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An overview of The Empathy Project resource.

The third step on the empathetic journey is forming a link with your character. Students will work to link with characters who are quite different from them.

In this toolkit, you will learn the structure and terminology of a standard lesson plan and how that lesson plan can be adapted in the theatre classroom. You will learn how to identify and utilize Bloom’s Taxonomy in the creation of your lesson plans and explore the National Standards for Theatre with an eye toward including specific state standards in your completed plans.

Students decide, design, and implement a culminating presentation that uses theatricality to share the concepts of empathy.

Use this rubric to assess group oral presentations.

The study guide provides the following: pre-viewing questions, viewing questions, and post-viewing activities.

This is a template and example you can use with your student actors to ensure commitment and a clear understanding of expectations across all aspects of a high school production. There is also an example parent/guardian contract included, to ensure their understanding regarding production commitments, including attendance, participation fees, and parent volunteer opportunities. These are both designed to help you communicate with your student actors and parents in order to set your cast and families up for a successful production.

Use this warm-up sequence with your students as they prepare for class. The teacher or student leader leads the sequence by calling out the name of the exercise.

Try these strategies and games when dealing with a large class size.

Poster: how theatre class is inclusive.

Set of 2 posters for the drama classroom; what you are learning in this class.

Inspired by our members with inspirational quotes right from drama teachers in the DTA. There are 2 versions of the Drama Teacher School Year calendar. One is a monthly calendar with an inspirational quote and image per month; the second is a portrait-layout booklet version that can be customized to any school year.

A complication of ideas from DTA members - how to fill the gap at the end of the semester.

Strategies and tips for dealing with a small class size.

Are you in a district or area that has decided against using participation marks? Some teachers are moving instead to using “skills practice.” For example, instead of a participation mark for group work, identify the skills you’re looking for when students work in groups – and give a mark for when students are actively practicing those skills. This template shows you how to build a chart you can use to assess skills practice.

There are a lot of challenges that come in the first few years of teaching, especially for new theatre teachers, including non-traditional teaching spaces, entire classes of students who have no interest in theatre, a lack of a standard curriculum, and creating objective assessments for subjective materials, just to name a few. This book will help you anticipate the preparations you will need to address before a student ever walks into your classroom and the kind of philosophical questions you need to ask, and answer, as you begin your teaching career. This toolkit examines four fundamental building blocks of teaching: Classroom Setup, Classroom Management, Lesson Planning, and Assessment. It also provides you with tools and activities that will help you integrate these fundamentals into a drama classroom. If you are a new teacher, or are still in your teacher training, these tools will provide you with a lot of supplemental, practical information that will help you prepare for your first few years of teaching.

Use these character maps to help students delve deeper into character analysis.

This exercise helps students think about how their characters sound.

Use this exercise to practice creating characters and then writing the first few lines of a monologue. Students will use a headline as a jumping off point.

This exercise encourages students to examine the language of a scene for clues on character action. Shakespeare often tells actors exactly what to “do.”