BURNING BRIGHT
Teaching Drama 1963 – 1996
by
Frank McKone
Teaching Drama 1963 – 1996
by
Frank McKone
PART FOUR
EPILOGUE
Life after Cancer
The Assessment Matrix
The Assessment Matrix
Have Something To Do When You Retire
Formally my teaching career did not end quite as suddenly as it seems. Tyger, 1993, was my last production. The rocket which transported William Blake was mirrored a few months later by the shingles virus exploding out of its hiding place in my nerve ganglia after 50 years of quiescence since my childhood chicken pox infection. Because I did not recognise the particular roseate pink colour spreading around my abdomen (having never known anyone with shingles before), I got to a doctor too late to get the medication which sends the virus back into its hidey-hole.
1994 was subsumed by a woefully painful six months’ being unable to teach, discovery in August that the shingles was a precursor warning of advanced prostate cancer, then a prostatectomy in October, resulting in a 50% risk that cancer cells may have escaped during the extremely delicate surgery, requiring 31 radiotherapy shots through December and into January 1995.
The effects of radiation meant I needed a combination of a ‘graduated return to work’ program thankfully offered by the ACT Department of Education, as well as using all of my 20 years’ accumulated sick leave and some of my accumulated long-service leave and working whenever I could, which took me through to early January 1996, within days of my 55th birthday, after which I could live on a superannuation pension. I hadn’t planned on quite such an early retirement, but my doctor was adamant. The energy output and stresses of teaching were not for me if I was going to survive.
Through 1996 I did manage to supervise the program for community groups to use Murranji Theatre, with a great deal of help from Kate Rose, Bren Weatherstone and Stephen Brown who took over my teaching roles. It was Steve who took my records of Hawker College stage productions and put them on his blog at http://stevebrown1.wordpress.com/theatre-arts/ .
At a short electrical safety course which I was required to attend as the theatre manager, now a casual paid position since the Principal Sandra Lambert (my one-time stage manager) had negotiated an annual grant from the Department, I had the luck to meet Australian Broadcasting Commission sound engineer, John Macfarlane. He was a freelancer, looking at that time for more local work, and took over Murranji Theatre with far more qualifications and industry expertise than I had ever had.
By mid-1997 I had divested myself not only of teaching (apart from a few short stints as a relief teacher on an occasional drama class), but also of the out-of-hours Murranji Theatre work, and of conducting classes in audition training.
But life cannot end at 55. My great fortune was that the arts editor of the Canberra Times, Helen Musa, asked me if I would like to write theatre reviews as one of a small team including Alanna Maclean and Narrabundah College drama teacher Peter Wilkins. This provided me with a new experience in a highly flexible arrangement, which continued with the Canberra Times until 2009, followed by the Canberra Critics’ Circle blog at www.ccc-canberracriticscircle.blogspot.com.
I added my own blog to collect all my reviews on one site, at www.frankmckone2.blogspot.com.au and a now separate blog at www.frankmckone.blogspot.com for Drama Teaching.
The Matrix – How to Assess Drama
But to end on an educational drama note, I leave you with some practical help (if you are a teacher, and particularly a drama teacher). The final version of Drama T and A, completed by myself with David McClay and Jenny Brigg in 1992 does not include the full rationale for the method of assessment of drama students’ work. This was because I had developed a visual diagrammatic representation of the process which the Department did not wish to publish in its standard presentation of course documents.
30 years later, I hope that this matrix may be still be useful to help people clarify what is happening when they judge drama students’ work. The labels we used to describe the drama learning process were specific to Hawker College, but the principle of discovery by the student of what is in the drawers of the drama cabinet can be a basis for new understanding, while the layout of the matrix for generating letter grades and scores can be adjusted to suit many different assessment systems.
Drama Curriculum – Concepts and Design
The Hawker College Course
The following picture was first thought of in about 1986 and became more complex as re-writing of the Hawker Secondary College course took place in the early 1990s. It describes the progress a student might make in their learning drama over the period of two years 11 and 12 (age 16 to 18). The original conception was of a set of five drawers which contained, metaphorically, elements of costume or props which the student would display in their work. A second diagram shows more detail.
