Drama: Tableaux

Tableaux is a theatrical technique where the actors arrange themselves and freeze in place to create a still image. A tableaux and the participants can create a representation of a scene, an event, a theme, or an idea. Some important elements of a tableaux include: character, space, and relationships.

To do a tableaux students will be asked to get into a pose or create an image with their bodies in a group. The teacher can do this by providing prompts to describe a scene such as "you're investigators at a scene of a crime." Give the students some time to think and then give them a 3 count to get into their tableaux. The teacher and students can walk around the tableaux to see everything. This is the time where the teacher can take pictures or assess it as it is being held. You can find a video example of a tableaux in a classroom down below.

 I really like how flexible this activity can be for tackling any kind of subject or idea. For that reason using tableauxs is a great way of making cross-curricular connections with drama. This activity also helps to remove any anxiety students might have over speaking in front of the class as it is non-verbal. It is a great way of getting students of any grade up and moving and collaborating with each other.

Some accommodations to consider when doing a tableaux: provide written and oral instructions, change the time that students have to hold the tableaux, and use seated poses in tableaux.

Drama: Hot Seating

Hot Seating is a drama activity focusing on the element of role/character and improvisation. In this activity a student takes the role of a character and is questioned by other students about their background, experiences, behavior, and opinions. This activity can be used to help develop characters and students' ability to role-play and perform. The main focus of this is to find out what the characters knows or thinks and and to engage with that character's viewpoint.

What is required to do a hot seat is just some chairs. Designate one of those chairs as the hot seat that sits in front of the students asking questions also seated. Set up before hand what roles the people in the hot seat will be taking and what scenario they are in. You can also provide questions or directions for the students not in the hot seat for how to interact with the person in role. Some interesting story book roles we have done in class include: The Wolf from the Three Little Pigs, an evil step sister from Cinderella, and the baker from The Gingerbread Man. 

I have also used hot seating in my own lesson about combining history and drama. In my group's use of hot seating the person in the hot seat was actually a teacher taking the role of a person from province before Canadian Confederation. People were encouraged to ask questions about what we as ordinary people thought of Confederation.

 

I think this activity is most successful when the teacher takes an active role in it or facilitates it closely, as students can often get off topic or run out of ideas. Ultimately students are in control of how much or how little detail they want to use. This activity can be done improvisational or planned. I feel planned would be better for most classes.

Some accommodations to keep in mind if running this activity include: providing information wirtten and orally, model expectations, provide examples, and adjust groups based on readiness or ability.

Drama: Zip Zap Bop

The first activity we will be talking about is Zip Zap Bop. The activity is all about the elements of focus and energy as students pass on their energy to each other in a circle. The main objective is focusing on what the student says and gives you, whether it is a Zip, Zap, or Bop and passing something else on to another student. You can begin the game by getting your students in a circle and having them imagine that you have a bolt of energy in your hands and that you are going to pass that energy to someone else using a strong movement, being sure to make eye contact so they know they are passing it to you. Start by using Zip which can only pass the energy to someone beside you. After your students are used to using Zip you can introduce Zap. Zap can pass the energy to someone across from you, then give them a chance to use Zip and Zap to pass the energy around as fast as they can. If you think your students are up for it you can introduce Bop. Bop negates or blocks any Zip or Zap so they have to pass it to someone else. A good rule we used for Bop is that a student can only be Bopped twice and then the energy has to be passed. You can view a video example of us playing Zip Zap Bop below.

I think that this game is a great introduction to drama, an amazing warm up game, and a good way to get students to start thinking about energy and focus. The activity becomes more complicated as you add Zap and Bop to it, so the difficulty of the focus required is changeable. To make it easier you could just focus on Zip, or to make it harder you have to use all three, or you cant use the last one that was just used. It would be a great activity for a new class to let unfamiliar students get to know each other and have fun with each other.

When it comes to accommodations for this activity I have already mentioned one which would be to remove some of the elements of the game to make it easier to follow. That being said there are other ones such as making clear verbal and non-verbal signals during the game, providing instructions in oral and written forms, and just allow the game to keep flowing despite errors.

Drama and Dance Portfolio Introduction and Theories

Hello everyone and welcome to my drama and dance multi-media portfolio. Within this section of my blog I will be posting various activities from my experiences with drama and dance (five for each). Before I get too into sharing and commenting on all these wonderful activities though I wanted to take some time to discuss the guiding theories behind a lot of these activities.

One of the theories I want to mention is Leban's Movement Analysis Theory. This theory states that movement is a two way process of sending and receiving messages with their body movements. Leban's movement theory focuses on the independence of the body and how it can relate to and interact with the world around it. For educational purposes Leban's Movement Analysis Theory emphasizes observation of movement, describing movement, and analyzing movement. Some activities that really benefit from using Leban's theory include tableauxs, flocking, and mirroring.

