Drama for the Inclusive Classroom

Activities to Support Curriculum and Social-Emotional Learning

Sally Bailey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000367591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Incorporate drama and improvisation into your classroom to build confidence, support social-emotional learning, and engage every student in the curriculum. This book's detailed and easy-to-implement chapters walk you through using drama to develop critical listening and communication skills, conflict resolution abilities, behavior regulation, and even grow new skills in math, literature, geography, and more! Each chapter builds on the skills learned in previous lessons, allowing you to increase the complexity as students progress. Designed for use with inclusive classrooms as well as dedicated special education programs, this guide features adaptable activities to include students at every ability level.

Basic Skills Students Need for Participating in Drama

Before using drama as a tool for social-emotional learning or teaching curricular material, teachers and counselors need to start from where the students are in terms of group abilities and expectations. Drama activities typically do not happen at a desk. Students need to be out of their chairs either in an open space, sitting in a circle, or working in small groups, perhaps around a table or several desks pushed together.

There will be some noise involved, because students need to communicate verbally with each other, and sometimes the volume may rise when they get excited, or if they get frustrated and need to work out differences of opinion. Noise and movement does not necessarily mean students are out of control; often they indicate students are deeply engaged and excited. There is a clear difference in the quality of the sound in a classroom that appears on the surface to be chaotic and one that is actually in chaos. Students in control of the creative process are focused on the activity; students who are unfocused and not on task are fooling around or showing off.

Drama requires self-discipline and self-control. To learn how to remain in control, especially at the beginning, students need careful scaffolding. Directions for how to play the activities suggested in this book will be included with each description as well as Helpful Hints to simplify, clarify, or vary it.

If you have students who have difficulty staying focused whenever they leave their seats, then start with games that help students develop their executive functions. Take your time and repeat games they like often to provide practice with those skills.

Students should think of drama as an enjoyable part of their school day, but not as indoor recess. Accordingly, think through what you want to call the dramatic activities you are going to be doing. Theatre professionals call the activities you will find in this book “drama games.” Sheldon Patinkin (2000), one of the founders of Second City in Chicago, says:

The improvisational games aren't games in the sense of winning and losing, and they aren't about being funny. They are about being in the moment; they are about being totally present to each other onstage – being “in play.” (p. 22)

Notice, he says “in play,” not “in a play” or “playing around.”

If the word “game” sends the wrong message to your students, avoid that term. You may find:

• Self-expression
• Drama
• Creative drama
• Practicing the ability to _______[insert name of skill]
• Explorations
• Challenges or
• Experiments

work better for your class. You could say something like:

We are going to do an experiment about focusing today. You will be challenged to use your concentration abilities during this experiment. When we are done, I want you to tell me on a scale of one to ten [or one to five] how well you were able to concentrate.

I will alternate between the terms drama, activity, game, experiment, exploration, and challenge throughout the book to provide variety for you as reader.

One way to help students develop self-control is to emphasize their responsibility in making the experiment a success. They need to bring self-control to the experiment you are going to do together as a group. The more self-control they display during an activity, and the more they follow your directions, the more they will learn and the more fun they will have.

If they cannot bring their self-control (or focus or self-discipline or whatever developmentally appropriate term you want to use) to the experiment, the whole class will not be successful, and everyone will have to sit down. The consequence of stopping drama early does not need to be worded as a threat, a warning, or a punishment; it can be delivered in terms of enlisting each individual student's commitment:

I need each one of you to follow directions and pay attention to your body's movements in space. As long as you are listening and being careful, you won't get hurt and neither will anyone else.

If you have students who like to police others' behavior, you can also add:

Everyone is being responsible for themselves; there is no need to pay attention to anyone else's behavior.

Another approach can put the focus on creating group safety:

As long as everyone is safe, we can do these experiments, but if you put yourself or someone else in harm's way, you will have to sit out.

Having students sit out is best accomplished if there is a para-professional or assistant who can engage those taken out of the activity in something else productive or take them aside to talk about why they could not follow directions.

The best way to keep a group engaged and behaving positively is usually not to remove anyone, but to keep them all participating. Often the most distractive behavior comes from players who are “out” and have nothing to do. When someone is bored, it becomes very easy for them to “make excitement” by teasing or bothering someone else who is also “out.” Most of the drama activities in this book will not involve elimination or “outs” for that reason. One way to keep everyone participating is by using games that do not eliminate players. I call these “Odd-Person-In” games. Elephant and Giraffe and 1776 are two of the Odd-Person-In games in the book.

