How to Approach Speaking and Listening Through Drama

Name   : Putri Oktaviani (171230116)

Class    : TBI-6 D

HOW TO APPROACH SPEAKING AND LISTENING THROUGH DRAMA

There are seven ways how to approach speaking and listening through drama

A.    How to begin with a teacher 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 pupils. One of the best way to do drama works is to be inside the drama. Therefore, at the center of dramas is key teaching technique that is used, named teacher in role (TiR). TiR creates a particular context and can raise the level of commitment and the meaning-making. It can ‘feel real’ even though it is not.

1.      Teacher as story teller

       Teacher’s role will be to communicate the text in a lively and interesting manner, holding their attention and engaging their imagination. For many pupils the time spent listening to their teacher as storyteller will remain as significant moments in their education. The connection between the teacher as storyteller and the teacher using drama, in fact that they both use the generation of imagined realities in order to teach.

2.      The teacher taught relationship

       With this methodology, if set up right and handled judiciously, offers interest and engagement to hold the class attention. So, if a minority of the class start to undermine it, the committed will demand they stop; the disrupters seen as spoiling the enjoyment and it is not unusual to see majority let them know this fact.

There are five basic types of role:

·         The authority role

·         The oppose role

·         The intermediate role

·         The needing help role

·         The ordinary person

B.     How to Begin Planning Drama

       There is even an intermediate stage in planning and that is take parts of different dramas and remake them as new ones.

       For planning drama we can use a piece of strong material, a creative idea and more inspirational an objective led design. For example, when we wanted to introduce Shakespeare to a class of 10 years old, we wanted to use ‘Macbeath’ because it has very strong story. The original idea for drama came from thinking about how servants in the play might feel when they bring Macbeath piece after piece of bad news towards the end of the play. That led to thinking about whether the servants in the castle were aware of what is going on and what their moral reaction was. The frame for the drama developed from that.

1.      The frame of drama

       In planning drama, we have to write the main frame, the scenario, in a way that indicates the relationship of component parts and how the interactions provide tension and potential

2.      The ingredients of planning

a.       Learning objectives

In a learning objective, there are five areas; language development, spiritual, social, moral, cultural, personal, content, art from drama, and thinking skills.

b.      Strong material

In this parts, we need stimulus to learning, to focus the exploration. This may be a piece of writing with key learning points that are usually unresolved by the writer of the original material.

c.       Roles for the pupils

The class need to be framed up as a community, where the class work together supporting each other and working for the same aims. This builds their ability to communicate with and understand each other, the best basis for all learning.

d.      Tension points – risk – theatre moments

Tension provides the momentum that pushes the class, demands a response, engage them. It involves taking calculated risks.

3.      Types of drama

       There are two main types of this sort of classroom drama that have evolved: ‘living through drama’, where the pupils face the events at a sort of life rate in the here and now, and ‘episodic drama’, or strategy-based drama, where the class are led by the teacher in creating situations and events through specific techniques or strategies and where chronology is more broken. Of course, most dramas have a mixture of the styles, but the younger or more inexperienced a class, the more ‘living through’ will dominate to create the tensions and challenges more directly. The more sophisticated the group, the more they will look in a more abstract, artistic and less realistic way.

C.    How to Generate Quality 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.

It has to be an interaction with others where both sides are contributing. When a pupil is speaking and listening properly, he or she is able to see how each contribution arises from what has already been said.

1.      Dialogic teaching

       Talk, being central to the development of the brain, must be a priority for teachers. Alexander promotes dialogic teaching as the most powerful form of talk in the classroom. He identifies its key elements as:

·         Collective: teachers and pupils address learning tasks together, as a group or as a class

·         Reciprocal: teachers and pupils listen to each other, share ideas and consider alternative viewpoints

·         Supportive: pupils articulate their ideas freely, without fear of embarrassment over ‘wrong’ answers; and they help each other to reach common understandings

·         Cumulative: teachers and pupils build on their own and each other’s ideas and chain them into coherent lines of thinking and inquiry

·          Purposeful: teachers plan and steer classroom talk with specific educational goals.

2.      How is listening of high quality taught through drama

       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, and 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.

       In order for drama to work the teacher has to listen very closely as well, to see where the pupils are, to pick up what the pupils are offering and use it within the drama.

D.    How to use drama for inclusion and citizenship

1.      The relationship between inclusion and citizenship

       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

·         Developing good relationships and respecting the differences between people.

2.      The concept of drama and keeping pupils safe

       The drama teacher plans dramas with these devices in order to shift and adjust the emotional proximity of the class in relation to the social event they are examining. These planned structural mechanisms create a safe place to learn and make sense of the issues being looked at while at the same time providing the opportunity to work at a feeling level.

       It is important to remember that when dealing with issues that are close to the real world of pupils we need initially to create a distance that enables them to view the events more dispassionately. That does not mean we cannot move closer to these issues as the drama develops, but it does mean we need to find a way into the drama that will not generate counter-productive learning, behaviour that will seek to undermine or destroy the drama.

3.      How to approach citizenship and PHSE through drama

       The classroom-based drama world that we create can happen much more frequently and in a more focused manner. It is less problematic and costly to organize and to supervise, and with much less immediate risk.

When we consider that drama can link citizenship with personal and social education, and spiritual, moral, social and cultural education, then we can begin to understand the importance of drama as a teaching method.

E.     How to generate empathy in drama

According to Professor Simon Baron – Cohen (2003), Empathy is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to them with an appropriate emotions.

1.      The components of empathy

·         The cognitive components, understanding the other’s feelings and the ability to take their perspective

·         The affective components, this is an observer’s appropriate emotional response to another person’s emotional state

2.      How to structure drama for emphatic response

·         Building the cognitive component

·         Framing the affective component – through tracking and dealing with workhouse master

F.     How to link history and drama

       According to Professor Cooper (2006) says that in using the arts of pupils are creating their own interpretation account, based upon sources. This help them to understand how historians and others create accounts of the past and why accounts may be equally valid, but different.

       In view of Fact that the use of drama to teach history is not straightforward it 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.

G.    How to begin using assessment of speaking and listening through drama

According to Eve Clark and Goode (1999) said that assessment records evidence related to student’s abilities, both actual and potential, and charts their progression. The intended audience of assessment feedback should always include the students themselves.

1.      The purposes of the assessment

The purpose of the assessment

·         To give feedback to the pupil

·         Report to another teacher

·         Report to a parent

2.      Formative assessment

In the formative role of assessment we need to be feeding back to the pupils during and after the drama.

a.       Collect data formally

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.

b.      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.

Analyzing video recordings of drama we need to look at issues relating to:

·         The language used

·         The non-verbal communication

·         Proximity to the teacher

·         The empathetic and affective tendencies of pupils, their speech and their actions as they intervene