself that I would love with a passion for years to come.

So, the past few weeks, while many of my colleagues at school have been noticing students in their Year 12 classes casually, yet consistently, arrive late to their lessons, my Year 12 Drama class is arriving on time and where possible (after lunch break etc), five minutes early. I have arrived at class myself recently to see all my Year 12 Drama students happily rehearsing their developing solo performance exams in the classroom without me! A significant shift in mindset has taken place: they are now happily taking responsibility for their own learning in Drama. They “own” their solo performance and want to do well in their October exam. They’re not meeting time-lines and doing hours of homework preparing it for their teacher like I did at high school, but rather they are doing it for themselves.

So right now my Year 12 Drama class is the warmest place to be on campus, no matter how cold the Melbourne winter is outside. Short of hugging each other, these students care for themselves and what they do in Drama, they care for each other, and they are proud of their work. Like all Drama students, they become frustrated, lose confidence in their own ability, become perfectionists with their work and occasionally would just like to throw a mini-tantrum in class to get it all out!

I listen to loud applause for the less confident students who perform their work before the class for feedback. I see students at parent teacher night tell me doing well in this performance exam means so much to them, they have tears in their eyes as they speak. I watch students take others under their wing and go out of their way to look after them in Drama class. I see the same level of artistic discipline from the weakest student in the class, as I see from the very strongest. I see a culture in my Year 12 Drama classroom that “makes my day” as an educator, three times a week. I don’t think I could possibly ask for more …….

ArtsEdge is probably the best resource site for drama/theatre lesson plans in terms of both quality and quantity. Each lesson plan (or unit of lessons) is comprehensive, uniformly structured and linked to US curriculum standards. Searching for lesson plans on this website can also be filtered by grade bands K-4, 5-8 and 9-12.

All lesson plans at ArtsEdge follow this structure:

• lesson overview
• length of lesson
• instructional objectives
• supplies
• instructional plan
• assessment
• extension
• sources

Lessons are contributed by education professionals from a variety of American schools, listed below each plan.

Sample lesson plan topics in drama/theatre at ArtsEdge include;

• characters
• melodrama
• musicals
• structure
• famous plays and playwrights
• myths, fables and folktales
• culture
• costume
• themed units
• history
• Shakespeare
• musical composers
• puppetry … and more

I blogged in September last year on The Drama Teacher about the need for confidence in high school student theatre. As Drama/Theatre teachers, we are perhaps finely tuned to the life of teenagers in the development of theatre pieces. Where our students are in their personal lives – not quite children – not quite adults – can directly affect the theatre-making process.

It’s a myth to think all adult actors are either naturally confident, or find obtaining and maintaining confidence an easy thing. Time and time again we see well-known Hollywood actors interviewed on American talk-shows squirming in their seats, hating the limelight and looking awfully uncomfortable being the centre of attention. On the flip side, however, is Robin Williams. Over the years I have seen Williams so confident on the David Letterman Show, he ran the interviews, not Letterman.

As a teenager myself, I had way too much energy and acting was a method of releasing that energy in a more controlled and rewarding fashion. Confidence was not much of an issue, either. It just seemed to come naturally to me. Yet, Ian McKellan claims that one of the most frustrating aspects for him over many decades acting professionally for stage and screen is the fact that he simply lacks confidence as an actor. It has been the demon inside him his entire career.

So, if you were given one skill to name as the most valuable an actor can possess, what would it be? I’m putting my money on focus. Without focus, an actor is doomed. I’d be interested in other people’s thoughts. Comment below…..

Well, this year I struggled with actually delivering my topic to my students. It is such a heavy topic laden with responsibility, that I dumped the idea and went on the Plan B for a while, only to eventually give my students the option of two ensemble topics. They chose my first idea, so here it is below.

It is unquestionably the heaviest drama ensemble topic I have given students in many years of teaching. I have a small class this year, so they have formed one single ensemble group for this play. It will be in the vicinity of 45 minutes duration and the development and rehearsal time line (including research) is about 8 weeks of good working time, on a 10 week time line, with a two week holiday break in the middle.

I believe, with a topic such as this, all the planets need to align in order to pull it off successfully. The elements were there from the beginning. A small group of passionate, highly motivated, mature students, half of them school leaders in various areas such as College Captain, Drama Captains, Arts Captain, Public Speaking Captain etc. While not necessarily best friends, they are a close-knit group that is bonding further through the process of developing this ensemble performance. The stakes are high. It will either be a huge success that will no doubt bring audience members to tears, or it may miss the mark, altogether. My students know the risks and are prepared to take on the challenge.