Competitive activities can be problematic in a classroom, especially when students are trying to develop self-control. Yes, the adult world is filled with competition, but before students can begin to handle losing and winning, they first need to improve their abilities to work cooperatively. Competition creates a deficit-based situation for whichever team loses, resulting in unhappy feelings. It makes more sense to create a strengths-based space and generate feelings of safety among students. This book focuses on learning how to participate within a group cooperatively, not on how to win.

Developing Belief in Yourself as a Teacher or Counselor Using Drama

Just as students will be starting from where they are in terms of drama, teachers and counselors will be starting from where they are. Many educators feel intimidated about incorporating drama into their classroom or therapy room, because they do not have formal drama training. I guarantee that if you have the skills to run a classroom or a therapy group, you have the skills to facilitate the drama activities in this book. If group facilitation skills were not focused on in your training, you can learn them.

Part of leading group activities involves establishing group norms, creating clear structure, and providing simple instructions. I will go over these with each activity and offer examples of proactive ways to give directions. Of course, you will want to translate them into your own words.

In terms of drama training, whether you know it or not, you actually already have had a lot of experience in drama. While you may not have ever been in a play or taken a theatre class, between the ages of one-and-a-half and two you began naturally to participate in imitation and dramatic play. This is an instinctive activity that children initiate in the preoperational stage of child development (Flavell, 1963; Piaget, 1962). Until the age of five or six, you continued to learn in large part through acting out people and situations, sometimes by yourself and sometimes with your friends and family. Because of these experiences, you are a drama expert. Even if you last played dramatically thirty years ago, you will find that doing drama is like riding a bicycle: Once you start again, the ability quickly comes back to you.

Child psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978, 1986) believed that children learn about the social world by enacting it and through that process develop their social skills. As they solve problems while acting out scenes, they begin to understand the world around them better. Often children who do not have adults to scaffold these dramatic play skills for them or who lack other children to play with are in need of these skills. The lack of these skills negatively affects the ability to function appropriately in a classroom and in other social settings. If you experience difficulties when you start doing drama activities with your students, lack of enough early dramatic play may be a reason. You may have to practice the basic skills in Chapter Two longer. That's fine. Moving on to more advanced drama activities is not required, and your class is not on a timetable. Practice the basics until students have mastered them.

A big part of successfully leading a drama group is presenting yourself to your students with confidence. Undoubtedly, you are able to do this when you are teaching your academic specialty. Transfer this confidence to drama. Imagine yourself in your most self-assured, empowered, and relaxed state, when you are presenting your favorite lesson plan or doing an activity you truly enjoy. Can you remember what it feels like to be doing this? What words and images come to your mind? Write down those words and images so you can remember them. Before you teach each drama lesson, take a moment to bring those feelings and images back to your heart and mind. This kind of preparation is an acting technique created by the famous Russian acting teacher Constantin Stanislavski (1948) called “sense memory.” The actor transfers an emotional experience from a remembered event to a moment on stage currently being performed. Sense memory is easier to do with positive experiences than difficult ones.

Drama leaders typically are meant to play many of the games in the book with the students, serving as a role model. Your participation helps the game to function smoothly. Other times it is more important to be outside the game watching and coaching. The instructions for each game will indicate whether you are a coach, a participant, or serve a different function.

The drama activities in Chapter Two focus on helping students develop basic executive functions and self-regulation skills so that they can successfully perform in the freedom of a drama setting. These skills are also needed for learning and handling oneself in all work and social areas in life. Later, after students develop these basic skills, Chapters Three, Four, and Five will introduce more complex activities, involving advanced problem solving, social interaction, and teamwork.

The Basics of Teaching a Drama Game/Experiment

There are a few basics involved in teaching any drama game or activity. As we get older and become more experienced, we often forget how complex many of the tasks are that we do every day. As an adult, we do not need to think about the activity while doing it, because it has become part of our procedural memory and is now automatic. Some of the instructions in this section may seem to be presented in an extremely obvious, simplistic, and detailed manner. I am consciously reverse engineering all the steps in a described process so anyone doing the task with a group for the first time will know exactly what sequences are involved.

How to Plan a Session

A drama session typically moves from a short warm-up game that engages everyone, followed by a ma...