Focusing on the theories within the Ontario Arts Curriculum we can see the importance of the Creative Process. This process is designed to help students create and interact with art. This is meant to be applied across all strands of art including drama and dance. The stages of the creative process include: challenging and inspiring, imagining and generating, planning and focusing, exploring and experimenting, producing preliminary work, revising and refining, presenting, performing, and sharing, reflecting and evaluating. All of the steps in the creative process have a curriculum expectation that corresponds to it to make it something easier to plan for in a lesson plan format.

Finally from the Ontario Arts Curriculum again we have the Fundamental Concepts of drama and dance. All of these fundamental concepts are listed under the overall expectations for that grade. As students progress their knowledge of these concepts will deepen and through the expectations will be challenged to develop them more. The Elements of Drama include: role, relationship, time and place, tension, focus and emphasis. The Elements of Dance include: body, space, time, energy, and relationship. As we look at drama and dance activities I will be relating which Fundamental Concepts best apply from drama and dance to the activity.

I hope that you will enjoy reading through my explanations, reflections, analysis, and extensions to the upcoming drama and dance activities.

Math Reflection Week 6: Technology and Real Life

For class this week we focused on the use of technology in the classroom and how it can facilitate blended learning and differentiated instruction. My table group focused on the SAMR Model of using technology in the classroom. The SAMR Model divides technology use into four parts: substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition. Substitution involves using technology as a substitution with no functional change, while augmentation is a substitution with a functional improvement. Modification allows for technology that significantly redesigns the task, while redefinition allows for the creation of new tasks previously impossible. As teachers for 21st century learners we must strive to design tasks that best use modifications and redefinition of technology for learning.

Michael Feagan. (Oct.19 2017). SAMR Model [photo].

  The online activity that I did for this week involved watching a video about math in real life. I thought this topic would be the most interesting as children learning math often say things along the lines of "There's no real life application for learning math" or any other specific math topic. I like this video because at its core it highlights that the real world skill we want students to walk away with by learning math is pattern recognition. One of the most famous mathematical patterns that this video uses as an example is the Fibonacci spiral. The video highlights all the real world uses of the spiral both in nature and man-made things. This helps show students that mathematical patterns are present in all natural and unnatural creations in their everyday lives. In the end making student curious about mathematical concepts is key but giving them the big ideas (as discussed in last week's blog post) like pattern recognition helps them be curious math investigators.

Math Reflection Week 5: Big Ideas or Memorization

Although we didn't have an in person class this week we still had plenty of online activities to do. The one idea that stuck out to me, and the one that I will be spending the majority of my post focusing on, is the concept of big math ideas versus memorization of math formulas and procedures. For me this debate was sparked by a short video you can watch below.

Dr. Boaler argues that there are few general math principles that students need to understand. Students often struggle with math because they get caught up in memorizing details and procedures. With this kind of approach math is less about how many questions you can get right, and more about the knowledge and understanding that go behind the mathematical solutions you arrive at. Principles such as student intuition, making sense, and finding ways to represent problems can all contribute to a student's understanding of the big ideas.

Although I do agree with all of the basic concepts represented in this video there are some structural problems with how I feel this is implemented in an education system. Firstly I feel like this outlook, that knowing big ideas about math, is less testable. At least in the old fashion sense of math tests filling in multiple choice responses. As that method does not allow the student to show their thought process and their knowledge and understanding of wider math ideas.

It should not come to any student teacher's surprise that Ontario students are struggling in math, according to EQAO testing. With only half of grade 6 students meeting the provincial standard in math. This is very worrying, and it does not surprise me that Ontario boards are starting to emphasize math competencies more in students and educators. However, I wonder if teaching students big math ideas are really assisting them in math, according to EQAO it might not be.This is not to say that it is a bad idea, but that EQAO might be ill equipped to assess this kind of knowledge from students.

Math Reflection Week 4: Rich Tasks and Number Flexibility

This week in our math class we focused on participating in and assessing rich learning tasks in math. A rich tasks boils down to one that is: essential, authentic, engaging, and active. One such task that we performed in class was a problem involving counting the fingers on a hand. The basic problem was that if you started counting your fingers starting with your thumb, index, middle, ring, pinky, ring, middle, index, thumb, index, etc. what finger will you land on when you count your 10,000 finger? Everyone came up with different ways of solving this question but the one that I found most interesting was the one Mina shared with the class. It was a video of how someone else solved the problem by thinking of it as an eight fingered hand rather than just one five fingered hand.

Michael Feagan. (Sept.29 2017). Hand Problem [photo].

I think that all of the different ways students had to express this problem help support that this is a rich learning activity.

The final thing I did this week was watch the math mindset video on number flexibility. The exercise the video wanted us to do was to do 18x5 in our heads. I did this by knowing that if 10x10 was 100 then 5x10 would be 50 and 5x8 is 40, so 50+40 is 90. Perhaps a longer way of doing it, but I would not be surprised if I had many students in my math classes who would mentally answer this question this way. This exercise is pretty similar to doing math strings, which I think are an excellent way of bettering number flexibility.

Math strings I think are an excellent way to better a student's mental math flexibility. Recently I presented a webinar with my classmate Paula that highlights the benefits of doing math strings, you can see it in the video below.