How to aproach speaking and listening skill through drama

1 How to Begin with Teacher in Role
Why use teacher in 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 the pupils. One of the best ways to do that in drama work is to be inside the drama. Therefore, at the centre of the dramas that we include in this book, is the key teaching technique that is used, namely teacher in role (TiR). This chapter will set out approaches to TiR and give examples of how it works.
Many teachers see TiR as a difficult activity, particularly with older children in the primary school. However, it is our experience that when a teacher takes a role he or she becomes ‘interesting’ to the children, so that there are less control problems because they become engaged. Many times we have watched trainee teachers with a class of children struggling to get attention when giving instructions in traditional teacher mode. Yet, as soon as they move into role, they obtain that attention more effectively.
For example, a trainee was talking out of role to a class to explain that they were about to meet a girl who was having trouble with her father and needed their help (see ‘The Dream’ drama based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream). The class were calling out and not listening properly. She was talking over them and trying to teach without getting their full attention. Then she explained that they could ask questions of one of the roles from the story and that she was going to become that role when she sat down. She picked up a ribbon with a ring threaded on it and put it round her neck as the role signifier. When she sat down as Hermia, they were focused entirely on her and were listening very closely, putting hands up to ask questions and taking turns in a very orderly way. They were interested in her problem, which was her father’s insistence on deciding whom she should marry. The trainee was not doing anything different apart from using role and committing to it very strongly. She looked far more comfortable.
The trainee was using the simplest form of TiR, hot-seating the role, where the class meets the role sitting in front of them and can ask questions. 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.
You are not effective as a teacher if you do not at some point engage fully with the drama yourself by using TiR. Remaining as teacher, intervening as teacher, side-coaching, structuring the drama from the outside, and/or sending the class off in groups to create their own drama must at best restrict and at worst negate any opportunity for the teacher to teach effectively. It is far more effective for the teacher to engage with the drama form as artist and be part of the creative act.
It is very useful in a Literacy lesson for the teacher to use roles from the text. The very fact that you take on a key role can provide important ways of defining and exploring the text. How does hot-seating open up the ideas and issues of a story to the children? Let us look more closely at the Hermia role. It can be used with 10- or 11-year-olds as a way of introducing Shakespeare or for other objectives.
Negotiate with the class that you are going to be someone with a problem. This can be done by narrating an opening:
The teenage girl with a paper in her hand burst angrily into the room.
Then sit down on the chair and stare at the piece of paper:
What am I going to do about this? How dare he. He can’t do what he wants. He’s not me. How does he know what I want to do?
Go out of role:
What did you learn about her and why she’s angry?
Having discussed the first entry you then give the class a chance to find out whether their speculations about her are correct or not by asking questions.
Here is another way that the role could be introduced. Set it up like this:
I am going to become someone else to begin the next piece of work and all you have to do is look at her and see what you think is going on.
Sit on the seat with a piece of paper in your hand reading it silently to yourself.
How stupid he is. He writes me a letter and thinks I like him and I will like him even more just because he likes me. He knows I like somebody else. I’ll never like him, let alone love him. I will have to tell him – again. But he won’t listen. Especially as my dad thinks he’s really nice and is encouraging him. He doesn’t know him.
Notice that the piece of paper means something different in each of the above situations. In the first it is the note from her father, Egeus, outlining her situation (she is under threat of death if she does not follow his wishes). In that case it will have a seal and look official. In the second instance it is a letter from Demetrius declaring his love for her and her blindness in seeking Lysander’s love. It will look different and might be accompanied by a little gift, a token like a ribbon or a necklace.
In this case, again, you go out of role to talk about what the class have seen and heard:
How does she seem? What is the situation? Who are all these people she’s talking about?
In both cases, when the class have speculated enough, they will have questions to ask Hermia and you have an interesting way to begin to tell them the basic situation at the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
You can then answer the questions by playing the role of Hermia based on the way that the character is in the play. She’s obstinate, believes in herself and her love for Lysander, is adamant she won’t do what her father wants and will want the pupils’ help to influence her father and the Duke.
You can introduce the fact that her father is threatening to invoke the law, to have her put to death if she doesn’t obey him. You can set up the idea that in this society a daughter is expected to obey her father. This extreme social expectation and law makes the fiction like their reality but also different from it, something that helps drama create a useful distance, which helps the class reflect on their own beliefs and look at the drama world in a more balanced and thoughtful way.
All of this introduces an interesting set of issues which children at this age are beginning to experience and understand about their relationship with parents and about their relationship with the opposite sex. Even if the main aim of the work is not a study of the Shakespeare play, the role can be used to open up very important areas for personal and social education that the children can identify with. It will motivate them and produce some very strong engagement with Hermia and later, if you introduce them, Egeus, and Demetrius and Lysander, the rivals for her love. (See the full drama set-up in Part Two of this book.)
For another example of the simple use of hot-seating see the Tim the Ostler section in ‘The Highwayman’ drama. This can show important elements of how the children see the text, what their comprehension of it is. It provides a more stimulating way of approaching comprehension than questions from the teacher. This is partly due to the shift in tense. We are talking ‘as if’ it is happening now as against the past tense, which so often dominates classroom talk.
Teacher as storyteller
The teacher as a storyteller is something all primary school teachers will recognise. Good teachers slip easily into it and use it frequently. In its most observable guise it occurs when teaching the whole class and engaging them with a piece of fiction. The pupil’s role will be dominated by listening and this will be interlaced with questioning, responding and interpreting the meaning and sense of the fiction. The teacher’s role will be to communicate the text in a lively and interesting manner, holding their attention and engaging their imagination. In making judgements about the quality of this method of teaching, the critical questions will be around whether the content of the story interests the class and holds their attention, whether the delivery of the teacher, i.e. voice, intonation and interpretive skills, are good and, where relevant, whether accompanying illustrations have impact and resonance. For many pupils the times 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, lies in the fact that they both use the generation of imagined realities in order to teach.
The relationship between story and drama in education is a complex and dynamic one. It means a known narrative can still be used, the knowledge of the narrative is not a barrier to its usage. However, if the pupils are locked into the original narrative it is problematic. It is the negotiable and dynamic elements of the relationship between drama and narrative that liberate the pupils and the teacher from merely retelling the known story. A class can take part in a drama where all of them know the story, where none of them knows the story, or a mixture of both. As long as some fundamental planning strategies are observed, knowledge of the story is not a barrier to participation. Broadly these pre-requisites are:
1 An awareness of those elements of the story that will not be changed – and agreements about these must be made with the class at the beginning or during the drama, in other words, the non-negotiable elements of the narrative.
2 A willingness to move away from the fixed narrative to an exploration of the narrative. The use of drama strategies to explore events and their consequences, to look at alternatives and test them. In these periods the class develop hypotheses, test them and reflect upon them.
3 If narrative consists of roles, fictional contexts, the use of symbols and events then the teacher needs to hold some of those elements true and consistent with the story so far. For example, roles and contexts may already be decided but new events may be introduced, the delivery of a letter, for example. How the class respond to this event is not known and it is at this point that they become the writers of the narrative.
Let us illustrate these ideas with an example from ‘The Pied Piper’ drama (a drama we designed for 6-year-olds but have used with secondary pupils: see Toye and Prendiville, 2000, p. 225).
The Mayor has got the Pied Piper to clear the town of the rats but has broken his promise of payment and in revenge the children have been led up the mountain. You put the pupils in role as the townspeople making their way up the mountain when they meet TiR as a child coming in the opposite direction. He is limping and carries one of his shoes. (In many versions of this story the child is a ‘cripple boy’. This is patently inappropriate and unnecessary. The child who couldn’t keep up because he had a stone in his shoe functions just as well in the story and avoids the stereotype of the disabled child not keeping up with the ‘fit’ children.) This provides the background to a simple hot-seating of the child.
Ask the pupils what would they like to ask the boy. They might want to ask him his name. They certainly will ask him why he is coming down the mountain and what has happened to the other children.
Preparation for the role
In preparing to be this kind of storyteller the teacher must have made particular decisions about this child.
Begin by asking the class out of role what they want to ask the child and the order of those questions. This not only provides the teacher with some security in knowing what is going to be asked, at least initially, but also allows some minutes to refine the planning, so that the teacher can be specific in answering their questions. The questions will, to a certain extent, be predictable because they are largely generated by the circumstances of the drama so far and the role the class has taken, which will be that of anxious parents.
