Bringing Dramatic Play Into The Classroom
Dramatic play has a long history in human learning. It is a species wide ability, best featured in role play. Now, in a sophisticated tech-age, with AI and 24/7 information, how might we use it in new ways of learning to be fully ourselves and relate to others.
Welcome
Thank you for visiting my personal portfolio site. It shows how my professional roles of teacher, curriculum writer and theatre historian motivates me to teach and learn through the concept of play. Please, feel free to download and share the joy of learning I’ve managed to sustain through five decades of working in education.
Why use dramatic play?
Read my three part manifesto on why and how dramatic play can enhance classroom experiences, from specific teaching and learning strategies to whole school projects.
Part 1: Why Use Dramatic Play?
Image: From my teaching portfolio, the public presentation as part of a Year 6 & 7 project “The Birth of Arlecchino”, on humour and thinking skills.
Making Meaning Is Life Itself!
There a contradiction in dramatic play. How is it that something that starts as child’s play transforms into virtuosity—that troublesome and obsessive state that comes from hours of practice and attention to detail? I have spent my teaching life trying to imagine how literacy skills are part of that same journey.
Given the current focus on cognitive science and AI, this exploration is more vital than ever. So, I’m renewing my commitment to pursuing dramatic play as a creative route to literacy and thinking skills—ones that sustains our students’ sense of personal and social well-being.
Part 2: Are We The Dumb Group?
Image: Kids reading scripts as a reminder of the benefits for promoting fluency through Reader’s Theatre.
Why units of work around phonological awareness, word fluency and role-play.
I am reviewing my previous attempts to blend “rigour” and “fun.” Working on a literacy team gives me a deep appreciation for explicitly addressing phonological awareness. It has been transformative to see how students could reorganise, infer and evaluate in highly competent ways only after they could decode with automaticity.
What is clear to me now is that ‘structured literacy’ requires me to motivate students to do detailed, difficult, and repetitive tasks. So, I’m creating units of work to support phonological awareness and word fluency through the research I’ve been doing for twenty years on role-play.
Part 3: Dr Seuss, Reader’s Theatre & Phonemes
Image: Consider why irony is the highest form of critical thinking, as two ideas get together and laugh at your limited ability to understand everything!
Creating a unit of work is a social act, a script for relating teaching and learning in the here and now.
The courage to succeed as I participate with students in dramatic play is bound up to having shared goals. So, in an English unit of work on studying multimodal texts, I add the task of reading a Dr Seuss story to a Year 1 audience. In doing so, I call up anxieties around ‘How can I read Fox in Socks to Year 1 in an interesting way’? and ‘What if they don’t like the story I choose to read to them?’
As the producer and director of a classroom ‘assessment event’, I’m fundamentally modelling for my students how relating to others is always about them experiencing how words have power! Sometimes you are able to muster up a great deal and carry the audience with you, but at other times (like a good sportsperson) you take pride in having done your best.