We borrowed our performance title, Terror in Mumbai,  from a BBC documentary of the same name on the Dispatches program. My goal, as teacher, is to see how a group of 17-year old girls can tackle such a serious topic with sensitivity and maturity. Below is the task details I gave my students:

Terror In Mumbai

Background For several days in November 2008, ten gunmen terrorised India’s most populated city. Recruited by leaders of the militant organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba, the men quickly created panic and hysteria among the people of Mumbai.

In constant communication with their controllers in Pakistan during the event, the gunmen shot people in the streets, set off fires in hotels and detonated grenades in taxis and crowded cafes. As the world watched from afar, Mumbai’s antiquated police force was virtually helpless in trying to stop the pandemonium and carnage back home. By the time it was all over, nearly 200 people were killed and over 300 lay wounded.

How did ten gunmen control the city of Mumbai for so long? What was the background behind such a well organised and planned attack on one of the world’s biggest cities? What repercussions do the Mumbai killings have for other major cities of the world today?

Prescribed Performance Styles Theatre of Cruelty (Antonin Artaud), Epic Theatre (Bertolt Brecht).

Prescribed Theatrical Conventions Transformation of character, transformation of place, transformation of object, disjointed time sequences, pathos.

Prescribed Dramatic Elements Contrast, symbol, language.

Prescribed Stagecraft Elements Costume, props, multimedia, sound.

Plot The following plot ideas should be included in the ensemble performance. Other ideas and/or scenes may be added as necessary. At least one example of scenes out of chronological order must occur in order to satisfy the prescribed theatrical convention of disjointed time sequences. The performance must end with a message(s) for the spectator (audience).

• Back story
  • The relationship between India and Pakistan
  • Previous terrorist attacks in Mumbai
  • Religious ideology of the militant organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba
  • The training of the Mumbai gunmen in Pakistan with Lashkar-e-Taiba

• The event
  • Leopold café bombing
  • Taxi bombings
  • Taj Mahal Hotel and Oberoi Trident blasts and fires
  • Nariman House (Jewish Outreach Centre) siege
  • Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (train station) shootings
  • Response to the disaster by the Mumbai police force
  • Response to the disaster from the Indian government
  • Response to the disaster by Indian soldiers, marines and commandos
  • Media involvement and reporting of the events from within India and abroad

• The aftermath
  • Victims stories
  • Interrogation by Indian police of captured gunman Ajmal Kasab
  • Public reaction to the events from the world’s media and political leaders
  • Lessons to be learned from the Mumbai attacks and repercussions for the future

Recently there has been essays on playwright Enda Walsh and Irish theatre, American actress Julianne Moore, the state of the arts in Sydney and New South Wales, 22 year-old English playwright sensation Polly Stenham, the strength of contemporary Russian theatre, the place of arts festivals in Australia and Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco.

This weekend John Bell, the founder of Australia’s national Shakespeare touring company, Bell Shakespeare, is interviewed on the eve of turning 70 and once again tackling the almighty role of King Lear. My personal love for Shakespeare began the day I opened King Lear in Year 11 Literature back at high school. From that day onwards, my interest in theatre accelerated at a rapid pace and even after reading Macbeth, Hamlet and most of the Bard’s other works, nothing in my opinion came close to the power of characterisation and playwriting that exists in Lear.

In fact, one of the reasons Lear is rarely seen these days on the stages of international theatre companies is because many quietly believe it to be “unstageable”. If not the play itself, then certainly the protagonist, Lear, King of Britain. Till the day I die, I will never forget the gaudiness, the campness and the grotesqueness of John Bell’s King Lear in Australia in 1998, directed by Barry Kosky.

Closer to home, Shakespeare is more relevant to me in the classroom. With a new group of Year 10 Drama students, I have placed them head-first into a Shakespearean monologue for their first assessment task at the beginning of the academic year. Their previous experience with Shakespeare has only been Romeo and Juliet last year in English class. Now, I have asked them to dive into the deep end of the pool head-on. Whilst they are definitely engaged (a sigh of relief), of course they are also bewildered, telling me Shakespeare’s use of words is so foreign to them (even after several lessons breaking the monologues into beats, reading plain language interpretations, doing research etc). From the article in Review, mentioned above, I have found my source of inspiration for my students from John Bell, himself:

Shakespeare is easier than anything else in that it’s memorable; the words are very beautiful. when I was young, I loved learning Shakespeare. It’s like learning a song or poem. It’s important to understand exactly what you’re saying, consult not just the footnotes, but dictionaries to get the meaning of the words, where they came from originally and how they differ today. Then it becomes easier. It’s helped by it’s rhythm and metre and rhyme.