Before the drama session, decide what attitude you are going to take when questioned by the class. You are going to be telling them a story but it will be as if they had just met you and it will not be the voice of the narrator re-telling someone else’s story but in the present tense as if it is happening now. There is no book symbolising the re-telling of someone else’s words. This is your story re-told in a specific place (coming down the mountain path) at a specific time (within minutes of a significant event) and from the child’s point of view, not a dispassionate onlooker or observer of events.
Of course, all these things are possible from the text of a book; however, the pupils will be defining what is important, which are the most important questions to be asked and how to handle the mood of the storyteller, whose views on the events may be very different from those of the audience whom he addresses. Be clear about his attitude towards being left behind, what has happened and how he feels about it.
Then run the hot-seating. The dialogue might go something like this:
Class member in role as parent: Where are the other children?
TiR as the boy left behind: It’s not fair!
Parent: What do you mean, it’s not fair?
The boy: Them! They get to go into the fairground and I don’t! Some friends I’ve got. So much for Joe and Kerry. Why couldn’t they wait? They could see I had a stone in my shoe and had to take it out. I couldn’t keep up.
Stop and come out of role and discuss what they have found out. Negotiate what they need to ask next. At this point some questions about what the little boy saw will emerge. Then go back into role.
The boy: You should have seen it! Lights, big dipper, toffee apples. Oh! the smell of the toffee apples … and all free. He was standing at the entrance shouting ‘It’s all free. Help yourself. Any ride, any food, anything you want you can have.’ It’s just not fair!
This interactive storytelling has an immediacy and urgency and is working at a different level of discourse from the read story, and yet it is still storytelling. It is essential that the teacher stops and comes out of role and reflects with the class on what has been said, but that is also true of the more traditional mode of reading from a book. It engages the class and gives them the opportunity to generate new questions and to make sense of what is happening in an interactive way. They are questioning from within the story, as if they were there. Next we consider this key skill of moving in and out of role.
Teaching from within
Moving in and out of role – managing the drama and reflecting on it
We are describing using role as ‘teaching from within’ because the teacher enters the drama world, but it is very important to step out of the fiction often and not let it run away with itself. When using TiR, the teacher is operating as a manager as well as participant and must spend as much time stopping the drama and moving out of role (OoR) to reflect on what is happening and give the pupils a chance to think through what they know and what they want to do. This OoR working is as important as the role itself. It manages the role and therefore the drama; it manages the risk, establishes where the class is and helps pupils believe in the drama. It provides time and space for the teacher to assess and re-assess the learning possibilities.
Let us look at an example to see how you as the teacher have the opportunity to negotiate how the role behaves with the class. This also shows a step from hot-seating to role-playing as a demonstration with a small group. As with all of this section of the book, we are using an example from drama based upon ‘The Pied Piper’ (see Toye and Prendiville, 2000, p. 225).
The class in groups of five have created tableaux as families taking part in bread-making in the kitchen. They then adapt the picture when a rat invades the space. You set up going into role with one of the groups that you know will handle the situation well. OoR you gather the rest of the class round: You will be able to influence what happens when we stop the action. Otherwise you watch and the members of this family group can role-play. You will find out who I am from what I do and say.
You negotiate your entry: I will enter as the rat runs out of the door. You pick up a rat trap and a notebook and pencil and enter saying, That was a big one, far too big for these traps. You write something down in your notebook, before continuing. That’s another piece of evidence to take to the Mayor. I was hoping you could help. I cannot manage what he has asked me to do. There are too many of them for me as the town rat-catcher to catch. I want evidence to take to him to show how bad it is getting. Can you help? At this point you go OoR:  Stop the drama. Who has entered? What do you know about him/her? What does s/he want? How is s/he feeling, do you think? How do you know. What would s/he look like?
The whole class is involved in defining the role and can use their imaginations, their ‘drama eyes’, to help create the appropriate appearance/behaviour and their own understanding. This is in contrast to an actor who has to use acting skills to create the role in its entirety for an audience. We are making a distinction between role behaviour and acting. Both depend on appropriate signing, but whereas the actor must give the non-participant audience the bulk of the signing, a teacher using role can get away with a committed minimum.
The class will see the Rat-catcher as overworked and probably needing help to put his/her case to the Mayor. When you have discussed enough (this process helps the class believe in the role) you can move back into role and take their stories about the problems the rats are causing. You can do this with all of the class or each family in turn. Give the groups time to prepare their evidence before you go into role to receive the input. The Rat-catcher ‘writes down’ the points and then asks the class/family if they could come to the Mayor to help put the case. We will look at setting up that whole class event later in this chapter.
For another example of using OoR to help establish a role see ‘The Governor’s Child’ drama for the entry of Maria, a travel-weary woman carrying a baby. OoR a blanket is openly rolled up to become the baby and the class describe how they will see the woman – possible answers are: tired, dusty, bowed-down, tear-stained. The person playing the role can then simply walk forward adopting a serious tone, holding the blanket, without having to pretend any of those outward signs an actor would have to portray if it were a play being performed to an audience. This is because the class will see it as they have described it themselves. The effect in this context can be more powerful.
OoR is very important as a way of negotiating the intent and meaning of the role and is the way the teacher can best control and manage learning. For the class are both an audience and observers of their own activities. When the drama is stopped they can describe, recap, interpret, think through, consider next moves and understand what is the significance of their work.
It is very important to get the participants to look at and interpret what is going on, frequently by stepping out of the drama. Depth in drama depends on the very clear and regular use of OoR negotiation so that the awareness of the co-existence of two worlds is effective at all times. Children commit to the fictional world of the drama but need always to be aware that it is fiction and to step outside it often to look at what they are doing. Contrary to some opinions, depth is not dependent upon maintaining the fiction all of the time, nor does it depend upon the children losing themselves in the drama. Learning depends upon awareness, not total immersion. In fact, if the latter takes over, children will get an experience but not understanding.
In effective drama, children can actually feel the ‘as if’ world as real at certain points. The teacher must make sure that if the drama does engage in that way, the pupils know it is a fiction at all times, especially by stopping and coming out of role frequently. That is also a protection.
A class reflect together in order to draw conclusions and consequently can influence each other far more in their understanding. They are in the process of negotiating a group meaning, something that can be held true for all of them.
The relationship developed by the teacher with the class is dependent on the movement between these two worlds. TiR changes the nature of the contract entered into by the class. What is that contract? It is ‘the imaginative contract’:
● It is not, I will teach you by telling you what you need to know – the style of much classroom teaching.
● It is not, I will present a play before you and you will watch me, as the actor contracts with an audience.
● It is not, Listen and I will tell you a story. It is my story and you must not interrupt it.
● It is, You will become a playmaker, an author with me and will be a part of the story that I start and we create together. The result is to make the creative community.
Drama then teaches in the following way. Taking a moment in time, it uses the experiences of the participants, forcing them to confront their own actions and decisions and to go forward to a believable outcome in which they can gain satisfaction. (Johnson and O’Neill, 1984, p. 99)
The requirements of working in role
The teacher, working in this way, is an important stimulus for the learning. It is not necessary to use role throughout the piece of work. It can be used judiciously to focus work at strategic points or to challenge particular aspects of the children’s perceptions whilst other techniques and conventions are used to support the work and develop it.
In order to make the TiR most effective, we need to look at educational drama from the point of view of the ‘audience’, an audience who in this instance are participants at the same time. This will help us shape up the TiR elements particularly according to how the audience is seeing things. Here are two responses to considering the ‘audience’ position.
Audiences are people who make sense of what they see in front of them. (Year One drama student)
In drama the pupils are making sense actively, knowing their meaning can be acted upon.
You’re asking a very complex thing of the group of children. They have to switch from operating as audience to participant and back again often and suddenly. It could be that they find this difficult or, my hunch is, they’re very good at it. (Experienced teacher watching a video of a class in a drama)
This is why this sort of whole group drama has so much learning potential. It involves the ‘audience’ in the process of the play-making, at the same time providing the teacher with ways of influencing directly the situation and the meanings. But that is only most effective if the teacher is skilled in genuinely responding to the contributions of the class members at moments where they take the initiative and make suggestions, those critical incidents where they are teaching themselves and each other.
