Why do we spend so many hours each week, trying to make everything perfect in multiple classes, afterschool productions and attending festivals? We do it for the kids, of course! We love our students and will do almost anything for them, sometimes to the detriment of our own personal lives and families. About ten years in, I was having a moment of crisis. I was really burned out and wasn't sure I could continue working in this fashion. I knew I loved my students, theatre and teaching, but it is so hard for one person to do so much, so I needed to find a solution. I knew the school wouldn't hire additional teachers or assistants and I was lucky enough to have some lovely parent volunteers helping out, but I was still working about 60 hours a week and I was exhausted. So, I found a solution that not only helped balance my working hours but ended up being really beneficial for my students as well: student ownership.
I handed over ownership of many responsibilities to my student leaders. I did some brainstorming with my Thespian leadership board, and we determined a variety of responsibilities that they could take ownership of, which took things off of my plate and taught them valuable skills. The treasurer started creating budgets and keeping track of expenditures for every production. That was later expanded to subcommittees, one for each production and one for each festival, so many students were suddenly understanding and communicating to everyone what things cost, how we bring in money and how we could save money. These are incredibly valuable skills for a young person to learn and it created further excitement for marketing, and they ultimately took better care of costumes and props as well. The vice president took ownership of social media marketing and was quite diligent in making sure everything was promoted within school appropriate guidelines. The tech rep took ownership of the training of techies for festival competition. She recruited others to help her organize, schedule and lead practice sessions. The president and secretary took ownership of recruiting new students during the registration cycle and even spent the time to reach out to middle schools, arranging dates for us to go and do short assemblies about theatre at our high school. All of these things took time of course and it didn't all happen overnight. Most of it sort of happened organically, starting with one project or responsibility, and expanding or morphing into something else. And each year, the projects would change as students graduated and new leaders came on board, but what I found ultimately, was that the students loved taking ownership of various things. If a student became excited about another festival they wanted to attend or another project they wanted to try, then I would simply ask them to take ownership of making it happen. Sometimes things did fall through of course, but that's okay too because that is a lesson in itself as well.
Making this sort of change helped me to still grow a strong program that I could be proud of, but also allowed me to learn to let things go (as needed) and allowed my students to learn valuable life management skills that went beyond the theatre classroom. I hope this tidbit of wisdom will help another young teacher before they reach that crisis moment as I did.
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Jeana Whitaker
Retired Theatre Teacher
EdTA Alumni
www.jeanawhitaker.com------------------------------