Fig. 1 – Drama Knowledge: Central Concepts (Hawker College 1994)
In the end, the picture was never published in the formal documentation, for two reasons, I think. First, curriculum administrators were unhappy about receiving any document which used words outside the standard sentence structure (although it was quite common to use diagrams to explain concepts in many educational texts). Second, during the period this course was accredited, the ACT education system changed its format for curriculum documents (in all subjects), using a new structure (interestingly called “frameworks”) and requiring teachers within each subject across the system to develop and all use the same terms for describing students’ learning. Although I worked on the committee, it was not possible to impose the Hawker College wording on other schools, nor could these concepts be re-worded easily to fit the new format. The result was that ten years of successful development, especially in the eyes of students, had to be largely put aside. However, later teachers (following my retirement) continued to use the concepts in this picture as an internal process for working out students’ grades, especially when listening to their oral evaluation speeches and discussion at the end of units.
The second diagram is more messy, but fills in the details which we can then discuss.
Fig. 2 – Drama Knowledge: Details of Concepts (Hawker College 1994)
You will need to imagine, on the left hidden end, there are five large brass handles, those curly ones which lie flat but hinge out for you to give a good tug to. Somehow I have the image of old fashioned sailor’s trunk handles, but the drawers are more like those old travelling wardrobes which I’m sure were on the Titanic.
Even if they have taken drama at junior high school, when a student who is new to the course first approaches our mystic drawers, they are not probably aware of the labels we can see in invisible ink on the outside. They choose a handle and give it a tug. Let’s say, Body, the middle drawer. When they look in, the left compartment might have some tools: a pen, say, and a sword - this is about Doing. The centre compartment may have a hat - this is about Being. The right compartment may have a puppet - this is about Relationship. What this student may find is not predetermined by any teacher, but is probably influenced by this student’s past experiences of drama. The student who finds nothing (or doesn’t even tug the handle) is very rare, although as people grow older their past may direct them away from involvement in drama knowledge. At Hawker College about 10% of the total population of students chose to take drama in most years when I taught there.
Perhaps this student chose to tug the drawer out only as far as glancing into the first set of compartments. They could have pulled harder and reached in. This is where they become active rather than just looking. In the Body drawer, for example, they would find themselves Breathing, Moving and Voicing while Doing things with their “sword”, wearing their “hat” rather Self-consciously, and working their “puppet” (which includes relating to other people) in imitative or conventional ways - following rather than providing leadership. If they had pulled out the next layer of compartments, the student would find themselves letting go their inhibitions, enjoying what they are doing, making connections between what they are doing and their own ideas and feelings. This can hardly go far without being closely involved with what others in the group are doing. The mystique draws the student along to greater motivation to become more fully involved. Already you can see that the “drawers” and “compartments” are not as distinct as our diagram may suggest. However, as a teacher or maybe an auditioner or director, it is not difficult to say, of this student or actor, that their Body work is quite limited in quality at first. Of course, in an educational setting, the teacher has a function, after recognising the student’s low level of initiative, to provide situations which may help them grow.
As time goes along and the student has more experience to build on, working in a positive atmosphere of encouragement, they may tug out the Body drawer to the next set of compartments where they find themselves Enjoying the Breathing, Moving and Voicing and in doing so begin to find that they Value the experience for Themselves (Connecting the Doing with the Self). Their involvement becomes Sincere, Intuitive and they begin to take the Initiative with more originality. For an auditioner, someone showing these qualities has very considerable possibilities for further training, and a director could expect such a person to be an effective member of a performing group.
Of course, this student may not have tugged other drawers out to the same level of compartments at the same time. It is likely that they may display the Self level in Body and Group, and yet be at the Action level in Role, while being at the higher end of Self beginning to show leadership in Making Meaning in Design. Yet their putting their work into its cultural context (depending on what this entails in your activity) may still involve Collecting more than Using (or interpreting) conventional elements of their culture, rather than Creating cultural artefacts. This might describe the “good” drama student who may never become a very good actor, yet find an effective place in theatre later in life. I can think of one of my students who showed this kind of mix during Year 11, then in Year 12 clearly moved along in the Culture and Design drawers, later becoming a sought-after professional stage manager after completing a university Theatre/Media degree.