An example of responding to the critical incident occurred in a session on the drama based on Macbeth. When considering the way of showing the overthrow of Macbeth, one of the class of 10-year-olds said, I want to sit on the throne and stop him sitting on it. The teacher took this up and put two of the servants on the thrones of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, with the rest of the servants gathered behind the thrones. He then set up the entry of Macbeth to the throne room. TiR as Macbeth entered slowly and stopped as though taking in the situation. How dare you sit on the sacred seat of power! Relinquish it at once. Of course, the pupils sat firm and outfaced him. He froze and one of the servants, picking up the idea of the situation, strode up to Macbeth, ordered him to kneel and took the (imaginary) crown from Macbeth to carefully and ceremoniously place it on the head of the usurping servant. The overthrow was fully symbolised, created by taking and formalising a very powerful idea from a pupil. The class cheered as Macbeth bowed his head and the two pupils stood up, triumphant.
How should a teacher using role relate to his or her class/audience? One of the key issues is seeing them as co-creators. If sufficient ownership is not given to the class, it is possible to turn them into the wrong sort of audience, giving them too passive a role. When they are given opportunities to influence the outcomes, to make decisions, the drama becomes partly theirs.
Disturbing the class productively
Discovery/uncovering – challenge and focus
The ownership also arises out of the way the teacher operates. The teacher’s function is to provide challenge and stimulus, to give problems and issues for the class to have to deal with. The drama is developed through a set of activities that build the class role, which is usually a corporate role.
We have to help them into the drama, making them comfortable, and then disturb that comfort productively. The fact that, as in any good play, the class discover things as they go along provides the possibility of productive tension.
In setting up the drama we are doing what Heathcote calls ‘trapping [them] within a life situation’ (Johnson and O’Neill, 1984, p. 119). The result of constructing the situation thus is that they can then discover what it all means. There, and in the resulting choices and decisions, lies the learning potential, borne out in an exciting challenge.
The key is how children are given information. They can be handed it on a plate or they can be given opportunities to uncover/discover/be surprised by information. In this last case there is much more involvement and ownership, especially if they have to work to get the information from someone who is reluctant to give it (as with Tim the Ostler in ‘The Highwayman’), someone who only gives clues as to what is really going on (the central TiR in the ‘Macbeth’ drama), someone who does not realise the importance of the information (Icarus in the ‘Daedalus and Icarus’ drama). Hence the skill of the teacher lies in the art of the unexpected.
If pupils acquire knowledge and understanding by working for it, stumbling upon it or having it sprung upon them such that their expectations are challenged, their learning experiences will be more dynamic than simply being told. An example of this occurs in ‘The Governor’s Child’, a drama based on Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle. The class are in role as a village community helping a woman with a baby, who, unbeknownst to them, has fled a revolution. The villagers discover later who she really is and then have to deal with the consequences.
It is important to withhold information early on, as any good playwright will do. Planning the ‘how’ and the ‘when’ of strategies is all-important here.
Responding to your class
The art of authentic dialogue – needing to listen – two-way responses
The class working as a community is the key to the use of drama as a teaching method. This is another reason that the class have more ownership.
This community is made most effective by the teacher participating in role. The art of teaching and learning should be a synthesis from a dialectical approach. If a teacher runs drama without using TiR there tends to be a lack of dialectic because the teacher produces the structure that the children engage with, but the teacher can only manipulate it from outside that structure. The result looks like the diagram in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1
On the other hand, if the teacher participates through TiR then there can be a meeting point at which creation takes place because, in addition to planning the structure, the teacher's ideas can operate within the drama and challenge and engage with the children's ideas in a dialectic. The teacher can fully manipulate the structure from within and the resulting activity can be shown diagrammatically as in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2
The second diagram shows the two inputs as equal, but that is not the case in practice. The teacher gives the impression of handing over the power and does so in a way that allows him or her to teach properly and yet empower the participants significantly. A TiR has to be properly planned and thought through so that the class are presented with an entity to respond to that embodies possibilities for learning.
The more we observe the use of TiR and the more we use it, we have come to the conclusion that if it is set up correctly, it does not require the person playing the role to have the same skills needed by the aesthetic actor. We are making the distinction here between the aesthetic actor and the social actor. The aesthetic actor will have learned skills related to voice, gesture and physicality that are not required by the teacher using TiR. The teacher in role will already have the skills of the social actor that are used in everyday life. These are skills that are learned in the presentation of self in every day life, the skills that demonstrate an awareness of the relationship between who we are, where we are and how we are feeling. It is the ability to adopt an attitude, to behave as oneself ‘as if’ you were in a particular situation that is required.
Because we work in close proximity to the class there is not the need to project oneself over the distances an actor does when playing in a theatre. The class will use their creativity to see the role in a particular way that has been indicated as long as it has been properly signed to them.
Whereas the actor defines for the audience the message of the play within the circumstances of the plot, the teacher uses signing as an indication to the audience to join in the encounter, effecting and affecting the enterprise. (Heathcote and Bolton, 1995, p. 74)
As a result of this difference, an actor, using lines written as a script, behaves in a very different way from a teacher improvising within a planned structure, who has to take account of what the class will say in response to the moves he or she makes.
The audience in the theatre waits for something to happen, but the participants in a drama session make it happen. (O’Neill, 1989, p. 20)
As the class feed back their responses and make possible development of the role’s importance the teacher must respond appropriately and therein lies the skill of the ‘subtle tongue’ and the possibility for authentic dialogue.
The teacher must respond to these responses in an authentic way, honouring how the class see the role. For example, when the servants discover that their king is a murderer in the ‘Macbeth’ drama, they can respond in two ways: to want to tackle this problem and bring him to justice or to see themselves as powerless to do anything. The TiR as the Steward must honour the truth of both possibilities and, in the first case, be the weak and fearing servant who cannot see how this can be done or, in the second, begin to challenge whether doing nothing in such a situation is going to work in keeping them safe. TiR in both instances must make the problems of choice apparent whilst not taking over the decision-making.
At other times the class can be given more input to developing the idea of the TiR themselves directly. The class must be made to work to achieve the aim they have been given in the drama.
Let us look at handling an extended example from the ‘Pied Piper’ drama (Toye and Prediville, 2000) when the class as the villagers finally arrive at the mountain. At this point in the drama they have accepted the main aim as the villagers of getting their children back from the Piper. Mark the space in front of the class, where the children have been said to have entered the mountain, with two chairs. OoR ask them to describe the mountain in front of them and whether there are any clues as to whether the children have, in fact, gone into the mountain as they have been told. This will give them more ownership of setting the current context.
How are you going to attract the attention of the Piper if he’s inside the hill? Work to use whatever idea they come up with, usually a chant or something like playing a pipe. Set them up to carry this out and then retire to the side. When they are not aware of you, slip behind them and when they are carrying out their task ‘appear’ behind them as the Piper. This simple, theatrical surprise engages the children even more. It is more effective than having a simple hot-seating.
Then as the Piper: What do you want? You chant my name/play the flute/beat the rhythm that will summon me so you have made me appear. Consider how you deliver the opening lines. Is the Piper angry or just irritated? Is he amused in a superior way or is he genuinely intrigued to find out what they have to offer him? The dialogue that transpires here is critical to the outcome of the drama.
You need to bring out the key learning area, such as the fact that the Piper is not concerned any more about money: You can offer me as much money as you like now, but I don’t want that; you have upset me by trying to trick me. If you feel that I didn’t do a good job then you should have said so rather than insult me with refusing to pay what we agreed. You should never break a promise. It's not about money any longer.
Go OoR to discuss the Piper’s attitude. The burden placed on the class at this point is to offer some way of showing their thankfulness, their sincerity and their trustworthiness to the Piper so that he will accept the apology and return the children. Accept any imaginative offer as long as it is not materialistic but is related more to establishing a human relationship of trust and honour with the Piper.
A different learning area would be to have a Piper who is too full of himself, someone who needs to be taught a lesson about justice and fairness. Hasn’t he over-reacted to the original refusal to pay the full amount of money? Isn't stealing the children a much more serious offence than what the Mayor did?
The drama is set up as a framework and is not finished in the same way as a play written by a playwright. In fact, the secret of educational drama is to have the framework, even a tight framework, such that the class feel they have some ownership because of the parts that they are developing.
For example, in ‘The Dream’ they can create the feelings and thoughts of any character. The pupils can thought-track TiR. It is important not to define everything yourself. If they challenge Egeus and ask, Why are you making Hermia marry Demetrius?, the teacher can stop the questioning and come out of role to consider the possible answers to this question with the class.
