So now, we’re going to look at some of the reasons why it’s beneficial to include drama activities such as role play in your teaching practice in a range of subject areas.
development.
Firstly, creating the space for children to express themselves freely in a group situation helps to give them confidence in their own opinions and ideas. And, of course, drama activities can work especially well for shy or introverted children who usually don’t participate in other types of classroom situations.
Secondly, unscripted improvisation activities where children work from their imagination, if done in a supportive way, give children the opportunity to gain experience in taking risks and encourage them to say things that they might normally be afraid to say.
Drama can also support the child’s educational development. For example, the emphasis placed on cooperative activities in drama means that group members must learn the value of listening to one another. Being involved in any sort of performance which relies on everyone working together and playing their part also helps children to be responsible not only for their learning but for their general behavior. These are just a couple of ways in which drama can benefit a child’s learning.
Now I’d like to look at how role play can be such a valuable learning tool in the classroom. The value of role play for children who are having difficulties as a means of therapy is now widely accepted. The experience of doing a role play where children act out aspects of their own life without explicitly stating that it is a direct representation of their own experiences can help children to judge their own behavior in an objective way.
One obvious example would be doing a role reversal with a bully role-playing a victim. Because this approach doesn’t involve direct confrontation, it may help the bully to see his or her behavior in a different light.
More generally, role play also allows the teacher to explore potentially controversial or taboo subjects in a safe setting in which children feel at ease. It’s obviously essential for children to feel they won’t be criticized or judged for voicing certain views.
Getting children to examine their thoughts and opinions carefully can lead to a deeper self-knowledge and a stronger awareness of morality. This is an important factor in developing social skills.
Let’s look at a specific subject area now and think about how drama can enrich the learning process for the study of history. Bringing characters from the past to life in the classroom by doing classroom drama activities is an easy way to improve the level of the children’s participation in the lesson.
So, drama in the history classroom makes for a livelier atmosphere, but getting children to reenact scenes from history can also be extremely useful as it helps them to remember what happened and why it was important, as well as helping to bring the past alive.
Another way of doing this is to ask children to find solutions to historical problems using role play. This can help to focus attention on why certain decisions were taken. For example, children can be asked to decide how best to defend their town from attack or where to build a new settlement.
Okay, what I’d like to do now is to think about your next teaching practice session and, in groups, discuss how you would incorporate an element of drama into your lesson plan.