Our aim was to encourage everyone to become au fait with all five drawers, and generally most students became aware of this expectation. It was interesting to see that both teachers and students formalised the five types of drama knowledge after a year or two, and then they began referring to them directly in the oral evaluations at the end of each unit. Whereas in previous times students were asked to comment on what they thought had been effective, what they thought had not worked, and what they had learned from the unit, now they were commenting, especially in describing what they had learned, about their understanding in each of the five types of knowledge. This raised the quality of the metacognitive understanding - which also raised for the teachers an assessment problem.
I will discuss the assessment process later, but the difficulty was that, compared with other matriculation courses, it became difficult to spread grades from A to E when most drama students were articulate enough for at least B grades (even when the same students might be given Cs in most of their other subjects). This meant that the teachers’ role at the intersection of the students’ frame and the frames of the school and system was never easy. This makes for a difficult decision for the arts, especially, between maintaining the integrity of the process of creating culture and offering students the social standing and opportunities their work should justify in a ranking system which suits mathematics and physics most closely.
Finally, in the 1994 version of the course, we documented these concepts:
"It is now [the writers’] view that distinctions between the aims of teaching theatre knowledge, theatre skills, and personal development skills are not appropriate. The evaluations show that it has been the integration of these areas of learning which has been the course’s strength. The previous course document was unclear on this point where it separated areas in the assessment process despite its stated aim of integrating students’ learning experience.
"In developing the Drama Assessment Profile [see details later], a way has been found to assess a student’s achievement in a form which links assessment items to the five types of drama knowledge.
"This has been done by considering learning in Drama as falling into two domains which are interlinked.
Key Area 1 is Drama Knowledge.
Key Area 2 is Personal Development.
"Five types of Drama Knowledge are proposed. Each has a focus on an identifiable area of learning in Drama: playing in role; working in a group; communication with the body; the elements of theatrical design; the transmission and creation of theatrical culture.
"Each of the five types of drama knowledge involve the student in operating in physical, aesthetic and cognitive intellectual modes. Each type of drama knowledge draws upon the student’s personal resources and cultural learning.
"In this way the course is an effective format for teaching students of widely varying intellectual qualities, as is required in a fully comprehensive school such as Hawker College….
"Learning in these five types of drama knowledge requires a driving force which motivates students to develop higher levels of intellectual understanding of the drama/theatre process. At Years 11 and 12 this learning is essential to give all students seeking further education an opportunity to enter their appropriate pathway: into degree courses, professional diploma and associate diploma courses, and specialist [technical and further education] courses.
"The driving force is supplied in Key Area 2. Personal Development incorporates three developmental levels: Action, Personal Relevance [labelled “Self” in Figures 1 and 2] and Making Meaning.
"At the Action level, the student’s intellectual level is essentially descriptive.
"At the Personal Relevance level, the student is developing an intellectual capacity to see relationships between dramatic devices and themes essentially from their personal perspective. The group methods emphasised in negotiating drama activities on the basis of the student’s own knowledge and interests provide the power which motivates students and drives them out of the Action level.
"At the 16 to 18 year age level, there is a strong need for the development of personal identity. This Drama course draws upon that need. In the process both learning of drama knowledge and personal development takes place, and is felt by the student to be an integrated experience.
"For many students the Personal Relevance level is a high achievement, but for those seeking tertiary entrance, reaching Making Meaning is necessary. At this level, students develop the analytical thinking which enables them to place their personal experience into the context of the wider world, including the world of theatre traditions and theory. The power needed to cause students to stretch their intellectual powers is provided by combining students with greater and less drama experience in the same classes and expecting the more experienced students to take a greater leadership role as they progress through the course. This approach motivates the students because it empowers them. Their intellectual development is an object to which they become committed as they take genuine responsibility for the success of the drama work which they plan, design and execute for the personal benefit of their peers. To be successful at Making Meaning, the student must learn the culture of theatre and drama and learn to articulate their knowledge clearly."
[The major credit for writing this section of the document must go to David McClay and Jenny Brigg.]
The principle behind this course is that the curriculum document is concerned with describing and organising the processes of learning in the subject.