A drama technique can be used to help them define possible reasons. They can thought-track Egeus about his daughter’s opposition or why he must have her obedience. The TiR is not exclusively the teacher’s creation. They will know as much about why a father tries to dominate a child, particularly from the child’s point of view.
The ‘play’ we are creating is a joint enterprise and, when the beginnings of a role are in place and we have established the givens, the class will know what we are creating and why and can develop that role by the way they respond and the way they see it. TiR creates an ownership dynamic that is attractive to the participants.
The teacher–taught relationship
In all teaching situations there exists a power relationship between the learners and the teacher. The learners are bound together as a group merely by being the learners and, of course, as there are more of them than there are of you, they hold the power.
If the class decide as a group they do not want to learn and they wish to make your attempts to teach them impracticable, they can do it. The power in the classroom lies with the class. Of course, it does not look like this when the class are responding and contracting into the tasks set by the teacher but should some or all decide not to, the cohesion can be broken. In drama this power relationship is made overt. We must start from the point of view that if the class do not want the drama to work then it will not.
What we have to counter this with is a methodology that, if set up right and handled judiciously, offers interest and engagement to hold the class’s attention. So much so that if a minority of the class start to undermine it, the committed will demand they stop; the disrupters are seen as spoiling the enjoyment and it is not unusual to see the majority let them know this fact.
We must begin with the interest level of the class: the plight of Goldilocks will interest the class of 4- or 5-year-olds and a mission to rescue Kai from the Snow Queen, children of 7 and 8. For those aged 10 or 11 it may be the jealousy of Tim the Ostler that gains their attention. The nature of drama makes the interest level a dynamic and flexible dimension. The pupils will, to a certain extent, define a level of interest in a drama by focusing upon the issues that interest them. There is not a hard and fast rule on age groups because we have used Kai with younger children and dramas from our Early Years book have been used with 12-year-olds. It depends upon how you do it.
In the classroom, the pupils enter into an agreement with you the teacher that you are in charge. This may be a tacit agreement, it may depend upon many factors but in it the teacher is in charge and there are certain rights and privileges attached to your role. The power relationship is asymmetric. Of course, in drama we have the possibility of shifting the power when we are inside the fiction because we may choose a role that has low status and has little power. This shift in status and power is very engaging for pupils. It can result in a different kind of dialogue from the usual teacher/pupil one and this can be very attractive to pupils.
So what are the possibilities in terms of power and choosing a role? There are five basic types of role and mostly can be illustrated from the ‘The Dream’ drama.
The authority role This is a role like the Duke in the ‘The Dream’ drama, who is presented with Egeus’s problem and has to rule on it. This figure is usually in charge of an organisation and has the class in a role subordinate to him/her. The role is fair, applies rules and governs properly, but often does not know the full facts and issues and needs the class to investigate and enlighten him/her. It is very close to being teacher and can be reassuring for a class, but also has the negativity of not changing the teacher–taught relationship enough to allow more ownership for the class.
The opposer role This is a role that is often in authority but dangerous to and/or creating a problem for another role and, by extension, the class. Egeus is an opposer role who is against Hermia and therefore in opposition to the class role, as they take her side against his dictatorial treatment of her. This is a stimulating position for many pupils as the opposition of parents is something they have all experienced. The opposer role has to be used carefully because the response to it can be difficult to handle if it becomes too strong. We have to know what response to expect and be able to channel it productively.
The intermediate role This is often a messenger or go-between, as the servant role used in the ‘The Dream’ drama. This role is then caught between opposing sides and can appeal to the empathy in the class to help them out of the predicament. In the ‘The Dream’ it might be a servant to Egeus who is sympathetic to Hermia but does not know what best to do as she cannot just tell her employer what she thinks he should do. So she seeks the help of the class to solve her dilemma.
The needing help role This is a role like Hermia, who is in need of help to fight the injustice of her father’s decision. This role, like the servant described above, is the best way to get empathy from a class and most raises the status of the class, putting them in a position of responsibility and thus generating interest and learning possibility because the teacher is the one who does not know what to do for once.
The ordinary person This role is in the same position as the role given to the class. We do not have this sort of role in our ‘The Dream’ drama but the Steward in the ‘Macbeth’ drama is like this. He faces the same problem and danger as the other servants represented by the class. Even though he is in charge of them, he needs them to sort it out for him and make decisions. Therefore this is a lower status role, the teacher being ‘the one who does not know’, a very powerful position of ignorance that teachers cannot ordinarily occupy. It is powerful because it shifts responsibility more to the pupil roles.
The three low status roles present more possibilities for the pupils’ learning because the teacher–pupil power relationship is shifted and they have a semblance of power. We say ‘semblance’ because the pupil power only lies within the fiction and, as always, the teacher is running the class and can come out of role at any time to assume control. ‘Semblance’ is not a pejorative word here. It does mean a shift of some power, but not a takeover of power. In a fiction what seems to be the truth is as powerful as if it were real.
Related to issues of power and role is the issue of power and control in the classroom. Drama has for many teachers a Health Warning attached to it: ‘This substance is dangerous, handle with care!’ The fear of chaos is one that puts many teachers off using drama. However, if basic rules are applied, there is no more danger of chaos than in any other lesson. Let us look at what might appear to be a potential recipe for chaos in the planning of a lesson on ‘The Pied Piper’ (see Toye and Prendiville, 2000, p. 225) and analyse how it is handled and chaos avoided.
The class have been told they must confront the Mayor. The angry crowd of townspeople are making their way to the Mayor’s parlour:
Before we can confront the Mayor we must set out how his office looks.
You take two chairs and place them at one end of the class and place a table and a chair behind it at the other end of the class.
This is the Mayor’s parlour. First you must tell me how big the doors into his parlour are.
The distance between the chairs indicates how big the class want the door to be. Now I want you to look at the table and chair over there. This is the desk and chair in which the Mayor sits. Tell me about the desk. What is it made of? What is it covered in? Is it simple or ornate in its design? Use your ‘drama eyes’ and tell me what you see.
The class offer suggestions, building the image of the desk. They then do the same with the Mayor’s chair. The contributions are valued and embellished. The class describe the whole room and visualise where they will work. The townspeople are marching down to the Mayor’s parlour. They are getting near enough to be heard. What are they chanting?
Suggestions are made and those that have a rhythm and meter and words that will maintain the seriousness of the event are chosen. This strategy binds the group together, makes concrete their community and an attitude they can hold as a group. The chant is rehearsed and when it feels and sounds like an angry crowd it is ready to be used.
So, we have a parlour, we have an angry crowd and a chant. When you arrive at the door who is going to be the person to knock on these great doors? How are we going to make the sound to go with the knocking on the door? Are you going to stamp your foot? We need someone to give a signal to stop the chant otherwise we won’t hear the knock on the door and the conversation with the Mayor.
Someone volunteers to stop the chant like a conductor stopping the music.
Finally we need one person to be spokesperson to say to the Mayor what you all think.
A volunteer is chosen and exactly what is to be said is worked out.
OK. I am going to take the role of the Mayor and I am going wear my chain of office. When I take it off I will be your teacher again and we can talk about what has happened. Listen to the story and you will know what to do:
‘The mayor sat at his desk and outside he could hear a crowd chanting getting louder and louder, nearer and nearer.’
You signal for the chant to begin, which may be something like.
Get rid of the mayor. Get rid of the rats.
Get rid of the mayor. Get rid of the rats.
This gets louder and louder until the signal is given to stop and there is a loud knock on the door. As Mayor you get up and move around to the front of the table, half sitting on it in an informal way.
Come in, do come in.
The townspeople come in and the spokesperson delivers his/her speech. We’re fed up of you and we’re fed up of the rats. We want your resignation, you’re sacked!
The mayor is acquiescent, compliant and biddable.
Yes, you are right to be so angry! Every right. It’s a dreadful situation and I have let you down. I have one last hope and that is a man who is due to arrive tomorrow.
You break out of role:
OK, let’s stop the drama there and look at what has happened.
This response is not expected by the class. It surprises them, defuses their anger. They expect the Mayor to argue.
The key issue in this example is the way in which a potentially chaotic event in the drama is managed by careful structuring and rehearsing before it takes place. In this way, the lesson remains under control and the learning possibilities are maintained while at the same time the class has a carefully managed experience of the confrontation.
If you consider the points, rules and suggestions we have offered, you can construct very influential roles for all sorts of teaching.
