Open Forum

First of all, that's ridiculous to put that many into one course. I had a similar situation a couple of years ago and continue to have large class sizes/interest but am only allowed the one section. Secondly, kudos to you for wanting to do right by them.

If the class is like my Intro class, you will have anywhere from 9th through 12th taking it, some with experience, some not, some with special needs (my largest class two years ago of 41 had 9 SPED kids with two paras in the room...), so your activities have to be varied enough to allow all to be successful and interested. I sense you have taught the course before and do not need any lesson units (but if you do, let me know and I'll send some) but instead are trying to figure out how to supervise and teach such a large group. The simple answer is one person can't, so that is why I asked about the vertical spread of year levels; the assumption would be that once you teach an entire group a game (eg What Are You Doing, Freeze Tag, Space Jump, etc) you can then put them in charge of smaller groups and you move around to each group. Conversely, this approach could be used with one year level but attempting to discern those students whose talent and maturity levels would indicate they could lead the groups. This method can work for the running of Improv games, etc.

Once you move on to other units, other approaches need to be made; I have used a 'round robin' approach for my Clowning/Comedy units wherein I pair groups up and they are the eyes/ears that I cannot be in the early stages of working out group devised pieces. Given a specific list of things to observe and note, they then report back to the group at large, with me parsing the most common observations to use as a teaching tool for that day.

Another option with such a large, and I suspect, diverse group is to not have everyone do everything. Once basics have been taught/practiced (warm ups, improv lessons on give and take, work on the basic Elements of Drama like focus, tension, level, space, and actor/audience engagement), have some take the role of writers, others directors, others designers, etc so that all do not have to be performers. In order to address the Core Standards/your state standards, you may need to swap roles around at times, but this way all students work to their strengths/interests, and the group begins to see the importance of a cohesive vision.

Good luck with it!

Lori

Dear Lori (and everyone),

We are opening a new high school and will have a black box theater. I would love to receive suggestions from experienced drama teachers on how to incorporate ideas like you've mentioned above into our English curriculum (both ESL and regular English/Language Arts). Your mention of lesson units above piqued my interest. (We may develop a drama program as well; that remains to be seen.)

Any and all suggestions are welcome! Perhaps I will create a stand-alone post on this later, as our situation develops.

I found this page as a small group of us are tasked with preparing a multi-disciplinary demo lesson in the theatre. What a great community!

Sincerely yours,
skye

Skye Ganbaatar
Orchlon International School
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

First of all, that's ridiculous to put that many into one course. I had a similar situation a couple of years ago and continue to have large class sizes/interest but am only allowed the one section. Secondly, kudos to you for wanting to do right by them.

If the class is like my Intro class, you will have anywhere from 9th through 12th taking it, some with experience, some not, some with special needs (my largest class two years ago of 41 had 9 SPED kids with two paras in the room...), so your activities have to be varied enough to allow all to be successful and interested. I sense you have taught the course before and do not need any lesson units (but if you do, let me know and I'll send some) but instead are trying to figure out how to supervise and teach such a large group. The simple answer is one person can't, so that is why I asked about the vertical spread of year levels; the assumption would be that once you teach an entire group a game (eg What Are You Doing, Freeze Tag, Space Jump, etc) you can then put them in charge of smaller groups and you move around to each group. Conversely, this approach could be used with one year level but attempting to discern those students whose talent and maturity levels would indicate they could lead the groups. This method can work for the running of Improv games, etc.

Once you move on to other units, other approaches need to be made; I have used a 'round robin' approach for my Clowning/Comedy units wherein I pair groups up and they are the eyes/ears that I cannot be in the early stages of working out group devised pieces. Given a specific list of things to observe and note, they then report back to the group at large, with me parsing the most common observations to use as a teaching tool for that day.

Another option with such a large, and I suspect, diverse group is to not have everyone do everything. Once basics have been taught/practiced (warm ups, improv lessons on give and take, work on the basic Elements of Drama like focus, tension, level, space, and actor/audience engagement), have some take the role of writers, others directors, others designers, etc so that all do not have to be performers. In order to address the Core Standards/your state standards, you may need to swap roles around at times, but this way all students work to their strengths/interests, and the group begins to see the importance of a cohesive vision.

Good luck with it!

Lori

Hi Linda! Did you ever get any of these materials? I'm also a part of a new program and would love to see what others are doing!

