British Columbia, Canada
Drama 11

Instructor Kerry Hishon is an actor, director, writer, and stage combatant with years of experience in youth theatre. Her course, Theatre Etiquette 101, is designed to help students be successful in their theatrical journeys. When teaching students who are brand new to theatre, it’s important to discuss and apply the expectations of the drama classroom and the theatrical world. This course starts by explaining "what is theatre etiquette", and then moves through every step in the production process from audition to post-show recovery. Every module has tips for both you and your students, classroom exercises, rehearsal exercises, and reflections. There are also printable posters included to use in your classroom or backstage.

In The Production Classroom, instructor Karen Loftus will show you how to explore ways that you can produce shows during your regular class time. The course gives you a series of exercises and reflections that help you determine everything, from the type of show you may want to do, to the way you can divide up your class and responsibilities, to specific assignments that will keep your students engaged and focused. The Production Classroom is the ultimate in project-based learning. Students learn to work collaboratively while setting goals and working towards a successful finished project. The course includes exercises and strategies to use with students to help assure their success in the production. Multiple examples and anecdotes help you to envision what the production classroom could look like in your room, performance space or theatre.

Colin Oliver leads this introduction to teaching Musical Theatre in the Drama Classroom. In this course, you will learn how to build musical theatre into your dramatic courses of study. “Why might you want to do that? Singing is scary! You want me to teach my students how to do it? I don’t even know how to do it.” This course approaches musical theatre preparation performance much as we would approach preparing a monologue in drama. If you use script analysis in monologue preparation in your class, you can teach musical theatre. By the end of this course, you’ll have a great, full-body physical warm-up, a student-driven research assignment, character development exercises, a little bit of musical theory, and a performance assignment complete with assessment. So, join us for teaching Musical Theatre in the Drama Classroom. It’s as easy as Do-Re-Mi!

Allison Williams leads the course: 21st Century Skills Through Devising. This course covers what devising is, why to do it, how to do it, and how your students can master the 21st Century Skills of collaborations and cooperation, critical thinking, creative thinking through devising. High school is a great place to try devising with your students. But it’s not something you want to throw at your students without any preparation. Framework is important and this course takes you through a number of exercises you can take into the classroom tomorrow to help build a place of physical safety, a place where students work at making a lot of choices instead of waiting for the perfect choice, and a place where students feel comfortable making creative choices. The material also reviews the process of putting together a show from the idea/research stage to editing, to giving feedback. Your students have what it takes to create their own material, collaborate with each other, and have a unique theatrical experience!

In Preventing Pandemonium Part 1, Maria Smith will share with you a classroom management tool critical to success. It’s called procedures. Procedures are daily classroom management routines that are the key to classroom management success. They are the essential element of classroom management. This course will give you straightforward, practical “this is how you do it” information, as well as procedures catered specifically to the drama classroom, to help you maintain order from start to finish, even during that chaotic group practice time. Imagine yourself in a classroom where you can spend most of your time teaching and keep students on track without the constant lecturing. If that sounds appealing, then start the first module.

The focus of the teacher-director should be not only on the quality of the show, but on the value of the experience offered to student actors. This course takes you on this journey through practical rehearsal strategies that apply an ensemble approach. This course starts with those all important first rehearsals, explores warm ups, and looks at character development. We examine specific types of plays, like classical texts and comedy, and conclude with strategies to solve common rehearsal problems. Go beyond the basics!

In Preventing Pandemonium Part 02, instructor Maria Smith shares a classroom management strategy that transformed her class from a discipline zone to a thriving environment. It’s called positive incentives (or rewards) that make your students want to behave and participate positively in the drama classroom. This course includes straightforward “this is how you do it” information, as well as posters, passes and rewards for teachers to print out and use in your classroom. Learn how positive incentives cut down the need for discipline,and find the joy in teaching.

This course by Lindsay Price explores strategies you can use to encourage students to embrace failure rather than see it as a point of shame or something to hide from. Our goal for students is to embrace a try/fail/try again/fail/try again/succeed formula. Each module in this course comes with exercises and activities that you’ll be able to take into the classroom right away. It’s one thing to talk about embracing failure, it’s another to give students practical tools to help them achieve that goal. Join Lindsay in getting students to embrace failure in the drama classroom as we look at Failure from a Yes! perspective.

Shakespeare is one of the greatest resources a drama teacher can have: scenes packed with action; opportunities to explore comedy and physical theatre; rich themes and characters to act as springboards for devised theatre; the chance to work with our language at its finest and – most importantly – ideas that relate directly to the experiences and preoccupations of students. Yet Shakespeare isn’t easy. The language can seem dense, and finding a way in can be tough – especially for drama teachers who have not themselves studied Shakespeare. That’s the goal of this course – to help teachers find a way in. This course presents teachers with as many ways in to the exploration of Shakespeare as possible. Action scenes, themes, characters, different theatre styles, and devised theatre projects. Students will be armed with the tools they need to begin individually exploring monologues, or working together on scenes.

Viewpoints is used to create dynamic moments of theatre by simply existing on the stage. However, Viewpoints is more than just an acting technique to understand your own physicality and more than a directing technique to create “ah-ha!” moments on stage. It is first and foremost the philosophy that to create an organic performance, you must see obstacle as opportunity, and that by simply standing in space, your creativity can spark. This course by Erin Carr will help your students discover fresh impulses that motivate their performance in the moment. We will go through the Viewpoints technique, as created by Mary Overlie, and learn how to tap into kinesthetic awareness as individuals and as an ensemble. Through this style of play, students learn to release their thoughts on what they “should” do, and instead just respond organically to their surroundings and ensemble! We’re going to break down each of the Viewpoints, there’s lots of visual demonstration, so you can see each Viewpoint in action, and I’m going to provide tips and side coaching examples.

Moral dilemmas are not only faced by characters in gripping plays, but are also faced by our students. The project outlined in this course will help students develop their critical thinking skills through the use of one of the dilemma questions to shape a student written production. If you had the choice to press a button and earn $25,000,000... but a species (not of your choosing) would become extinct, what would you do? More importantly, what would your character do? Join drama teacher and playwright Claire Broome through this course which includes role-playing, Stanislavski’s Magic If, character creation, playwriting and staging.

Who says theatre history has to be boring? Hands-On Theatre History: Creating a Modern Day Morality play is an interactive course by Wendy-Marie Martin, combining hands-on activities with research and analysis techniques leading to a full performance of the popular medieval morality play, Everyman. This course gives students an overview of the medieval period and the various medieval play forms and teaches students the key points of storytelling and adaptation. It includes dynamic individual and group exercises leading students from the first steps of the adaptation process through a final, full-class performance of Everyman—and proves, once and for all, that theatre history can be fun and exciting to learn.

This course will help you integrate technical theatre earlier in the creative process to help reduce the stress of tech week, and make sure you have what you need before choosing a show. We will explore how to include your technical theatre team from day one and will help you have an easier experience throughout the rehearsal process and final performances.