Summary of points to consider
● Why we use teacher in role – pupils listen to teachers in role
● How we expand the possibilities of story and explore story
● Operating the two worlds of drama, inside and outside the fiction
● Moving in and out of role – managing the drama and reflecting on it
● Building the teacher role with the support of the class
● What, when and how to give information for maximum influence and effect
● How to dialogue with the class – teachers learning to listen well
● How we work with the class as collaborators
● Choosing the role – the low status roles offer more learning possibilities
● Handling drama – structuring for control – imposing shape and constraint

2 How to Begin Planning Drama
In this chapter we are going to describe and analyse the main components of planning in drama. On this journey we will visit a number of key planning decisions and approaches. These are:
● How to begin a plan
● The frame of a drama – first example ‘The Governor’s Child’ ● The frame of a drama – second example ‘The Wild Thing’ ● How did this drama evolve? ● The ingredients of planning
● Learning objectives ● Strong material
● Roles for the pupils
● Tension points – risks – theatre moments
● Building context and belief-building
● Challenges and decision-making
But before we begin this journey a word of warning to those who are new to this way of working: ‘If I was making this journey, I wouldn’t start from here!’ Planning brand new dramas is complex and, while we hope to unravel some of the complexity in this chapter, the best starting point is using tried and tested dramas first. That is why we have included 14 dramas in this book. When you feel comfortable with the approach, the planning becomes more accessible.
There is even an intermediate stage in planning and that is to take parts of different dramas and remake them as new ones.
We cannot establish a simple procedure for an order of planning. Clearly the teaching/learning objective will drive the shape of the drama, but the engine that drives the drama needs fuel and that fuel is a piece of strong material, a creative idea, and that is more inspirational than an objectives-led design. This material – a book, a piece of literature, a picture or some other subject matter, fiction or non-fiction – will give us one or more of the elements of a good drama, a role or roles, an interesting context or a dilemma. In this way we may come up with an idea for a role that will provide a specific challenge for the class; we may get a mental picture of a particular situation we want the children to become involved in, or an idea for focusing a problem based on the original material. For example, when we wanted to introduce Shakespeare to a class of 10-year-olds, we wanted to use ‘Macbeth’ because it has a very strong story. The original idea for the drama came from thinking about how the servants in the play might feel when they bring Macbeth 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 was going on and what their moral reaction was. The frame for the drama developed from that.
‘The Governor’s Child’ arose from thinking about how to teach a sixth-form class, 17-year-olds who were studying the Brecht play The Caucasian Chalk Circle, the significance of the child in the play; how to underscore the girl Grusha’s strong attachment to the baby, Michael Abashvili. The central idea came with thinking of how Grusha is shunned by people she seeks help from. What if a village accepted her and therefore began to shoulder the responsibility she had, to see if they could feel protective and committed to the innocent? Then the pressure point of the arrival of the Ironshirts, the soldiers looking for Michael, was the obvious key development. The drama that evolved seemed strong and suitable for adaptation to a wide range of age groups.
Then we assemble all the ideas that make up the frame for a drama. A new drama is a difficult beast and takes time to develop and grow. We must never forget that drama is an art form. As such we need to consider the way that planning drama is a creative and dynamic activity, not done by just following a set of procedures. A full drama grows over a period of time, it is organic. It is not something that can be planned and completely finished in one go. Dramas develop through their usage, like the oral tradition of storytelling; they are tried and adjusted, refined and edited. Drama for learning has to be grown slowly.  With this organic nature lie the possibilities for the class to contribute to the way the drama turns out. We must plan gaps for pupils’ ideas, we must be careful not to plan the pupils out of the drama. There has to be a balance of freedom within the drama for new possibilities and decisions for the children and the teacher structure that provides the constraints and necessary dynamic of the piece, the scaffolding that holds it up.
The frame of a drama
We are using the idea of a frame as a way of seeing key decisions in planning. It is originally defined by Erving Goffman (Goffman, 1975) as the way a situation develops, or in our case is constructed, to give particular viewpoints and ways of understanding the meaning of that situation.
Goffman uses ‘frame’ to refer, essentially, to the viewpoint individuals will have about their circumstances and which helps them to make sense of an event or situation and to assess its likely impact upon themselves as individuals. Translated into terms of process drama as a genre of theatre, we could say that Goffman’s frame constitutes a means of laying in the dramatic tension by situating the participants in relation to the unfolding action. (Bowell and Heap, 2001, p. 59)
The frame is a dynamic, interrelated and complex weaving of all the other ingredients. It has pre-text, which is derived from the stimulus material (see Figure 2.1).
In planning a drama we have to write the main frame, the scenario, in a way that indicates the relationship of the component parts and how the interactions provide tension and potential. For example, the frame of ‘The Governor’s Child’ is shown in Figure 2.2.
Pre-text
Context
 When?
Figure 2.1 The dynamic of a frame when planning

Figure 2.2 Frame of ‘The Governor’s Child’
An example of thinking through a plan
How did the ‘The Wild Thing’ drama evolve from initial ideas?
Looking at Maurice Sendak’s book Where the Wild Things Are led to ideas about possible roles and situations to explore with the pupils. The book has always held a fascination because of its depiction of boys’ behaviour. There is a direct link to PSHE objectives. To translate this to a drama, the first idea was: how might Max’s mother feel if she went to his room and found him not there? The mother is mentioned in the book but never appears herself; there is just the meal appearing in the room at the end of the story.
Let us look at the key components of the frame here, a frame that could be outlined thus:
Mother sends Max to bed without supper because he has been naughty. He leaves the bedroom to have an adventure. Mother finds him gone and seeks help to find him. Max returns. Where has he been? How will he behave now?
The next stage was to develop some sense of his mother, her handling of Max and her attitude to him. Learning resides in this, the parent–child relationship, something all children know about but is infinitely variable in levels of success and quality. The complexity for the drama resides in her role. We considered the mother’s possible ambiguous signals, embodying ideas of softness and indulgence towards Max at the same time as being irritated by Max’s wildness and wanting to control him.
Thus we are exploring ideas of why Max is like he is, an exploration that the class will experience through the drama.
Therefore the next planning decision was about who the children might be in order to encounter this experience, what viewpoint will they have to see the situation of a missing Max. Who could the mother go to for help? One answer was an agency, based on ideas of ‘Mantle of the Expert’ from Dorothy Heathcote’s work (Heathcote and Bolton, 1995), which unites the children in a particular viewpoint with particular expertise. In this case it becomes ‘Lost & Found’, an agency expert in finding lost children. We then have to decide how would we build belief in that role. Then the children have to encounter the mother, desperate for help to find her son.
The frame now looks like the diagram in Figure 2.3.

Figure 2.3 Frame for ‘The Wild Thing’
You can see that we have begun to create ideas of what Max’s room would look like, as it is the central setting. The thinking here is to use the room to allow the class to have a say in what they want and how they define Max. This will reinforce their role as agents of Lost & Found and invest more in the drama, own it more. So we can use the set up of the room to give clues as to what Max is like and what has happened to him. This will lead up to the moment where he reappears.
The technique ‘defining the space’ is used to establish the room. However, the basic defining of the space is further developed because the teacher inserts specific signs and symbols he or she wants as the clues. So the teacher directs the picture of Max the class forms. One of the inserts is a toy pirate ship, which is not in the book, where Max sails out in an ordinary sailing boat. But the pirate ship was chosen because it is more visual, embodies ideas of adventure and wild and violent behaviour. In the Sendak book there is a picture on the wall in the second illustration of a wild creature’s face with ‘Max’ written underneath, clearly a drawing by Max himself. This suggested including a line drawing of Max chasing his mother with a knife. In addition we added little notes written by Max for the pupils to discover and read. They discover a rich environment to decode and from which to deduce things. The outcome of this is usually that the class, as agents of Lost & Found, suggest that Max has run away. Of course, we could have then developed a drama about finding Max, but it would be difficult to run that without descending into potentially silly non-activities for the pupils searching non-existent places. They do go to the shed his mother talks of, but there draw a blank, apart from the arrival of a figure they take to be him (raising tension), hide to surprise him, only to find it is his sister. She can provide other instances of his selfishness and wildness.
So we decided to have Max return, as he does in the book. Then he can meet the agents, and the drama is no longer about finding him. Instead they have the responsibility to confront Max and make him aware of his problem, his behaviour and the mother’s attitudes.
