Every school drama studio in the country has one thing in common: there are no desks.
As a drama teacher today, this is a problem. In years gone by, GCSE drama was almost entirely practical but now up to 40 per cent of the qualification is assessed by written exam. The teaching of this paper requires modelling, scaffolding, practice answers, peer-review, improvement time and self-assessment, like any other subject. Only, we have no desks.
So aside from booking a computer room, what are our options? How do we promote that academic, theoretical confidence in a space where students can’t readily put pen to paper?
Firstly, we can’t shy away from the theoretical. Too many times I have seen drama teachers reluctant to teach essay technique in the drama studio due to the limitations of the space, saving the written paper for the back-end of exam years. This is a mistake. Students need time to develop those exam skills, to get answers wrong and amend - just like in any other subject.
Essentially, what we need to practise is the principle of “strong talk” teaching. If a student can verbally analyse a piece of work (whether that be a text, an equation, a work of art or a performance) and orally communicate their personal responses, the written work produced after will be of a higher standard than if students are merely offered an exercise book and a pen and told to get to work on the practice question.
GCSEs: Oral analysis to prepare students for written exams
In 2014, Alex Quigley wrote that “scaffolding your students’ understanding is essential: using clear explanations, oral rehearsal and utilising models”. In other words, high-quality talk is an important part of the process.
So, actually, having no desks can be an advantage and a fantastic opportunity to really support all students’ learning. Taking emphasis away from “How do I start this paragraph?” and putting it on to formulating meaningful verbal rehearsal of a response produces, in my opinion, infinitely more analytical academic work.
So, how exactly might we go about putting these ideas into practice - in any classroom, whether they have desks or not?
I’ve always found this old adage to be true: if you can’t explain it to a five-year-old, you don’t understand it well enough. Asking students to put complex ideas into a succinct, verbal form is a great place to start.
Oher opportunities for facilitating oral exam preparation include using group discussions, presentations, debates and scaffolded verbal sentence-starters.
The latter is a particularly efficient approach. One way to do this well is to create a display with a really simple selection of sentence starters that promote academic language, and encourage students to begin orally crafting essay paragraphs.
Here are some suggested sentence starters:
- “One potential interpretation of this could be…”
- “Alternatively, the contrary might be the case…”
- “This made a powerful impact upon the audience because…”
- “The connotations of this design choice are…”
You might ask students to begin at least one sentence in their oral response with one of these. It’s a really simple approach, but one that I have found to be very effective.
In this way we set the expectation that even in the drama studio - a space in which we create practical performances using all types of informal, colloquial, imaginative, creative methods of communication - we should still be using academic language when we analyse theatrical work.
The lack of desks is irrelevant. By getting students to approach analysis orally, we lay the groundwork for them to be able to effectively communicate their understanding and knowledge when they finally come to put pen to paper.
Hetty Steele is subject lead for drama at The Bishop’s Stortford High School and a part-time PhD student at King’s College London