The model we developed at Hawker College will need much reworking for assessing drama learning in younger and older students, or for people engaged in drama outside the formal education system. However, it was designed to take a great deal of stress off the teacher. It is based on the two Key Learning Areas which we called Drama Knowledge and Personal Development.
By taking the side of the set of drawers in our original Figs. 1 and 2, we can create a table with two dimensions:
This is the generic model. There are several ways you can easily modify it to suit your needs.
For example, suppose you are teaching a specialist drama / theatre arts course to students who have already been selected for entry and are all young adults. Perhaps this is at US College level or at Year 12 in a Performing Arts Specialist School in New South Wales, Australia. You would probably want to modify the table something like this:
In this circumstance, anyone who worked only in the Action level would effectively fail the course. Your curriculum document, mind you, would need to be written in very definite terms to make this clear. No generalised woolly waffle about self-development should appear in the aims of this course. This is a specialised training course and assumes the students are ready for higher level learning and performance.
Another modification might be for a situation where the students might be expected to have a “normal” range, that is, likely to have a statistically normal spread. Despite what many school administrators believe, it is very rare that a single class will have a normal profile, but it may occur if several classes are combined together in a comprehensive school where a wide range of backgrounds and abilities may be assumed among the students in drama.
If you want something for a younger group who could not be expected to achieve the Making Meaning level which we thought appropriate for Years 11/12, you could make a different kind of modification – one which will require more research into drama learning than I have managed so far. However I can imagine something like this:
If grades are imposed at this age, which I would personally oppose, you can see how it could be done. But I could suggest that particularly in this age group there may be more to look for in the Action level. Christine Warner's article “The Edging in of Engagement” raises important questions about the assessment of students' learning in drama. (Warner, Christine. "The Edging in of Engagement: Exploring the Nature of Engagement in Drama." Research in Drama Education Vol 2, No. 1 (1997): p.21.)
The distinction she has found between “talkers”, “processors”, “participant observers” and “listeners/outsiders” rings true to my experience with younger teenagers and I suspect should be considered more rigorously from about the age of 8. “Talkers” who are very active are not necessarily learning as much as “participant observers”, who may superficially seem to be less enagaged in action. “Processors” may be learning the most if they are able to engage in the action and foresee where the drama should go, and go there. But Warner discovered that even “listeners/outsiders” who effectively refused to take an physically active role, and often seemed to not even participate as observers, were actually learning a great deal, though it took careful management to find out what they understood.
I’m not sure that you could lay out these types of engagement along a continuum, but I have certainly seen elements of these responses to drama at senior secondary level. At the younger age, Warner’s observations may help in deciding where a child’s drama experience might place them in the Action – Self columns – or may suggest that these columns need to be re-thought for earlier stages of drama development. I feel we have long faced the problem that child development in drama has not yet been researched properly, from the days of Peter Slade (running play changes to performance around age 12) or Brian Way (creative play all the way). However, for the immediate situation we cannot wait for the research but must satisfy the requirements for assessment that our societies place upon us.
Before looking closely at how our 2-axis model works to decide scores – i.e. numbers – for each student, I want to suggest how the vertical axis, Drama Knowledge, may also be adjusted to suit your particular curriculum circumstances.
GRADE LEVELS
In the original Hawker College model, we classed all drama knowledge under only five headings. In Fig.7 I have replaced our headings with a selection of the Massachussetts USA framework outcomes.
Though a framework with dozens of possible outcomes creates a bigger task than dealing with only a few headings, we can see the principle of assessing a student’s drama knowledge in terms of their personal development has not changed. The outcome 1.9 in Fig.7 is clearly related to our “Body” heading, and a student’s performance can be assessed to be at some point along the Action – Self – Making Meaning axis. Some outcomes-based frameworks, however, ask for no more than a tick-the-box or Yes/No response from the teacher against each descriptor, but using the 2-axis system allows the teacher to more carefully reflect the student’s quality of drama knowledge.
We can see this more clearly when we come to consider a student’s score as well as grade. We easily recognise that a letter grade A to E is meant to indicate a quality in the student’s work which we can describe. In Fig.5, for example, a C grade indicates that in general over the five types of drama knowledge in the Hawker College course, this student can be expected to be an independent and effective participant in drama activities, ready for continuing on into adult drama at least as an amateur.
