Brandi Burtts
Drama Educator
Be Intentional
Touchstone 9- I make the most of every minute.
It's so easy to lose time in a classroom. If you start the year off flustered you may feel that the whole year is already off on the wrong foot. But making the most of your time in the classroom can be as easy as adding procedures as soon as you can that will save you time and help your students focus for a day of lessons. I am a teacher that has tried everything to get my students ready to start our daily lesson. I have sat quietly and waited for them to stop talking. I have yelled and forced punishments. I have had heart to heart chats with them about how frustrating it is that they are wasting time. All of these tactics took so much out of me, yet made no advancements on the productivity of my class. In fact, most of the time I was shocked by how much time was wasted each day.
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Establishing procedures in my classroom has changed my life. It has taken some practice for both myself and my students to understand what to do. These are the simple procedures I have implemented in my class that have saved time and, let’s face it, peace of mind.
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Enter room quietly
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Take off shoes and jackets
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Leave bags and electronics at the door
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Get into "Perfect Circle"
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Student leader starts drama warm up game
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By following these procedures daily, my class has gone from taking 7 minutes to get ready for class with me constantly asking them to prepare, to 1 minute. And I don't need to ask anything of them. Watch this video from Harry Wong as he explains how simple it is to add classroom procedures.
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Touchstone 10- I help students develop deep knowledge.
When teaching, it is important not to fall back on the old method of memorize and respond. Providing our students with the opportunity for deeper knowledge can help them retain information long past an exam. In The 12 Touchstones of Good Teaching (2013), Goodwin and Hubbell introduce us to The Six Essential C's for Learning:
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Curiosity- Let's be honest, if our students are curious about the topic they will pay attention to what they're learning. This is where the "hook" can come in handy.
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Connection- No matter the subject it is important to not only connect students learning to prior knowledge, but also to real world situations. Making sure each lesson or unit has connections throughout will guarantee your students deeper knowledge.
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Coherence- It can take a while for our students to make these connections. "Teachers need to explicitly spell out connections, patterns, and the larger meaning of what students are learning" Goodwin and Hubbell (2013).
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Concentration- We need to provide our students time to reflect and think about what they are learning. We can allow them to take this time alone, with other students, or perhaps as a class. However, you choose, making sure you don't teach without a chance for students to reflect and concentrate on the topic.
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Coaching- This is where we must focus on allowing the students to try and then provide them with the feedback that will keep them going. As teachers we truly must guide and coach our students through the topic being taught. Providing them the chance to fail and improve is a crucial part of their learning process.
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Context- "If students never extend and apply learning, then their knowledge tends to fade from memory" Goodwin and Hubbell (2013)
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During the process of building our lessons or units we can simply add in places where the 6 C's are implemented. If you skip ahead to my lesson plan on "The Bully Experiment" you will see the places where I have made the C's a crucial part of the instruction.
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Check out the 6 C's here.
Touchstone 11- I coach students to mastery.
Formative assessments are one of the most important things you can use to gauge how your students are doing while they work towards mastery of the standard. One of the rules I set for myself is to not move in a unit until all of my students have reached the skills I need from them during their formative assessment. These assessments also provide us a great chance to offer productive feedback to engage our students in learning. However, there are other methods you can use to gauge where your students are during the lessons. One of my favorite skills to use in order to evaluate where my students are is the “3-2-1 method of summarizing.” While students are working in class I might call “freeze” and the students must stay still in whatever position they were in. I will call out a student and ask them to “3-2-1 summarize” where they will share three things they learned: two interesting things and one question they have. In a regular classroom, the student might be given time to reflect on these topics with the class but I want to keep the energy up in the theater classrooms, so they must react to this question rapidly.
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For more information on formative assessments for drama check out this website titled Classroom-Assessment-Theory-into-Practice.
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Touchstone 12- I help students do something with their learning.
If I look back on my time in school, I can't describe each lesson and everything I learned in class. But I can easily recall the time I needed to learn lighting design in University because I needed to design and focus lights for a production at the end of the class. Being able to use skills we’ve learned in a real-world setting is the key to helping students actually do something with their learning. For the last touchstone, we look at ways in which we can help our students retain what they have learned for the long term. As it states in The 12 Touchstones to Good Teaching (2013), students applying their skills looks different in each classroom or setting. Some examples are listed below, these examples are taken directly from The 12 Touchstones of Good Teaching:
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A project that requires students to develop and test their own scientific hypotheses.
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A persuasive essay that requires students to integrate research, grammar, and writing skills.
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A presentation that compares one historical period with another (e.g., the fall of Rome and the decline of the British Empire).
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A small-group assignment to develop a mathematical formula that relates a factory's costs with scale of production.
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These are some ideas in how you can connect what the students have learned in the classroom to its application in the real world. In a drama classroom, I like to follow something I learned when I was teaching using the International Baccalaureate, or IB. Using this formula, you are allowed to incorporate a students’ learning to the real world by having them participate in service action hours in the middle years and Creativity, Action, Service (CAS) hours. This is something that takes place outside of the classroom but gives the students time to use their skills in a real setting. Similar to how I was able to retain the knowledge I learned by designing lights for a real production, students can be held accountable for the skills they have learned. When we apply this method to teach our students we can encourage them to retain that knowledge we teach and help to create life-long learners.
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To learn more about the IB and their methods on how to help students do something with their knowledge just click on the link below.
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