Max’s return and the confrontation with the Lost & Found agency is the central event of the drama, the moment that the previous stages have been building to and the event from which the challenges, the decisions will arise. It is the focusing, pivotal moment and all good dramas will have this. It needs to be handled dynamically to raise tension, so it is now planned in that the class are considering what they know of Max (technique – role on the wall) and thinking where they could look next, the shed having proved fruitless. They need to be gathered round the role sheet and be looking at it. The teacher then moves behind them, picks up the Max role signifier and surprises them as Max begins speaking to them: Who are you and what are you doing here?
The drama has now taken shape. The aim of the drama is now clearly focused, to have the children explore and consider a boy’s unacceptable behaviour and look at a parent–child relationship, to give advice and solve problems. The resolution of the issues is the final stage of the drama. How will we make that happen? Usually we use forum theatre to set up the class taking over the wronged role, against the role who most needs to learn to change, to see and understand something important about themselves. In this case that is Max, who will always remain a TiR. The pupils have to show him the error of his ways and how other people, his mother, his sister, really feel about him.
Other techniques and roles are used along the way to build the class’s understanding of Max so that they can best see how to help him see his responsibility to others, to change from his totally self-centred way.
The ingredients of planning
Let us take the elements of a drama we have been referring to above and look at them separately with other examples.
Creating a drama is very much like cooking. It is easy to serve up a fast food meal, which has very little quality and goodness, but it is a more detailed, careful and thorough process to create a quality meal from scratch with good ingredients. Our ingredients include the following.
Learning objectives
Learning is often focused through a key problem or issue for the children to tackle (Dorothy Heathcote’s ‘man in a mess’). This helps hand responsibility for learning to the pupils themselves.
The learning can be in any of five areas:
● Language Development – the medium of drama and hence the key impetus to Speaking and Listening (see ‘How to Generate Quality Speaking and Listening’ p. 41).
● Spiritual, Social, Moral, Cultural, Personal – there is usually this capability in any drama.
● Content – the curriculum, focused on any subject – we have highlighted possibilities in our examples for English, History, Technology, Art, Geography.
● Art Form drama – the more the class do drama the more they understand the form and the more they can manipulate and help shape the work.
● Thinking Skills – drama models the mental moves that underpin our thought processes: actions and consequences, being logical about decisions, giving reasons and arguing positions. The very reflective nature of the work, going out of role to examine the meaning of situations and events in the drama, promotes metacognition.
If you look at the sample dramas we give you, you will see a range of objectives in these areas specifically related to the material of the drama, for example, in ‘Daedalus and Icarus’ the following are all possible:
Objectives
Pupils will understand:
● the significance of legends as a focus for literacy work
● legend as part of historical understanding
PSHE
● consequences of actions (on taking the folder of drawings)
● father/child relationship and disobedience ● the consequences of keeping secrets
The first two could be further refined to:
● How the story of Daedalus and Icarus is related to Greek ideas about technology. ● Comparing the drama version of the story and the original myth.
Likewise, the first PSHE general objective could be focused more as the consequences of: ● taking what is not yours and
● finding out about something that represents knowledge dangerous to yourself.
Clearly the contact points have learning areas related to them.
If we can refine an objective tightly it will help us make decisions about the structure and what it should do.
Strong material
We need a stimulus to learning, to focus the exploration. This my be a piece of writing with key learning points, that are usually unresolved by the writer of the original material. These often lie in the PSHE curriculum area. Let us again look at our drama ‘The Wild Thing’ from Where the Wild Things Are. Maurice Sendak shows us Max, a boy who is very imaginative, but whose behaviour is very wild. It also hints at him learning something important on the island, how he misses his home and his mother. The story finally shows Max returning to his room, but there is no resolution of what he will be like in the future, no exploration of his relationship with his mother, whether he continues to behave wildly in his wolf suit. In addition, no other family members appear in the story. This is a gift for drama because we have a number of PSHE issues implied through the story but not dealt with and we can add key roles to look at these issues and embody in them their attitudes to Max. For example, how does his mother deal with him? What does his sister think of him? What would a Wild Thing from the island say if it came after him? All of these are embodied in the plan we offered you in Figure 2.3.
Roles for the teacher
We dealt with this in Chapter 1, ‘How to Begin with Teacher in Role’.
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.
They can be an expert community, the ‘Mantle of the Expert’ role. We can see the use of this as the historians in ‘The Victorian Street Children’ (notice here, though, that they are moved on to become the street children as the drama develops) and ‘The Highwayman’, as archaeologists in ‘The Egyptians’, as journalists in ‘Scrooge’, as advisers to the Duke in ‘The Dream’, as an agency specialising in finding people, Lost & Found, in ‘The Wild Thing’ and as an agency again, Superhelpers, in ‘The Snow Queen’.
The ‘Mantle of the Expert’ role gives the pupils status and an objective viewpoint to consider situations often fraught with emotions and opposing attitudes. We use this sort of communal role as they also invest the pupils with the skills and attributes that we would want them to exhibit – they have to be analytical, compassionate, communicative, thoughtful, creative, listeners.
The other sorts of communities in the outlines we give you are servants in ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Daedalus and Icarus’, mountain villagers in ‘The Governor’s Child’, park volunteers in ‘Charlie’. In all cases belief in the role is built and the learning focused through the problem they encounter.
The pupils also have opportunities to take central roles, particularly from TiR at key stages in the dramas. We see this with all the aggrieved roles in ‘Scrooge’, Maria in ‘The Governor’s Child’ and with the adoption of the sister’s role in ‘The Wild Thing’, Charles in ‘Charlie’, Hermia in ‘The Dream’, and many others.
Where they take over a role it is usually the role who needs help; the role is a victim in some way so that the takeover hands responsibility to them to resolve key issues. They take it over at a crucial moment where the chance to change things, to challenge injustice or correct a wrong is paramount. It is important though that planning does not assume success without hard work and proper arguing of a case by the class. It is important not to make solutions easy for them, a great deal of learning in drama is generated by challenging their thinking. In some cases it is enough for the issues to have been aired and that no solution happens. The learning objective must be the focus of planning.
Tension points – risks – theatre moments
Tension provides the momentum that pushes the class, demands a response, engages them. It involves taking calculated risks; for example in a recent version of a drama based on ‘Snow White’ the class, who were in role as people helping the dwarves at the mine, returned to the house to find Snow White, who appears to be dead. This is a very demanding moment, but one that the children, after initial hesitation, tackled with great commitment. They had to lift the poisoned handkerchief from her face and she would revive. All the times we have done the drama they have never failed to do this. There is a bit of a risk on our part because we cannot ensure they will do it, but should they not do so we plan to go out of role and discuss how they see what is happening and what they think needs to be done. They sometimes need the permission to do something they are already thinking about but unsure of taking action on.
Tension can be planned in, but needs to be seized on according to how the class react. One theatre moment happened this way. ‘The Governor’s Child’ is planned with the possibility of searching the village and the teacher will be looking for a chance to create a moment of near discovery. The class choose how and where they hide Maria. With a class of 10-year-olds the tension was created on the spur of the moment by the teacher’s use of the potential of the planned situation itself. At his second return to look for Maria and the baby, the Soldier (TiR) searched the village. At one point he stopped right next to where the pupil playing Maria was crouching ‘hidden’ in a shed and asked, What’s in here?
The tension at that point was palpable with all eyes on the class member (villager) whose job it was to handle the situation. It’s hardly used, she said. The Soldier mimed turning the handle. It’s locked and I don’t know where the key is, said the girl. The Soldier moved on and the class sighed with relief.
The teacher playing the Soldier built the situation admirably, with never any intention of finding Maria, but the class could see the possibility. The tension rose even though, or maybe because of the theatricality of the moment. There was no shed of course and Maria was pretending to be hidden. In reality, Maria was in full view of everyone with the agreed convention of her hiding being symbolised by crouching down. This provides the fictional belief in her invisibility aided by the Soldier never looking at her. But then the Soldier is the teacher so unless the class accept the fiction nothing will work. Tension here is produced by the collective imagination, what the consequence of discovery would be.
Another example of the effect of tension occurred when another class working on the same drama were so startled by the entry of a TiR that one girl was heard to gasp, ‘Scary!’
Building context
Usually having one main location helps the drama to be properly focused.
