The Perfect Drama Class

1. Taking the roll

In most settings now, a class roll needs to be taken. Experimented yourself, and watched other teachers handle this administrative chore. You will find that those teachers who begin the session ticking off students as they arrive are establishing a dull atmosphere which punishes those who arrive early or on time. It kills energy and wastes time. You have seen our lesson plans. There is plenty of time to mark who is present once exercises are underway. Ideally you want to create a class which students want to come to. Your sessions should start promptly so that any latecomers feel they are missing out. Do this and a lot of other issues will evaporate.

2. Setting expectations and rules

Like roll-taking, you will witness too many times when experienced teachers start a drama class by sitting the group down and spending as much as ten minutes running through rules and expectations. What a way to destroy energy, atmosphere and precious time. Set your expectations on the run, when they are relevant. Reinforce cultural ideas during closure. Reinforce behaviours you want by spotlighting those moments when students demonstrate positive examples. If you have a student who is behaving in a malicious or destructive way, you will get a lot further trying to talk with that student one-on-one after the class or during a lunchtime. The faster your drama classes feel different from most other times in the day for your students, the stronger will their commitment and energy and enthusiasm grow.

3. Energy levels

It is a common mistake made by young teachers. They try sessions that are basically all games and play. Students end up out of control and not actually respecting the session or the spirit of the class. Or the teacher. You may try sessions heavily weighted towards theory, chalk-and-talk, as we once called it. Thinking that senior students or adults need and can handle theoretical classes. They always lack something vital. Sometimes inexperienced teachers have sessions where they run through the plan too quickly and with 20 minutes to spare they go back to games. These sessions feel like fillers. A message you desperately want to avoid. Be strict with yourself. Start by energising and focusing the group. End by refocusing the group, praising and thanking them, and projecting forwards with goals and anticipation. In the middle, you control the energy and focus of the group, like a roller-coaster ride. At times you demand and facilitate their concentration and quieter co-operation. There is a rhythm to a great session. Find it. You’ll know it when you do.

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4. Goals and hidden goals – pulleys and levers

With any game, exercise or task, there should be clear and overt goals and parameters. This is critical. But as the teacher designing their program, you should also be working with your own set of aims and goals. At the beginning of any year, one of your aims should be to get everyone familiar with each other’s names. You will desperately need this too. Building trust, comfort, a sense of group, an expectation of controlled fun, are all central aims that should direct your early choices as you plan first weeks of classes.

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Over time, your goals will shift. You might see a need to keep challenging the most capable students while allowing less confident students to continue to grow. You might see a need to strengthen verbal skills. Or grow more physical risk-taking. Often there will be a handful of students who need attention because they are so shy or too attention-seeking. The dynamics of the group are always evolving. It is your job to evaluate this and come up with clever ways to tweak and improve elements.  

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You will have to sit down at times and ponder over the gender imbalance in a group, challenging differences in experience and natural ability, even age differences in adult groups where participants can range from late teens to 70-year-olds. As the facilitator, the challenges are yours to recognise and solve creatively. Ideally without groups ever feeling aware of the subtle ways you are pulling levers and strings. You will grow proud of your achievements and in this way, your job will never become repetitive. Each group presents new challenges and opportunities. There will always be a gap between what the students think is going on and your goals and aims.

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5. Extending and developing games and exercises. (sock-ball to glass)

Another rookie mistake often made is to think that you need to come to every session with new games and exercises. This fairly quickly becomes a tremendous stress as you search books and the internet and pester other teachers for new material. Students begin to expect it too.

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Out of necessity, you will learn a valuable lesson which will keep you in good stead for a long career. Almost any game can be extended, tweaked, made more complex and more challenging. And it turns out, this is more fun and more rewarding for the students.

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Adding blindfolds to simple trust exercises increases the challenge and excitement and sense of achievement. Adding time limits on tasks turns them into Reality TV-style “cook-offs” and dramatically lifts the excitement levels. A simple task like throwing a ball of socks (Why not a regular ball?  Because they bounce and roll away, wasting time and killing the game), changes into something more serious when you bring in a ceramic mug. Students take ten times the care. Over many years experienced drama teachers sen barely two or three mugs dropped. One teacher, working with a group he has worked with for several years, famously even plays the game with a glass. The tension and group ownership of the risk is extraordinary. No glass has been dropped yet! Think on that - they play throw and catch the glass; and it's never dropped. 

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6. Nobody goes out.

You will search for and collect games and you will find favourites with different groups. You may even have students offer to teach the group games they have played on a camp or elsewhere. But you will learn the hard way if you ignore this advice: do not play games in which players go “out” and have to watch others continue.

Why not? Firstly, it feels bad to be out. Those students lose energy. They are quite possibly individuals who often go out early, or are even targeted by bolder students. So your game is reinforcing a negative pattern and making it harder for you to undo. Secondly, it is boring. Those who are out will chat, distract themselves or others. As facilitator, you suddenly have a separate field of concern and may have to monitor and control those who are out.

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Some great games can hold this problem. One solution is to invent a new participatory role once a player is out. This proves highly successful. See Bang!  above and Everybody’s It. These were originally games students loved, but there were 'outs' and teachers recognised the problem over time. You have the solutions. You will need to create your own solutions when you have a game you want to include in your repertoire which calls for 'outs'.

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Some teachers go through a phase where they tell themselves that in a group that has been together a long time, or in an adult group of more maturity, the risks of having “outs” are more or less gone. And so they include games they wouldn't with younger groups. And certainly, they have no behaviour issues. But after a while, you will recognise that the group as a whole loses energy and you will conclude that an absolutely primary goal of the starting games is to bring the whole group together and energise them together. This can only be achieved by games which require all of them to participate for the entire time. Teacher too, as much as possible.

