How to Approach Speaking and Listening through Drama

    

• Why Use Teacher in Role?

Learning requires the teacher's role to organize, direct and influence student learning.  One of the best ways to do that is to do drama work that the teacher is involved in.  The main teaching technique used was teacher in role (TiR).

With teaching through this role, the teacher is able to get more effective attention.  Remaining as a teacher, intervening as a teacher, coaching side, structuring the drama from the outside, and / or sending classes in groups to make their own drama must limit the best and at worst negate any opportunity for the teacher to teach effectively.

With the drama the teacher can provide a more stimulating way to approach students' understanding rather than just asking questions.

•   Teacher as Storyteller

The teacher's role is to communicate the text in a way that is lively and interesting, holds attention and engages students' imagination.  The connection between the teacher as storyteller and the teacher uses drama, lies in the fact that they both use the generation of imagined reality to teach.

Knowledge of the story is not an obstacle to participating.  Broadly these prerequisites are:

1. Awareness of story elements that will not be changed

2. Willingness to move from fixed narrative to story exploration.

3. If the narrative consists of roles, context of fiction, use of symbols and events, then the teacher needs to hold some elements that are true and consistent with the story.

•  Preparation for the Role

In preparation, the teacher must make a specific decision about this.  Begin by asking students out of the role and asking the child then the order of the questions.  This helps the teacher allow a few minutes to improve planning, so the teacher can be specific in answering their questions.  You will also tell them a story but it will happen as if you just met and it will not be the voice of the narrator who tells it again, but the story is as if it is happening now.

They will also question from the story, as if they were there.  Next we consider these key skills for entering and exiting roles.

•  Teaching from Within

Use of roles as 'teaching from within' because of the teacher enter the world of drama, but it's very important to get out of fiction often and not let it run away on its own.  When using TiR, the teacher operates as a manager as well as a participant.  The teacher must also give time to change roles (OoR) to reflect on what is happening and give students the opportunity to think about what they know and what they want to do.

OoR is very important as a way to negotiate the purpose and meaning of roles and how the best teacher controls and manages learning.

•  The Requirements of Working in Role

To make TiR the most effective, we need to look at drama education from an 'audience' perspective.  This will help us shape the TiR element specifically according to how the audience sees it.  Audiences are people who understand what they see in front of them.  In drama, students make sense actively, knowing the meaning can be followed up.

They must move from operating as an audience to becoming participants and returning often and suddenly.

Involving the ‘audience’ in the process of making a game, at the same time giving the teacher ways to directly influence the situation and meaning.

• Disturbing the Class Productively

It is important for teachers to be able to provide challenges and stimuli, by providing some class problems that must be faced.  This drama is developed through a series of activities that build class roles, which are usually shared roles.

We must help them in the drama, make them comfortable, and then productively interfere with that comfort.  The fact that, like in a good game, the class discovers things while walking that might provide productive tension.  So that we are able to assess them in response to their problems and activeness.

• Responding to your class

It is important for teachers to be able to do two-way responses.  Classes that work as a community are key to using drama as a method of teaching.  This community is made most effective by the instrumental teacher.  Where the teacher must participate through TiR there can be a meeting point where creation occurs because, in addition to planning structure, the teacher's ideas can operate in drama and challenge and engage with children's ideas in a dialectic.

When the class gives feedback on their responses and allows the development of important roles, the teacher must respond appropriately and therein lies the 'soft language' skill and the possibility of authentic dialogue.  The teacher must respond to this response in an authentic way, respecting how the class sees the role.