With ‘The Egyptians’ we did not have a single location in an early version. It started with the tomb and we planned to spend time creating it and its wall paintings as the early belief building activity. However, then the main role, Geb, was found praying at a temple separate from the tomb. Then we realised that if we had a separate temple we would have to spend time establishing belief in it as well. There was no reason that Geb’s discovery should not happen in the tomb, and that gave us even more potential because he should not be there and we could raise the tension through that prohibition. The tomb could focus all the activity of the drama. That planning decision reinforced the importance of the depictions on the walls so that they can also then be used more at other stages of the drama. That consolidation of the context strengthened the integrity of the drama and helped structure it, as you will see from the full plan.
Building belief
What does this mean when related to drama? It is the need to get the class to trust in the teacher and what the teacher is creating. Why should they go along with the fiction? Only if you create the belief that there is something in it for them. How do you convince them that there is something worthwhile in it?
This is done in a variety of ways. Use of TiR can interest and build belief. The right choice of pupil roles helps that, especially if meaningful activity can be given to them to establish the roles, or the situation and place is properly realised and created for the imagination, as indicated in the previous paragraph. All of the ingredients contribute to building belief:
● choosing worthwhile material, engaging interest, as with the dramas here;
● having the right ‘hook’ at the beginning, a stimulus, a picture or artefact, a role or piece of material that raises expectations, like the street children photograph which never fails to pull the class in;
● planning in times to contract and re-contract with the group, asking them to accept specific conventions, e.g. taking the cloth that becomes the baby in ‘The Governor’s Child’ and deliberately rolling it up into the shape in front of them and asking what it is representing. We have never had a child challenge the credibility of Maria entering with the baby if contracting is done in setting up the moment;
● raising their status, genuinely, in the choice of role for them and in the way we deal with them, like the expert roles we have discussed;
● choosing the right strategies and the variety of strategies so that interest and involvement are maintained, like the thought-tracking where roles are built with their input;
● choosing the right task/activities – giving them something to do that makes sense and through which they contribute to the content and realisation of the drama, like the creation of the wall paintings in ‘The Egyptians’;
● planning to involve them in key decisions and the creation of the drama (see later in this chapter);
● planning to test belief and take calculated risks – and most importantly to provide tension, an unexpected moment or encounter, a role that behaves in a challenging way.
In delivering the drama we have to:
● talk to them positively ... accepting answers as far as possible and looking for elements within a suggestion that might hold possibilities even when the whole idea does not. We have to remove ideas that may get in the way of the drama working (magic solutions, violence, etc.), but doing it in such a way that the pupil offering the idea genuinely does not feel rejected in the process and is willing to continue to make suggestions. It is important to upgrade by repeating answers, commenting on them, acting on good suggestions;
● go slowly, stopping and reflecting and taking the time to do that;
● isolate any problem of non-belief and dealing with it in role or out of role.
Belief in the drama comes mostly from feeling a part of the drama and that requires that the class members contribute to the way the drama develops. As such we have to plan the key moments for critical decisions for the class.
Decision-making – key developments in the drama which provide the class with challenges
In any drama there will only be one or two main decisions that have to be taken by the pupils; by main decisions we mean where the direction and outcome of the decision is crucial.
Inexperienced practitioners often think that they must give the pupils a decision at every turn, what to do next, whom to meet, where to go. This will lead to chaos, with too many possibilities to manage. There are teacher decisions and pupil decisions and we have to be clear about the timing and nature of both, why one should be the teacher’s and why another should be the pupils’.
Many teacher decisions are built into the plan as givens, otherwise there will be no clear direction for the learning. As with many art forms, the constraints of the piece are critical to the quality of the product. What we embed as non-negotiable in the planning of a drama tightens the focus and ensures a concentration on the particularity of the main event. As successful dramas move from the particular to the universal this makes certain the contexts and dilemmas are not nebulous or indistinct.
The opportunity for the pupils to input and take initiative parallels the idea of Dialogic Teaching as outlined by Robin Alexander (2005) and related to drama in Chapter 3 ‘How to Generate Quality Speaking and Listening’. We must plan space for real dialogue, which will involve listening to and using, where possible, their ideas (see Figure 2.4).
When the plan is laid very close to expected responses, and even, in the worst case, when expected responses are laid on top of the plan, so that the plan is a predictor of the response, the correspondence of plan and responses leaves little or no room for a proper dialogue to develop. This generates a false

Figure 2.4 The relationship between planning and delivery in drama – the space for dialogue
sense of security for the teacher: ‘I have my plan and it is tight and secure. The success of the lesson will be how closely the pupils follow my plan and deliver what I have planned.’
The lack of space gets in the way of quality learning and stifles commitment for many of the pupils if it is like that at all times in the drama; there are times when tight planning is necessary. It has to be recognised that in drama lessons the dynamic of teacher planning and pupil response must have fluidity. The teacher may plan for little space for pupils’ decisions in some parts of the lesson and more in other parts. Highly constrained planning is often a feature of the early phases of the drama lesson where common agreements are necessary in order to build the context. In these early phases of the drama lesson the pupils do not have enough information to make key decisions. Later in the drama there can be more space and more possibilities for pupil contribution. It may be better to use a drama where tight planning is the norm throughout because the class are inexperienced and not ready to take on the responsibility of key decisions.
How does this work in practice? Here are examples of the difference between a closed access and open access approach to drama. The examples are from ‘The Governor’s Child’ drama.
Early in the drama, when the villager comes to tell them about the woman and the baby staying in the village, there is no decision given to the class as villagers about whether to take her in: I wanted you to know that I want my family to take her in, said by TiR, is non-negotiable. The issue at this point is one of informing the villagers. We may get their reactions, but these viewpoints are not going to change this decision. This is because at this point we are building context, a context where Maria will be hidden by the villagers and that will provide the major challenge and decisions later. The major decision is about whether to continue to hide her after the Soldier has visited and the villagers know she represents a danger to them. Then the gap in the planning opens and access to dialogue becomes more potent. The class can have a big input here.
Planning is about creating fictions to allow children to see the possibility of change in life. The class should always have the opportunity to make choices, to see alternatives in the way we approach situations, to look at the consequences of actions, but they have to be far enough into the drama to have belief in the situation, knowledge of their position and the understanding of the roles before they can properly make decisions. These three elements are directly influenced by the constraints or givens planned into the drama by the teacher.
The drama conventions, strategies and techniques
There are many techniques for structuring the stages of a drama. Variety of activity for the class is important but each chosen technique must fit the moment and do a particular job. They may:
● create context
● build belief in the roles and therefore the drama
● focus learning
● help explore a situation and deepen understanding ● help to reflect on the meaning of the event.
For details of using the drama techniques see the table in the Introduction p. 4.
Planning as a collaborative activity
We also recommend that you plan with at least one other person. Planning for true learning is a social activity and needs to have more than one mind brought in to develop its full potential. In our team, one member may have the beginning of an idea and sketch that idea out, but usually turns to another member of the team for feedback and a planning discussion. This functions as a means to bounce ideas, to see flaws and to provide insights into the potential for learning. The complexity of drama means a multiplicity of possible learning outcomes.
For example, when planning developments to the original ‘Macbeth’ drama, we wanted to add the ‘Witch’ section. We began with the idea of facing the class with the ambiguity and teasing language that the witches in the original demonstrate. How to do this? One of us, A, had ideas about the Witch arriving at the castle door, a vagrant, carrying something. This was developed further by B with the suggestion that the bundle should contain a mirror. The symbolism of this became obvious, considering some of the imagery in the play, appearance and reality, what is truth?, etc. When searching out a mirror, A came across a cracked hand mirror and this was ideal. We can then use the mirror to get the class to look into the future for Macbeth.
Another example happened with ‘The Wild Thing’. When sharing the planning so far with a group of trainee teachers and looking at the composition of Max’s room, it was suggested that Max would have a den, just like he’s making with a blanket hung over a rope in one of the pictures in the story. This not only parallels the storybook but also gives the teacher, as Max, a place to go and sulk when the class are trying to get him to see sense and gives a place for the Wild Thing, who comes to find Max, to hide and surprise the Lost & Found agents.
Road testing the first version
Participants in dramas offer us as the teachers insights into ways of using an established structure. Once we have the beginnings of a drama we need to try ideas out. We try out the draft plan with a good class, one we know and can rely on to be responsive, but also with the skill to offer new ways of looking at the drama, to challenge properly and be honest in response; they will help us develop the potential in the drama. When a class are responding to strong moments in a drama they not only provide ideas for future use, but also show us the sections which are weak and need replanning. Their positive responses reveal new possibilities and can often become incorporated as ‘givens’ when the drama is used in future. They will show you how a TiR is working.