But you also know that a single grade is inevitably a compromise which can be shown in Fig.8
We can see here that Student 1 works evenly across the drama knowledge categories, while Student 2 shows much more variation. In a tick-the-box outcomes system, it would be difficult to distinguish these two students, while using the 2-axis system it would be easier to describe the particular qualities of each student’s work. This becomes an important matter when we think about writing reports.
For the moment, though, we need to more fully understand how to get numbers into the picture. We can see how something like the compromise in Fig.8 can come about when test scores are used, let’s say in a 20 item maths test. Two students may score 10/20, but the items in the test are each testing a different aspect of the maths course. Student 1 got the first ten right and the last ten wrong, while Student 2 got the last ten right and first ten wrong. They end up with the same score, but what they have each learnt in maths is different. This situation is not far different from our two students getting the same grade in Fig.8.
However, numbers are used in education with many different meanings. Like grades they are used to place students along a line of comparison, but with much finer degrees of distinction. It has become a habit to use only five letter grades, while numbers are infinite. It’s also true that, as science has become established over the past few centuries, numbers have acquired a much greater sense of being true than letter grades. People are very willing to criticise grades, querying what it really means to get a ‘B’, or arguing that the value of grades goes down if a school gives too many ‘A’s. But everyone seems to think they know that 51% means a pass and 85% means a distinction.
What’s really going on with numbers is that they may have one of three meanings.
First, a student’s score may be meant to show how far away from or close to perfection their work is.
Or it may show how far or close their work is to rock-bottom.
Or - and this nowadays is the most common meaning - the score may show only a relative position of the student’s work compared with all the other students in the group (which may be their class, their subject, a group of subjects, within a school, across a local system, across the nation or across the world).
Unfortunately, “perfection” scores are the ones that I have found most teachers believe in. Of course the number a student gets for their work is a compromise just as we saw in Fig.8. However there is one case where two students must be regarded as exactly the same as each other – that is, when they both get 100%. Two students on 99% have 1% differences between them, while two on 50% have 50% differences between them. (This is a bit like genetics: we humans are 2% different from chimpanzees.) You can see, if you follow this logic, that there is something odd going on. Usually people think of the the middle of the road students who might get about 65% as all much the same as each other, OK but not very original; while the ones who get over 90% are the original thinkers who make a difference.
“Perfection” scores cause an inherent problem of conflict between encouraging conformity while expecting originality. It’s no wonder that drama students tend not to do so well in scoring systems “out of 100”.
“Rock-bottom” scores are hardly ever used because most people cannot imagine a score of absolute zero - except, perhaps, in mathematics! - and where there is no fixed top score, no point at which perfection can be reached.
However, a tick-the-box outcomes based assessment system can be seen as a “rock-bottom” scoring system if just the ticks are added up, because the score achieved does indeed show how far away the student’s work is from zero ticks. If scoring is done by adding up ticks and taking away crosses, then the score becomes a kind of compromise between a “perfection” and a “rock-bottom” score, but with the interesting twist that although no-one can get more than full marks, anyone with fewer than half ticks will end up with a minus score. This system ends up pushing scores relatively further down the scale the fewer ticks you get, while pushing other scores relatively further up the scale the fewer crosses you get. The result is a distortion which creates a greater divide between successful and less successful students than seems justified.
To understand “normative” scoring takes a reasonable study of statistics, which involves going against the grain of “perfection” scoring which most people still seem to take as the natural or inherently true way. A “standard score” is a number which tells you how far away, above or below, the student’s score is from the “norm” for the group. This scoring is based on the idea that any group’s scores will gather more around some point in the line of possible numbers, while fewer and fewer will fall further and further above and below that point, theoretically as far as infinity in either direction. The advantage of standard scores is that numbers originally given by individual teachers for small classes, probably on a “perfection” basis, can be standardised and then combined with scores from other classes and even other subjects across faculties within a school, or across schools and education systems.
The purpose of all this scoring is to make fine distinctions between students’ results which are used to decide at the end of secondary school who will be allowed into further education. But unfortunately, because most people still believe in perfection, and numbers have “scientific” backing, scores become a measure of the worth of a person, rather than an unemotive way of making decisions. But since normative scoring is now the norm, at least the 2-axis assessment model for drama can be made to work from the education system’s point of view. It’s a compromise, as all assessment systems are. Here’s how it works.
