Click on the links below to read more about the role of drama in the classroom.

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• Good Behavior and Audacity: Performing Arts in Education, Past and Present

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• Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 TED talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”

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• Author and kindergarten teacher (and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient) Vivian Paley tells the story on This American Life of an experiment she conducted in her classroom to make children less cruel to each other. She instituted a rule: “You can’t say ‘You can’t play.'” In other words, if two children are playing, and a third child comes over and wants to join them, they can’t tell him or her to get lost. They can’t reject him or her. This is the cause of unending pain in most classrooms and playgrounds. The experiment was a remarkable and immediate success. (11 minutes). Click here to listen to Vivian Paley’s This American Lifestory.

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• How do we make learning visible? Why is learning made visible important to thinking? (Watch the video from Project Zero!)

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• The ethos of drama in education today owes an enormous debt to the inspiration of one woman. Dorothy Heathcote, MBE* began her working life as a weaver in a Yorkshire worsted mill at the age of 14. She went on to develop an unorthodox yet empowering approach to educational drama that fired the imaginations of children and inspired the work of teachers and academics across the world for the next six decades. Her essay on the conventions of drama is considered of seminal importance in both fields.

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• Dorothy Heathcote: Three Looms Waiting. BBC Omnibus (Dir. Ronald Smedley, 1971)

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• Dorothy Heathcote MBE (29 August 1926 – 8 October 2011) was a drama teacher and academic  who invented mantle of the expert and many other revolutionary dramatic-inquiry approaches to teaching and learning. Click here to read more.

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• Vivian Gussin Paley at 92Y Wonderplay Conference 2008

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• Guided meditation for children: https://www.wakingup.com/children/

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Recommended Reading

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• Drama Worlds: A Framework for Process Drama by Cecily O’Neill

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• Planning Process Drama: Enriching Teaching and Learning by Pamela Bowell and Brian S. Heap

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• You Can’t Say You Can’t Play by Vivian Gussin Paley