I just walk around and around in circles with a book in my hands and repeat it over and over until it gets into my head. It’s growing into the role, like putting on clothes item by item until you’re fully inside it.

(John Bell)  Source: The Weekend Australian, 20-21 February 2010.

What better advice could I give to young students tackling Shakespeare in a Drama class for the first time? Perfect.

Link: Bell Shakespeare Company

Learning Must Be Fun: Let’s face it, school isn’t exactly a bundle of laughs for many teenagers, so on the top of my priority list for effective Drama teaching is make sure as many of your lessons and activities as possible are fun for your students. While you’re at it, remind yourself that if you don’t make learning fun, you’ve lost half the class … instantly. I even take a risk and tell my students at the start of a course that one of my responsibilities is to ensure their learning in Drama will be fun for them and that they are encouraged to tell me whenever the fun has stopped!

Keep Your Students Engaged: I never stop asking my students what they’re into, no matter what year level. While my enquiries are genuine, it also enables me to stay young and by knowing what’s cool at the moment, I can always use this to my advantage to adapt a future exercise, drama game or activity, so my students remain engaged in Drama. These enquiries allow me to tailor ensemble performance topics to their interests etc. Being critical of your own teaching has its advantages, too. Mix it up a little and never get stale with your delivery, so your students keep engaged.

Know Your Students Well: I always make an effort to get to know my students, ask what bands their into, genres of music, films etc. Particularly if they are senior students. Always keep professional boundaries very clear. Never try to win students over by pretending to be their friend. You’re their teacher. But good teachers care for their students beyond the textbook and the classroom.

Set Clear Guidelines and Expectations: I set my expectations in the very first lesson of a Drama course, to avoid any confusion later on. I’ve blogged on The Drama Teacher before, that I will not accept laziness and lying (to the teacher) in my classroom. I make no apologies for it. I set my student expectations high at the beginning and spend most of my Drama courses encouraging (daring?) my students to see what they are capable of in Drama.

Ensure Everyone Respects Each other. Every Drama course I teach, at any level, begins with an agreement that my students firstly respect themselves, secondly respect other students in the class and thirdly respect me as their teacher. In return I tell them I will respect them all by default each time they enter my classroom. I ask students to respect why other students have elected to do this Drama course and to respect those that are less confident than themselves. This results in a warm atmosphere where less confident or able students are more prepared to take risks in performance work before their peers. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of respect in the Drama classroom.

Know Your Content. You can’t be a whiz in Drama teaching overnight. It takes time. Although I have blogged here before that in my opinion knowledge is not necessarily king in the Drama classroom, knowing your content certainly can’t go astray. Once you have gained much knowledge, two more things become important: firstly, remember we never stop learning and secondly, never be afraid to learn from a student. It empowers them and they respect you more as a teacher in return. Never pretend to know all the answers in front of your students.

90% Perspiration and 10% Inspiration. I’m sure many of you may have heard of this old adage. It’s true in Drama teaching, too. The most creative students you’ve ever seen in a Drama classroom will be useless if they are not prepared to put in the hard yards. I remind my students all the time, they have to be prepared to perspire if they want to achieve their own personal goals in Drama.

Keep Ownership with Your Students. When a school play or musical is a huge success, when an in-class Drama performance was fantastic, when your students performed beyond their wildest dreams … always keep the ownership with them, not you. While it may be true that you directed the musical, guided them in their class performance, or helped them every second step of the way, I always try to remind my students that the wonderful product they created belongs to them. This is when they smile and become very proud, but more importantly, realise what they are truly capable of in Drama. Encouragement and positive feedback will always return far bigger dividends than you ever expected in a discipline such as Drama.

Whether it is an A+ or a C, there’s nothing more satisfying than a Drama student being rewarded with a grade beyond what they believed they were capable of. Using these tips, above, has worked wonders for me over the years. I hope they work for you, too.