In this example, though Student 1 and Student 2 would both receive a C grade, the teacher could make a finer distinction which would probably result in the Student 1 receiving 59, and Student 2 receiving 58.
For the group this table is designed for - a normal secondary college group aged 16-18 - the scores when allocated with these cut-off points between grades are likely to remain fairly stable when they are statistically standardised. You will notice that the standardised mean of 65 is at the cut-off between C and B grades. This is because, from our experience teaching the Hawker College course, most students’ scores gathered around the higher C and lower B grades. Another point to notice is that the tail with relatively few scores in the D and E grades is stretched out much longer than the head in the A grade, despite usually more scores being here than in the tail. This means that the distribution of scores is “skewed”, with its hump around the mean further up the scale than the mid-point.
It’s important to understand that a “normal” distribution does not imply that the mean will be at the mid-point, despite the perfectly balanced picture that most people have in mind for a “normal curve”. A set of standardised scores must reflect the reality of the population concerned. Because, as I have mentioned before, these drama students are self-selected with a special interest in their work, a negative skew (that is, with a longer tail than head) is normal.
In the Australian Capital Territory standardising process, low scores usually stretched down to 30 while high scores stretched up to about 110. The 65/15 scale was originally devised because the numbers that came out looked fairly similar to people’s expectations of a “perfection” set of scores, which they were used to, except that scores could go above 100. In fact, after some years the standardised scale was changed to a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 20, which made the numbers fall rather more like an IQ test, and was an attempt to make teachers, parents and students break out of the 100% perfectionist mode of thinking.
This means that if you are required to produce letter grades and scores, what I have called the Drama Knowledge – Personal Development Matrix can help. You can adjust the definitions of drama knowledge and increase or decrease the number of rows. You can adjust the width of the personal development columns and add detail within them, or with further research re-define them. You can adjust the spread of grades across the personal development columns to reflect the reality of your teaching/learning situation. You can use a quick “line of best fit” method to arrive at an overall grade. You can attach a range of scores to each grade which is suited to the particular form of scoring your education system uses, so that you have a consistent approach which students come to understand and appreciate, and which should not downgrade drama students compared with students in other subjects when rank order lists are generated for entrance into further education.
You can use the DK-PD Matrix for any type of drama course from the strongly student-centred to one with defined expected outcomes, or even for a predetermined content course where the aims or objectives can be used for the Drama Knowledge axis.
The Matrix is not a Rose Garden, which I could never promise - no assessment system can make a good drama teacher - but I hope you may find some practical use for it, or at least that it stimulates new thinking and practice in assessing students’ learning in drama.
Author Information:
Francis (Frank) McKone
MA, DipEd, Ass Dip Theatre Practice, FACE, FRSA
Retired since 1996 from teaching Drama / Theatre Arts and People, Beliefs and Society at Hawker College, Canberra, Australia. Theatre reviewer for The Canberra Times (2006-09). Author of First Audition – How to get into drama school (Currency Press 2002)
Born in UK, 1941; Australian citizen; has lived in Australia since 1955; married, with two daughters.
Frank, who gained Master Teacher status in the ACT education system in 1982, trained in educational and community drama under Prof. Anton Witsel CAL OAM. He is an honorary life member of the ACT Drama Association and was instrumental in constructing the first constitution of the National Association for Drama in Education. He was closely associated with the establishment of the Canberra theatre-in-education team, The Jigsaw Company, in 1976, and had his play The Death of Willy workshopped at the Australian National Playwrights Conference 1981. He was Chair of the Board of Carol Woodrow’s WildWood Theatre Inc. through the 1990s. Admitted as a Fellow of the Australian College of Education in 1986 for leadership in drama education as an outstanding teacher and through contributions to course development and teacher in-service education, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts since 2003, Frank is now a freelance writer. His theatre reviews can be found at the Canberra Critics’ Circle website www.ccc-canberracriticscircle.blogspot.com and at www.frankmckone2.blogspot.com.au
© Frank McKone, Canberra
No comments:
Post a Comment