List of Contributions

Regarding scene work, one thing that you can do to use time more effectively is to separate how you assess formative versus summative assignments so that the formative assessments are of a work in progress and require little practice. They also "count less" or even not at all. Then the process to improve ...

I agree with Mr. Goodchild, absolutely.  My personal passion is about devised theater, but yours could be anything. It's always best to build any program onto your own personal passion for a subject, regardless of what subject you're teaching. I have seen so many master teachers thrive, in the arts or ...

I should add to this discussion that my chief area of advocacy, and that for which I am known, is for devised, original work over producing published plays. When I started in 1990, I began with a group of about 20 middle school students and they were the ones who chose this method, given all of the possible ...

I agree with what's been said so far, especially with the idea of recruiting in middle school, if possible. I've been teaching drama at the same private school for three decades and the only time my numbers dropped significantly was when I lost touch with the middle school by moving exclusively to high ...

Depends on the effect you want. I just did a car for an original comedy script and it worked really well.  Our car was front-view only, as if the actors were driving toward the audience. I built a frame out of PVC pipe and spray-painted it black, to make it disappear against out black backdrop. The frame ...

The answer to this question for me is that I don't want to make it easy for students. As a person who came to theater by accident in high school and through it actually discovered that theater was a treasure trove of literature, I fell in love with scripts. I could imagine them on stage as I read them. ...

I teach in an independent school and am in my 28th year here. I have taught grades six through twelve, but at the moment teach high school and work in tandem with a middle school drama teacher. We also do work with other grades. Our extracurricular plays are three hours long and anyone in grades six ...