Assessing theatre students, Teaching Day 5

Today was the day we designated as a “work day” and so most of the time was spent monitoring and providing suggestions and feedback to individual groups as they worked on their scripts. I could see a lot of good ideas coming out of the students, but now I am seeing what I wish we had done differently along the way. More specifically, I wish we gave them more writing time throughout the unit instead of having them do lots of brainstorming and developing activities throughout the weeks and putting off the writing till the end.
One suggestion that Brittany gave was making sure that we give them space. This was actually something that I noticed towards the end of the day. We were trying to be on top of monitoring them and so I think we unintentionally we interrupted their thought-flow.
By the end of the period, assessing the students progress, we realized that they were not as far along as we had planned. Therefore we decided that we’d have to give them our last day to finish their scripts. I think assessing theatre students in general is a tricky thing. Because so much of the instruction is participation, formal assessments are minimal. Also, with this unit, most of their work has been done in a group and so there’s a part of me that is concerned about the accuracy of the assessment of the individual.