Australia is experiencing a boom in documentary and verbatim theatre. From plays about forgotten Australians to docudramas dealing with political scandals and crimes, a bracingly factual scene is reinforcing the stage’s role as an eagle-eyed witness to our times

Successful documentary drama is occurring today in several major cities and regional centres of not just Australia, but other countries as well. While this form of theatre-making may not always attract the populous crowds of mainstream productions, it nevertheless has its place in contemporary theatre.

Kenneth Pickering, in his excellent book “Key Concepts in Drama and Performance” notes it was the great French philosopher Jean-Paul Satre who called documentary drama “theatre of fact” in his essay Myth and Reality in Theatre (1966). Whether one calls it “documentary drama”, “documentary theatre” or “theatre of fact” is probably just a matter of semantics. As is the case with whether we refer to it as a theatre genre or theatre style? If there are differences between what some know as documentary drama and others know as theatre of fact, they are probably subtle.

Most agree the form as we know it today originated in Germany in the early 1960s, consisting of plays about recent historical events, including the horrors of the Nazi regime. But documentary theatre existed in the USSR around the time of the Russian Revolution, it was being examined by Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator in Germany in the 1920s and with The Living Newspaper (part of the The Federal Theatre Project) in America in the 1930s. In all cases, this theatre was political propaganda, set up for social change. The late Augusto Boal used his position as a city councillor in Rio de Janiero to create his Forum Theatre for social change, in effect creating another form of documentary drama based on factual events.

Documentary drama uses historical records of real events as its foundation. Verbatim theatre, according to Rosemary Neill’s article in Review, originated in the 1960s in regional Britain in order to “give marginalised communities a voice”. It goes one step further and deliberately uses the actual words of people involved in the event, onstage.

But can we use documentary and verbatim theatre in the drama classroom and if so, is it likely to succeed? Some of the most successful work I have undertaken with my senior high Drama students in the past three years has been doing exactly these types of projects.

It was borne out of the freedom entitled to me as a Drama teacher to choose a topic of my choice for my Year 12 Drama students to write, direct and perform as a major play for part of their final year assessment. I suspected if I chose a historical event of some worth and motivated my students to undertake heavy research in order to write and perform a quality script, they just might bite the carrot.

In 2007 my Year 12 Drama students wrote and performed their own documentary theatre piece on the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The following year my senior Drama class performed two separate pieces on Hurricane Katrina from 2005. Last year, my Year 12 Drama class divided into two even groups – one exploring the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, the other dramatising the events of the 2003 Columbia Space Shuttle disaster. This year, my senior class will dramatise the events of British nuclear testing in Australia during the 1950s and 60s. Each year I have tweaked these projects, learning from previous mistakes, so that the project improves the following year.

My findings indicate successful documentary theatre with school students should involve:

• a factual event(s) worthy of investigation
• substantial preparation by the teacher in advance of delivering the project
• enough research information available for students (preferably web-based)
• proper research by the students
• effective scriptwriting based on adequate research
• a clear understanding of both sides/perspectives of the event(s)
• event(s) that has a lead up time – heightens the plot, builds tension
• non-inflammatory theatre – try not to sensationalise
• theatre based on the facts, rather than individual or group opinions
• clear timelines, as a chronology of events can translate into scenes
• episodic ensemble performances work well (as with Brecht)
• time shifts (flashbacks etc) are very effective
• fast jumps in location are also effective, but ensure it is clear to audience
• investigative elements, cover-ups, secret documents, tension, victims
• pockets of verbatim theatre weaved in (snippets of Presidential speeches etc)
• students playing multiple characters with simple costume changes are acceptable

In 20 year of teaching, I can honestly say that I have NEVER got a group of senior Drama students more engaged in an academic task than those listed above, with this bullet list of tips being used along the way. It was hard work, but fun at the same time. Most importantly, if the teacher acts as a facilitator and guide, the students will feel they legitimately own their piece of documentary theatre and when they perform it to parents and friends, they will genuinely believe their small play has made a difference to the world they live in. You can’t ask for any more than that!

The Story of Slapstick covers various masters of the genre, but from a refreshing British perspective. Naturally, short video clips are in abundant supply in this documentary, something that will no doubt please those Drama students of yours hungry for the visual entertainment their generation knows all too well.

Artists/characters/comedy teams featured include Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean, Monty Python, The Goodies, Michael Crawford in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, The Young Ones, Morcambe and Wise, Vic and Bob, and French and Saunders.

