Teaching Classroom Drama and Theatre will be an essential text for anyone teaching drama in the modern classroom. It presents a model teachers can use to draw together different methodologies of drama and theatre studies, exemplified by a series of contemporary, exciting practical units.

Teaching Classroom Drama and Theatre is all about teaching drama in the modern classroom. The book presents a series of new, exciting and practical units placed in the context of current ideas about classroom practice and presents a new model of how teachers can draw together the various methodologies of process drama and theatre studies. By re-appraising the very different traditions and approaches to drama teaching in schools, it presents examples of integrated projects and lessons suitable for the widest range of teachers and learners.

Rainer and Lewis present a series of new, exciting and challenging practical units for teaching drama in the modern classroom. The tried-and-tested units of work in this book are placed in the context of current ideas about classroom practice. The authors present a new model of how teachers can draw together the various methodologies of process drama and traditional theatre teaching. The flexible content makes the book suitable for specialist and non-specialist drama teachers. Newly trained teachers, student teachers and those new to drama will feel supported by the full, detailed layout. Experienced teachers will find the main benefit of the book as a springboard into their own drama teaching around the themes and topics given, and as a means of clarifying theoretical concepts.

If you’re a preservice teacher planning to teach the theatre arts, an in-service secondary teacher considering a foray into teaching theatre, or a theatre professional considering the classroom, there’s a lot to learn. But you don’t have to know everything to teach well from the start, you just need Theatre in the Secondary School Classroom. Theatre in the Secondary School Classroom is the trusty guide that every new theatre teacher will be grateful to have as a ready reference. It’s not an encyclopedia on secondary theatre, but a collection of musts that every beginning instructor needs to know. Theoretical, practical, and friendly, Theatre in the Secondary School Classroom introduces key instructional methods and successful strategies, and works through the problems of practice that face all instructors, regardless of their experience. With discussions of finding appropriate spaces (both personal and physical), assessing students’ learning, encouraging involvement, and more, you’ll find the crucial information you need to hit the ground running. Patterson, McKenna-Crook, and Ellington provide numerous illustrations, model letters to parents, work samples, rubrics, checklists, and example test questions to show you precisely how the nitty-gritty of theatre education plays out. In addition each chapter contains suggested extension activities for students, Internet links to valuable resources and research materials, and experience-won hints on topics of specific interest to the new theatre teacher.

A collection of games and music to aid the drama teacher and give ideas for varied classes.

This book includes strategies for integrating drama in the classroom through the use of creating characters, giving meaning to activities through answering the questions: who, what, when, where, and why about any person and situation under discussion (5 W's), using storyboards, incorporating music, writing radio scripts, and using literature and movies as prompts for improvised enactments. Students will learn how to create characters and apply those creations to different content-area activities, situations, and subject matter. This useful resource describes more than thirty-five scenarios of teachers and students in early elementary grades through graduate school working together to craft drama events that draw out participants’ creative energies, interpretations of curricular topics, and investigations of social, political, and personal concerns. In all of these lesson plans, students collectively explore topics, concepts, themes, or tensions that surface as they navigate their way through the conditions and experiences that unfold in a scene, skit, improvisation, or in interrelated episodes. Drama techniques include role play, scripting, dialogue, audience participation, improvisation, and the strategic use of interaction, space, movement, and gesture.