Drama Reflection

On my placement experience I have designed and taught a drama lesson to a class of Year Seven boys who were in the final stages of their Ancient Greek chorus ensemble performance assessment, with my mentor teacher wanting me to teach the students core drama expressive skills to better their final product. This lesson was their final lesson on the topic of Ancient Greek theatre, meaning I was required to conduct a final assessment task. Thus, in constructing my lesson plan, I have incorporated and integrated two main elements into a one-hour period: teaching core expressive skills and substantially scaffold learning towards the assessment task. The lesson plan needed to be flexible enough to review and amalgamate the entire term’s content, so

In drama, expressive skills are essentially behaviours manipulated to express particular characteristics or meanings. Therefore, if expressive skills are understood in terms of behavioural acquisitions, learning these can be pedagogically undertaken in as social cognitive learning. Using social cognitive learning theory – because students needed to exhibit ‘good’ expressive skills in their performance assessment – Bandura (1997) asserts “[because students] expect that certain actions of models will lead to particular outcomes [improved grades] and the [students] value those outcomes…then the [students] are more likely to pay attention to the models and try to reproduce their behaviours” (as cited in Woolfolk and Margetts 2016, 318). Therefore, the modelling component of the lesson consciously reflects a consideration of the nature of the drama skills being taught (behavioural) alongside a learning theory which suggests that modelling can improve behavioural reproduction. As the lesson aimed to have students emulate ‘good’ expressive skill use during their performance assessment, modelling expressive skills use really assists students in solidifying expectations. Furthermore, simultaneously juxtaposing ‘good’ expressive skill use acting with ‘bad’

Constructing student knowledge in the lesson was accounted for in its progression, beginning with warm-up activities to ease students into the drama class mindset, introducing new knowledge, then giving students time to experiment and explore with that new knowledge before incorporating it into their final assessment task. After modeling correct expressive skill use to the students, the lesson plan has them breaking into their ensemble groups and rehearsing their chorus performance, integrating the new knowledge with their prior learning. This component of the lesson is very individually-driven learning; however, the teacher is still expected to aid each group in assimilating the new knowledge with prior knowledge and facilitate the scaffolding of all the information. Vygotsky’s social constructivism theory asserts that “teachers need to do more than just arrange the environment so that students can discover on their own. Students cannot and should not be expected to reinvent or rediscover knowledge already available…rather, they should be guided and assisted in their learning” (Woolfolk and Margetts, 98), hence why the teacher is still asked to give undivided assistance to each group throughout the rehearsal allotment. Students need to be instructed on how to combine their learnt skills in rehearsals, as teachers and