ABSTRACT

Bravo! You have decided to embark on a theatrical adventure with your students. Rather than reading a play quietly to themselves or even aloud from their seats in the classroom, your students are going to take an active approach to a play, as a group of actors would. Initially, you may play the part of the director, at least as you kick off this unit. As students become more comfortable with new activities and skills, they may take on some of these responsibilities. As they learn to work together, your students will become an ensemble, which is at the heart of any theater experience-or any collaborative classroom activity. Simply put, an ensemble is a group of actors that have come together as a team to create a piece of theater. Building the ensemble experience in your classroom early in the school year can help create an environment that combines hard work with play, discipline, and trust. When those elements come together, you have a classroom that promotes creative risk-taking and deep discovery. This chapter offers activities and techniques that will help harness focus, build concentration skills, and reward cooperation. Using these activities regularly within a structured unit will reinforce these key concepts and help students see improvement in very specific skill areas. We will then introduce a close reading approach for working on a monologue that your classroom ensemble can tackle together before they begin working on scenes in smaller groups.