Dear Lori (and everyone),

We are opening a new high school and will have a black box theater. I would love to receive suggestions from experienced drama teachers on how to incorporate ideas like you've mentioned above into our English curriculum (both ESL and regular English/Language Arts). Your mention of lesson units above piqued my interest. (We may develop a drama program as well; that remains to be seen.)

Any and all suggestions are welcome! Perhaps I will create a stand-alone post on this later, as our situation develops.

I found this page as a small group of us are tasked with preparing a multi-disciplinary demo lesson in the theatre. What a great community!

Sincerely yours,
skye

Skye Ganbaatar
Orchlon International School
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

First of all, that's ridiculous to put that many into one course. I had a similar situation a couple of years ago and continue to have large class sizes/interest but am only allowed the one section. Secondly, kudos to you for wanting to do right by them.

If the class is like my Intro class, you will have anywhere from 9th through 12th taking it, some with experience, some not, some with special needs (my largest class two years ago of 41 had 9 SPED kids with two paras in the room...), so your activities have to be varied enough to allow all to be successful and interested. I sense you have taught the course before and do not need any lesson units (but if you do, let me know and I'll send some) but instead are trying to figure out how to supervise and teach such a large group. The simple answer is one person can't, so that is why I asked about the vertical spread of year levels; the assumption would be that once you teach an entire group a game (eg What Are You Doing, Freeze Tag, Space Jump, etc) you can then put them in charge of smaller groups and you move around to each group. Conversely, this approach could be used with one year level but attempting to discern those students whose talent and maturity levels would indicate they could lead the groups. This method can work for the running of Improv games, etc.

Once you move on to other units, other approaches need to be made; I have used a 'round robin' approach for my Clowning/Comedy units wherein I pair groups up and they are the eyes/ears that I cannot be in the early stages of working out group devised pieces. Given a specific list of things to observe and note, they then report back to the group at large, with me parsing the most common observations to use as a teaching tool for that day.

Another option with such a large, and I suspect, diverse group is to not have everyone do everything. Once basics have been taught/practiced (warm ups, improv lessons on give and take, work on the basic Elements of Drama like focus, tension, level, space, and actor/audience engagement), have some take the role of writers, others directors, others designers, etc so that all do not have to be performers. In order to address the Core Standards/your state standards, you may need to swap roles around at times, but this way all students work to their strengths/interests, and the group begins to see the importance of a cohesive vision.

Good luck with it!

Lori

Hi Lori! My name is Amy, and I just became a brand new theater teacher at a high school in Watts in Los Angeles County. I realize that you wrote this post quite a bit ago, but saw that you had offered to send this poster lesson units. My classes are pretty large and it's a brand new program - I've found that the things I had planned aren't working as well in a setting with such large classes and was wondering if you would still be open to sharing? I've been scouring the internet for something like this, but nothing seems to click right. Any and all help is super appreciated, I'm still in my first week and want to try and get the semester off right!

Hello David: Wowza, a challenge.  I had that many in an after school theatre ensemble class, it met twice a week for 90 minutes for a semester-- our goal was devising original theatre out of movement and images.  I used Anne Bogart’s viewpoints extensively as well as Image theatre work from Augosto Boal.  I found working with movement and images a way to manage that many students at once.  I used a lot of ideas from Michael Rohd’s book:  Theatre for community, conflict and dialogue.  It gave a good foundation of ensemble building activities that were great for large groups and helped me a lot in managing.  It included how I started every single class—cover the space. ( A side note here is that I found having very clear routines essential for working with large classes in all subjects --this past year I’ve been training teachers in Cambodia on how to manage large classrooms for English teaching in Cambodian public schools and I focused on organizational routines, specifically the first and last parts of the class) 

I found, also, that giving very specific tasks to smaller groups (teams of 4-6 seemed to work well) for example one person would sculpt an image, in silence, using 5 other team members  based on the concept of: (freedom, dreams, prejudice, racism, love…etc) and having them present to each other or the larger group provided an organizational context for all of us.  Or having 10-20  students on “stage” conducting a viewpoints exercise and everyone else  watches and makes notes on things they observed that had dramatic “potential” and using that as source material.  

Those are my ideas, curious as to what others will suggest.   Good luck and keep us posted.
Richard