For example, when road testing ‘The Wild Thing’ drama for the first time the teacher came in very aggressively as Max and growled at the class in Max’s bedroom, I am the King of the Wild Things and will eat you up if you make me angry. The class of 7- and 8-year-olds were taken aback by this behaviour and laughed at him. He had to manage the situation carefully to avoid the drama deteriorating. It was clear that whilst that attitude in Max might recreate ideas from the book, the entry needed to be more subtle and the context of Max’s adventure built more in order to work. The entry has subsequently focused more on his asking who they are, wanting to share his adventures with them if they are careful in how they handle him.
Another example of the class offering new ideas as to what to do and the form to use when you run the drama occurred in a run of ‘Daedalus and Icarus’. At the point where the servants have to decide whether or not to tell King Minos what they have found out about Daedalus’s plan, we were out of role discussing the pros and cons and putting forward powerful arguments on both sides when one pupil said, I’d like to see two of the servants discussing what to do. This was a gift, so the teacher set up a forum, asking for two pupils who had strong arguments on each side to take the chairs, gathering the others around and having them offer to take over the seats as they wanted to add different points. The discussion was thus more potent as they argued the choices in role. This method of moving forward can then be taken as the planned possibility for exploring the issue in future use of the drama.
The group even took the drama further themselves. Finally, when the arguments became circular, they were asked to stand behind the chair representing the choice they now most favoured and we got a clear outcome, not to tell. They moved immediately to spontaneously suggesting ideas as to how to avoid telling the truth of Daedalus’s plans – evolving a substitution of a decoy set of plans and drawings instead of the ones for flight. Even the minority who had opted to tell Minos began to contribute ideas to the decoy approach and we had the next stage of the drama, a group to produce the decoy drawings and two groups to work on building the wings for Daedalus and Icarus.
The quality of the drama develops in these ways. You can choose to incorporate them in future versions of the drama.
You will see other added ideas from work with classes highlighted in the dramas in Part Two, where the plans are outlined.
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. For example, ‘The Egyptians’ has a more living through feel, but ‘The Dog in the Night-Time’ is more episodic. Sometimes a drama will start in a living through way and the resolutions and final explorations will be more episodic, as with ‘The Governor’s Child’ or ‘Macbeth’.
The more you plan the more you will sense the needs of the group and the style that suits.
What about endings to dramas?
The most difficult thing can be resolving a drama satisfactorily in the time and to the satisfaction of the class. This is to some extent in the planning but mostly in the handling of the drama.
The class must always go away feeling they have achieved something. They need to have solved the problem. If a final resolution is possible, for example, as a result of the forum, Max realises he must think of other people, then let them win, but the class must have worked hard for it in putting the case across to him. You, in role as Max, will feel the pressure if they apply it well and can begin to signal that you do see you might be wrong always to think of yourself, that you are listening for the first time. We look to the class tackling the problem, the issue, the difficult role, the wrong attitude. However, the ending is not always a happy ending where all people become friends and the problem goes away. If the issue is not easy to solve in reality then pupils will see through it if you give them too easy a change in the problem role and too soft a landing. When one group of trainees were doing a drama with a class, a difficult role melted into compliance with such suddenness that one boy commented to a role, Look, you say sorry and she will give in and we can all live happily ever after! We were convinced by his tone that he had said it ironically and was showing how unbelievable this transformation was.
Avoid that easy ending. We must be satisfied ourselves with the feel of the drama at all times; it must feel authentic. It is better for the class to have struggled with the issues and to see possible futures without the problem role necessarily changing or the dangers being completely avoided.
In one outing of ‘The Governor’s Child’ the class could in fact see a greater dramatic satisfaction in partial success. The three teachers who were observing one of us teach this drama had discussed between the sessions what they thought the class would choose to do in the second session. Two thought they would resolve in a happy ending, the third saw them choosing complete disaster as the outcome for that sense of destruction children can seek at times. In the final analysis, the class did neither; they opted for Maria, the baby’s nurse, to give herself up to the Soldier, a sacrifice to save the baby’s life, and that was what they set up as the ending.
The feeling was strong as the Soldier led Maria away; the comments of the villagers as she left were thoughtful and convincing. They then set up a very telling memorial to Maria with lines for the epitaph contributed by different group members:
Always remembered,
The stranger who entered this village.
She was the most loving, caring person.
Born, not of this world.
She changed all our lives from bad to good. She wasn’t what we thought she was.
There is also the possibility of alternative endings, visions of the future that may be different and even contradictory. These enable individuals to share their understanding and open up further debate without being locked into one solution that they may not adhere to; it is almost the ‘minority report’ of a drama.
Finally – the key decisions
With all plans you need to ensure that a tension moment comes early to spur the interest of the group and that a TiR features early to model the commitment and seriousness of the drama.
Summary of points to consider
● How to begin a plan – facing the problems of starting from scratch
● The frame – the way the elements link together to provide viewpoint for the class
● The elements of planning including: learning objectives, a stimulus to learning, roles for the teacher and for the children, how to create tension points, building context and belief in the drama, the decision-making for the class, the choice of strategies and techniques
● Planning with someone else
● Road testing the first version  
Appendix: Drama starters
Here are some beginnings of ideas for dramas that can be used to provide short TiR events or can be developed more fully as dramas by taking the approaches suggested in this chapter. In each case we have supplied a ‘learning intention’, a starter role and the situation to be set up. The ‘key moment later’ shows potential for further development.
1. An idea from ‘Romeo and Juliet’
Learning intention Parental control over children.
Contact role A teenage boy discovered writing a letter.
Context The pupils are all in role as workers on a rich family’s estate. They have been ordered to patrol the estate and gardens for their employers, in advance of the important forthcoming wedding of the daughter to a cousin of the Prince’s. Their job is to ensure that all the area inside the estate walls is secure, all the gates locked and that there are no strangers around.
They question the boy about what he is doing and why he is here. He initially refuses to speak, but asks them to take the letter secretly to the daughter of the family.
Key moment later Depending on what the pupils decide to do, the daughter of the family approaches them either to attack them for siding with her father or to thank them for the letter and seek their help to escape that night.
2. An idea from ‘Macbeth’
Learning intention Confidentiality and dealing with a crime.
Contact role A maidservant to the Queen.
Context The pupils are in role as physicians to the King. The maidservant approaches them with a request for a confidential conversation. She reveals, I have found my mistress to be sleepwalking regularly, talking in her sleep about matters that disturb her. She refuses to say any more but asks them to come and observe that night.
Key moment later The King calls the physicians to report on his wife’s condition.
3. An idea from ‘Danny Champion of the World’ by Roald Dahl Learning intention Responsibility and children.
Contact role Danny is discovered upset on the steps of his gypsy caravan.
Context The pupils are in role as estate workers on Lord Victor Hazell’s estate. They discover Danny but he is reluctant to speak. He doesn’t know where his Dad is, but he doesn’t want to get him into trouble. He knows his ‘special bag’ is missing.
Key moment later Danny’s Dad returns – cannot say where he has been or what he was doing. He pleads with them not to tell Lord Victor Hazell.
4. An idea from ‘The Hobbit’
Learning intention About riddles and dealing with a tricky opponent, who is a bully.
Contact role Bilbo Baggins
Context The pupils are all in role as map-makers for Gandalf the Wizard. Bilbo has got lost and a creature called Gollum has promised to give him a map if he can invent a riddle that Gollum cannot answer. He has already solved one that Gollum gave him:
At night I come without being fetched
At dawn I disappear without being stolen
You can see me even when I have gone
And I am a sailor’s guide What am I?
Can the map-makers solve the riddle, but more importantly can they help Bilbo make up one to fool Gollum?
Will the pupils take the rhyme to Gollum and save Bilbo from being upset again?
The map-makers meet Gollum (TiR) and try out their riddle. Gollum struggles and eventually, reluctantly, gives them the map. They give the map to Bilbo, who leaves in haste.
Key moment later The map-makers get a panicky message. Bilbo has got lost again. They find him still underground. He is very scared and stuck. He’s not very good at reading the map and Gollum told him the Dragon’s Lair is the best way out. Bilbo reads the word as ‘Dragoon’ and the word ‘Lair’ he thinks is a type of gate. Gollum is in fact directing him to the dragon Smaug’s lair. When Bilbo finds out he has been cheated he asks the class what he should do? Other travellers are going to be sent to their death. How can they help others get out?