This documentary interviews several well-known British comedians, young and old, and covers many of slapstick’s vital ingredients such as violence and the innocence of the characters. The Story of Slapstick also dismisses slapstick’s stigma as being an unsophisticated form and interestingly highlights its additional success on the radio (The Goon Show) and its transition today out of formal scripted sketches into our own living rooms, with everyday slapstick caught on camera then posted on popular websites like YouTube etc.

Worth a watch.

Torrent (.avi, 60 mins, 553mb)

On the eve of my senior Drama students receiving their official grades for the year (for locals in Victoria, that’s the VCE Year 12 Drama course), I have a contradiction worth sharing. I spend most of my year pushing my students to achieve the best possible grades they are capable of, and yet I openly say to them that there’s more to school than grades!

Data in my case will show over the past five or six years, I have a near 100% record of my students achieving grades above what was predicted of them in Year 12 Drama by the curriculum authority mid-year. Hey, this is one of my major aims and I’m the first to be proud of that and many of my students and their parents appreciate this also. It means as an educator I have been able, as many of you reading this blog have been too I’m sure, to suck out of my students more than what everyone believed they were capable of in their senior Drama studies.

But then you get those students who are so obsessed with grades. There’s a difference between getting 13/15 on a written task and querying afterwards ”where can I improve?” and stressing about what those 2 little marks are going to do to your end of year study score and overall Year 12 score. Students need to hear wisdom from their teachers that even if they don’t get accepted into their university course of choice, they will fall on their feet eventually … and most importantly … be happy in life.

As Drama/Theatre teachers, we know the most rewarding things our students receive from studying our courses are very rarely the grades, but rather the:

• self-confidence in everyday situations
• socialisation skills
• problem-solving and negotiation skills
• increased self-esteem and personal development
• ability to articulate to others with confidence

And then there’s memories many students cherish for years:

• their first public performance
• the high school musicals or plays
• the musical cast parties!
• the sense of achievement after a successful show

As I reflect on some of the words in ‘thank you’ cards I have received recently, it is not the grades that our students and their parents remember from Drama at school … it is the life skills Drama gave our students in and outside the classroom that helped them through high school and prepared them better for the outside world.

This serves as a reminder to us about the power of Drama and Theatre in education and the profound impact it can truly have on the lives of young teenagers. With this comes our responsibility as Drama teachers.

Drama …. is there another subject at school that gives students so many skills? I doubt it.

The culprit? Celtx scriptwriting software developed by a team of Canadian software developers and film people. Had I been living under a rock? Why had I never heard of this amazing software before now? Her script looked like a professionally typed industry standard stage play manuscript! This was a Year 8 Soap Opera script for Drama assessment, not a script for a new Broadway play. What was going on?

Celtx scriptwriting software is absolutely free. This is incredible and hard to fathom, because when one realises what an amazing, fully featured, advanced product they have in Celtx, you’ll be scratching your head as to how and why this product is free? In case at this point you’re suspicious of my motives here, no, I’m not being paid to plug this product. Celtx doesn’t need me to promote it, as this software is so good word of mouth should be marketing it all by itself.

Screenplay Example

With the ability to write screenplays, stage plays, A/V scripts, audio plays and comic books, Celtx has built-in templates for all of these formats. Focusing simply on writing for stage plays, the templates meet both US and International (default) standards. The text editor is rich and intuitive, with all the bells and whistles. Best of all, the template realises you’re about to move, for example, from a stage direction to character dialogue and the cursor hits the right spot on the template, accordingly. It is so easy to place either existing content or write from scratch in this editor.

There are also places in the stage play editor to put additional notes about scenes in the script, scene breakdown reports, notations and more. You can even dump images into a sidebar from your computer or the web, such as a costume note in a particular scene with an image of a costume item or prop. The advanced features really are fabulous.

I’m so excited about this product, I’ll be using it for all Drama scriptwriting activities at school from now on. The software is easy enough for students at most levels to understand and yet advanced enough to accommodate professional demands as well.

Celtx is a wonderful product for scriptwriting in Drama/Theatre classes in education and a great way to get students to enjoy using technology with a meaningful purpose. Celtx is a free download catering for Windows, Mac and Linux in more than 30 languages and just in case you need support, there’s online video tutorials, FAQs, a wiki manual and community support forum as well.

Celtx Website

Celtx Download