Facebook Pixel Skip to main content

Lesson Plans Articles for Drama Teachers

Browse 22 lesson plans articles

Classroom Management Substitute / Emergency Plans

Setting Your Students Up for Success With a Substitute Teacher

How do your students act when you’re not there? Do you dread getting feedback from a substitute? Here are five tips to set your students up for success with a substitute teacher.  1. Try to keep...
Curriculum & Lesson Planning Monologues & Scene Work

Writing a Monologue Lesson Plan

Monologue writing is a great exercise for students. The monologue is a mini play: It has a beginning, middle, and end, as well as character, conflict, and often a listener. This makes the monologue...
Teacher Support

The Arts Remind Us of Joy and Possibility

Even in the middle of struggle, the arts create space for laughter, beauty, imagination, and play. They remind us that humans are storytellers and creators, capable of imagining solutions,...
Acting Technique

Character Study in the Drama Classroom

Ideally, we want students to study characters and bring them to life through scene work. But what if you have students who have been away during rehearsals and you need a related activity for them...
Curriculum & Lesson Planning Lesson Plans & Projects

Lesson Plan: Using the Arts to Navigate Life

How do the arts make life more bearable? Click below to access a one-class lesson plan that uses this George Bernard Shaw quote as its starting point: “Without art, the crudeness of reality would...
Curriculum & Lesson Planning Lesson Plans & Projects

Emergency Lesson Plans: Middle School Drama Class Task Sheets

The Emergency Lesson Plans: Middle School Drama Class Task Sheets resource is specifically designed for the middle school drama teacher. Everything you need is at your finger tips: task sheets with...
Curriculum & Lesson Planning

Playing to Your Students’ Strengths

Drama teachers understand that we must plan our curriculum around the standards established by school boards, administrators, and other leadership. But whenever possible, it’s wonderful to...
Curriculum & Lesson Planning Lesson Plans & Projects

Writing Lesson Plans for the Drama Classroom Toolkit

Lesson planning is the backbone of effective teaching. Think of lesson plans as your classroom's roadmap—they guide everyone toward shared learning goals. When they're on point, the classroom runs...
Curriculum & Lesson Planning

Setting Up Your Theatre Curriculum

Curriculum is the cornerstone of your entire teaching foundation. Your curriculum is the roadmap that tells you what, when, why, and how you will teach your students. However, there is no...
Curriculum & Lesson Planning

Current Events: Diversity in Theatre Lesson

The following lesson was created for students to discover, appreciate, and display respect for diverse, real-life issues and events in the theatre world. It can be done live in class, assigned as...
Curriculum & Lesson Planning

Lessons Learned from Directing a Virtual Show

If you miss doing shows with your students, you’re not alone. We’re all missing live theatre! Luckily, there are playwrights writing virtual plays for online platforms that you can do right now....
Curriculum & Lesson Planning

Tips for Adapting Existing Lessons

How do you adapt existing lessons to a virtual environment? The goal is to adapt without reinventing the wheel, which is an added unnecessary stress. Some lesson plan elements will remain the same...
Curriculum & Lesson Planning

Tips for Adapting Lesson Plans to the Virtual Classroom

Drama isn’t always the easiest subject to adapt to distance learning. So much of what makes drama fun and worthwhile involves human interaction. Seeing students engage with one another, create...
Games, Exercises, & Activities

Lesson Plan: Create and Perform a Radio Play

Radio plays are theatrical performances that are purely auditory; they’re meant to be performed on the radio, hence the name! There is no visual aspect, so performers must rely on their vocal...
Acting Technique Movement & Physicality

High Status/Low Status Character Physicality

If you want your students to physicalize their characters, get them thinking about status. What is status?Answer this question for yourself. Write down a couple of different answers yourself, then...
Curriculum & Lesson Planning Lesson Plans & Projects

Top 10 Tips For Writing Awesome Lesson Plans

If you’re starting out in your drama teacher journey, you will learn very quickly that lesson planning is the bane of your existence. It is never-ending. You may need to show your lessons to an...
Acting Technique Character Development

Commedia Dell’arte in the Drama Classroom

Commedia dell’arte is an improvised comedic theatre form that flourished in Italy in the 1500s. The exact origins of commedia are fuzzy and hard to pin down; there is not much documented previous...
Playwriting Playwriting Exercises

Playwriting Exercise: Subtext

Subtext is a glorious medium. It adds depth to a scene. There’s the conversation that two characters are having, and there’s the conversation underneath the conversation the two characters are...