Assessing Theatre Students

Learning how to access theatre students is difficult, I've discovered. Taking a written, multiple choice test is easy: they got the answer or they didn't. There's no if, ands, or buts. But when assessing a performance, there's more to consider. We gave an assessment in the form of a performance. Easy enough. That's how I was always assessed in the theatre while in school. And I thought it would be an easy and effective way to grade. But I discovered that it is a lot harder than I thought. A performance is very subjective. There isn't always a clear cut line on what's an A or a B. If you have a list of things that need to be included, then it's easy to take off points when things are missing. But when assessing character, it's much harder to grade that, especially with kids. Some are more comfortable than others performing and come off as better performers. Does that accurately show what they know and understand about what you have been teaching? Does the performance have to be perfect to get full points? What is a perfect performance? As I have been thinking about this, to me the most important thing when assessing students is grading the final performance coupled with your observations through-out the weeks of the unit. Making sure they are growing and that they are putting forth effort everyday into their work is a major part of their grade. And it should be. So assessment should be two parts: the final formal assessment, as well as the informal assessment of their progression, and assessing how much they've grown from the first day of the unit to the final performance. That to me is an accurate assessment of their knowledge.

Contextual Factors in the Classroom

Considering textual factors for this particular classroom setting was difficult. I understand how in some schools and classes there is a necessity to change the lesson plans in order to fit the unusual needs of the students. Some of those things we learned about were English learners, learning disabilities, physical disabilities, and socio-economic factors. Coming into the classroom I was prepared to learn what were the most prevalent factors and apply them to my lessons. But when we got there I was surprised to find, there were no contextual factors that required the adjusting of the lessons we had created. There are only two Hispanic kids, neither of whom are English learners. There were no kids in the class with any disabilities, and there were no socio-economic factors that the teacher had knowledge of. So I was expecting to have to change my lessons for these things and then didn't have to. But it did get me thinking about the ways I could change the lessons if needed. One thing I thought of was that if there are students who have reading or writing disabilities, doing small performances where they don't have to write lines but can just say them, is a way for them to still perform and incorporate what we're learning without having problems because of their disability.

Applying Texts and Literacies

The main text we used in this unit was the body. We knew coming in that the students didn't have a lot of experience using their bodies and really struggled with that. So we really focused on ways to help them understand their body and how it can be used in performance. We did a lot of activities where we isolated the body and analyzed it. An activity we did to help the students understand how the body can be used to create pictures and portray images really got them thinking and they all loved it. It was one of the most beneficial things we did because it sparked their creativity and they really understood how to use and manipulate the body. It was a sculpting activity. We had the class get into groups of three or four. One person was the sculptor and the others were the clay. We yelled out a situation, and the sculptor made their clay into their interpretation of the situation. It gave them a chance to be different, to create what they saw individually, but since had a reference point because of the situation we gave them. We did this activity in a variety of ways and the students didn't want to stop! They kept asking if we could keep going. Their images got better and they got more and more excited as class went on because they understood it and were able to improve as their understanding grew. I really learned through-out these lessons that making sure the students understand the text you're analyzing is so important. Baby steps and taking it slowly and according to the pace the students need is essential. If they don't understand the text at the beginning, they just get frustrated. But once they get it, something clicks and they just run with it. They get creative and love the work they do.

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.

Megan Teaching Response #5

Today we were supposed to teach our 5th lesson, but Bradley was having a matinee showing of his musical so we had are going on Monday for our preview performance day and to include a little of our 5th lesson. Since we didn’t get to teach today I was thinking about contextual factors in the classroom. Right now in our class all the students are white. We have no obvious differences, but they are still very diverse. I just took my multicultural education class and loved it. I had a great teacher. One thing that he kept emphasizing was good mulit-ed or diverse teaching is just good teaching. You have to be flexible and get to know the students. I learned that you have to be very positive and be ready for any witty comments about my race. I may have to teach a classroom full of Asians, Hispanics, or Black people and they may think that I don’t understand or I hate them. I have to provide the resources for them to learn and let them know that I don’t hate them. I want to emphasize that we are all theatre students and that we are not white or black theatre students. But I also learned that some students may want you to recognize their blackness or other race. They want to be acknowledged as different. I will agree and respect them for that. Overall I am still learning and trying to figure out what I will want to do in a diverse setting. All this experience is great!

Kristy #9

Teaching Day 4
Today was presentation day for the students. It was a short day, so we were able to get through all of the presentations but one. I was pretty impressed with MOST of the kids presentations. The students were required to become "experts" on their genre of theatre history and give a presentation on that genre. They were to have a group outline, a visual and an activity to demonstrate and further explain their genre of theatre that they were presenting. I was pretty impressed with the activities that each of the groups came up with. I think that they all had fun with the presentations and were able to learn some good new things about different parts of theatre history that they didn't know about before and was able to share those things they learned. We talked to Lindsay and asked how she handles the students that dont show up during group presentations - they get kind of a free-bee ticket out of it...but later on there are evaluations that group members do and say who put in how much work when and that is where the consequence comes in to even out the 'fairness' of the grading. There are little things here and there that I think we learned worked better than others- like having them hand in papers right after they have completed them instead of them holding onto them to turn in later on....most got lost. overall the presentations went well today.

Teaching #2

So after our first day of teaching it felt like things were going pretty well; we had a good start and it seemed like we were doing our best to teach to different learning styles and despite the struggle of getting the students attention, life was good.

Day Two seemed to present a myriad of different challenges. One of the biggest obstacles being that we had at least 6 students that were out on the first day and while they didn't miss a critical portion of information, they did miss enough to cause a teaching challenge. The interesting part was that some of the students wanted to know what they had missed, while others thought it was obligation to approach them and give them the missed information. I finally realized that it was alright to be a little 'sassy' with the students, especially when Ms. Sellers told us to just give the sass right on back. Honestly, I didn't realize how much sass you are allowed to give your students! The more we found the balance between giving them guidelines and not letting them push our boundaries the more they responded to our teaching.