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7. Teacher chooses groups

It is so easy to fall into allowing students to grab a partner or form their own groups. Even adults will gravitate towards people they know and like. And they will ask you, sometimes plead. From day one, you need to make this an absolute non-negotiable. Do it simply and without fuss. Just repeat as often as needed that in your sessions, they will have to get used to working with anyone and everyone. This will automatically include times when they happen to work with those they know well or love to work with.

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Why? On the down-side, like “outs”, allowing them to choose partners can only reinforce divisions and status groups within the class. These are most often the actions of the more confident group members. Outsiders, newcomers and those with low self-esteem – the very individuals you need to work at building up and melding into the group – are never going to initiate grabbing a partner or forming a group. Do you want to be left with the less confident, less experienced individuals working with each other all the time?

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On the up-side, you and your students will quickly discover that they feel more and more comfortable working with any and all of their classmates. On top of this, working outside of their usual peer group forces confident students into uncharted territory and always strengthens their flexibility. Often they will produce results which surprise everyone. At times you will be able to articulate exactly this idea to your strongest students who will come to you in private and object to working with weak students. 

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You will know that you have hit a milestone when there is no longer an issue in your group regarding who works with whom. This is gold!  Most teachers would be envious. Many parents too.

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8. Unit, term, semester and year-long trajectories.

Elsewhere we will write about these matters at length. But it should be clear to you that just as a single session has an ideal structure, so too a semester or term, a year, even an intensive six weeks (as directors have with a group of actors rehearsing a play) requires and benefits enormously from a trajectory and shape to content. Without harping on about it, this is no different to a science teacher or history teacher shaping a unit and a course. It is unimaginable that a history teacher spend three sessions on World War 2, then when students next return, they are studying the Industrial Revolution, followed the next session by the Cold War. And yet, there are drama teachers who do the equivalent, making drama some sort of random lottery of play and entertainment. The dreaded filler reputation you will still have to fight, not only as an attitude held by some students and some parents, but among colleagues as well. There are teachers working in schools where PE teachers are asked to run drama classes rather than employ a specialist. One has to ask, “Would they ask English teachers to run maths?”   It is doubtful!

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So a ten-week unit might focus on script-work. Withing that you might start with basic short scripts and build their appreciation of the need for action and reaction not written in the script; the value and employment of props; basic principles of staging; simple costuming ideas like status and characterisation; and at the end, a significant performance of a scene putting all this learning together. That feels like a ten-week trajectory. One with potentially a very satisfying end-point.

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With Year 8s, some teachers develop a semester-long program around mask-work, culminating in stunning performances at school assemblies, parent evenings, even community events. At some schools, Year 10s know famously that there is a spectacular term of Theatresports (improvisation theatre based on many hilarious games, each with its own parameters and rules). There are students in these schools who know from older siblings or simply being at school assemblies and Theatresports nights the fame of this unit. Often, these students say that it is the reason they take drama as an elective in Year 10.  Such units become a part of the school's culture. 

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On paper, map out your journeys. Set endpoints and goals, both in terms of the group’s dynamics and in terms of the skill-set and theatre craft you want to pass on. Build your individual lessons along these trajectory lines. And be willing to adjust as you learn more about the group and see its progression.

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There is an old idea that used to be popular among teachers in the 1970s, often seen on office walls as a poster. It simply stated that all groups pass through five stages:  FORMING – STORMING – NORMING – PERFORMING – TRANSFORMING. It's a great idea. Over the years, it is an idea many teachers and even directors have shared with groups, put it on their walls. You might suggest that all relationships pass through these stages, marriages and families, friendship groups. Unfortunately, many groups give up or disintegrate during the storming phase. A sober challenge to face.

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9. Handicapping regular winners

This may sound harsh. But in many groups it can become quickly evident certain individuals are very funny, or naturally talented with games, or just big attention-seekers. Like most things, a lot of teachers' strategies change significantly from their early years. Saying to a student, “No James, you always want to go first,” or conspiring in a game to ensure that Lisa doesn’t win it for the third time in a row, are just too overt and can damage that student’s enthusiasm and the energy he/she brings into your sessions. Are you punishing them for being good? 

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What you will discover is the power of chatting with such students outside of the class and putting to them that you can see that they are talented or experienced or very confident. And you can propose to them that they stand to grow fastest if you find ways to challenge them within the classes. You can explain that this is not something others in the group needed to know about. It is just your understanding. Such students are so flattered, and so boosted by being recognised rather than punished for being capable, that the results are often transformative.

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Now, in a game like Bang! which Lisa was too often winning, you could have her run it so that  you can play. Listen to this experienced teacher talk about one memorable case:

One year, in a group where I had been asked to absorb two special-needs students being partially integrated into mainstream classes, I called on my most capable two or three students to help these students, the group and me. I asked them in private to accept the challenge of working more often with the special needs students. I assured them I would not make it every occasion, and I assured them we would talk again after a few lessons to re-evaluate.

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What they managed was far and above anything I could have hoped to achieve myself. Some sessions I was astounded by what a group would produce and the positive, creative ways they integrated a challenging group member. All this because I had spoken with these talented individuals and not only asked them to help me, but suggested that the challenges they would face would accelerate their own growth and learning. I was embarrassed by the praise heaped upon me by parents and the principal because deep down, I knew it was my most capable students who had managed a kind of miracle. What I had done was facilitate it. 

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