To the mother who says their daughter is ‘too smart’ to study Drama,
 
First of all, congratulations on being the mother a beautiful, talented young lady. I am a mother too and I can feel the pride you have for your little girl. You tell me you want her to succeed in life and reach her full potential. I want the same for her too and that is why she should study Drama.
 
You see your daughter loves Drama. When you let her take it for Year 9 and 10 she fell in love with the subject. It became her outlet. Her opportunity to express herself in ways she had never experienced before. It was a chance for her to get to know her peers and let them see her in a different light. She was given a break from sitting behind a desk for hours, she was given freedom to move, she was taught life and she loved it.
 
Yes, she was taught life. Drama is about the world and it’s people. In Drama my students are explicitly taught how to relate to others. They learn the importance of trust. They learn how to respectfully work together to reach a creative goal. They learn empathy as they step into characters from worlds beyond that of a teenage girl. They learn compassion, sensitivity and acceptance. My students refer to their classmates as their ‘drama family’. They leave the social constraints of the playground behind as they step into the drama space listening and responding to students different to those they usually associate with… and that’s before we even touch the curriculum they are learning.
 
But that is not all.
 
Your daughter is learning about herself in Drama. She is learning how to use her most important communication tools – her voice and her body. Just like you taught her how to say her first words and helped her balance on the soles of her little feet, Drama can help her refine and control each element of her voice and body manipulating it expertly to express her deepest thoughts and feelings. She will have the confidence to step in front of that courtroom and bring home that closing statement. She will move listeners as she reports from the front lines about the atrocities she has laid witness too.  She will convincingly assure the grant review panel that her research deserves funding. She will be able to engage a nation as she shares her newest policy.
 
Yet that is not all.
 
She will learn to feel. She will develop self-esteem, tenacity, grit, courage and heart. She will overcome nerves or at the very least learn how to use them. She will learn resilience. Taking creative risks will become second nature because when we take creative risks we discover new and wonderful and ever so exciting things. She will learn to improvise, to think on her feet and isn’t that handy given that life is improvised?
 
Yes, in drama social-emotional learning comes in bucket fulls. In fact, I can’t name another subject that does it better which means I am preparing her best for the workplace of the future. Don’t believe me? The World Economic Forum has found that children must explicitly learn social and emotional skills if they are to thrive in the 21st Century landscape (WEF, 2016).  According to the WEF there are sixteen skills required for survival in the 21st Century including foundational literacies (which I will address in the moment), critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, curiosity, initiative, persistence, adaptability, leadership and social/cultural awareness. That list is my curriculum.
Critical thinking = improvisation/directing.
Creativity = everything in my class.
Communication = body and voice.
Collaboration = explicitly working together.
And I could go on, but I don’t want to sing the song of ‘I told you so’.
 
But as for literacy….
 
Did you know that students who experience drama increase their reading comprehension? Maybe it is because we live and breathe a text as though it were life and therefore comprehension is a non-negotiable consequence. As we examine the power of words, the power of movement, the power of stillness we stumble upon and express the social, cultural, political, historical and personal issues of life. It is not only reading literacy, it is world literacy.
 
Still this is not all.
 
Did you know that students who study drama maintain better attendance records? Stay generally more engaged in school than their non-arts counterparts? That schools which embrace art-centred programs even in low economic areas report high academic achievement? Did you know that students who study arts subjects have higher standardised test scores then their peers who do not experience the arts? (AATE, 2014)
 
I guess you didn’t because if you did we wouldn’t be having this conversation. There would be no doubt that your child is taking drama. Yet here we are and I know why we are.
 
We are here because you daughter comes home and says, “We had so much fun in drama today”. We are here because she told you of that game we played. I want you to know that she was telling the truth. We did have fun. We did play a game… maybe even more then one. We did dress up and laugh until tears ran down our face. We did pretend we were garden gnomes and witches and crocodile hunters. We may have even danced.
 
But that does not mean we were not learning.
 
Tell me, at what point did learning become so mundane and lifeless? Think about it. When did you learn the most? When you had someone breathing down your neck as you sat in rows of desks or when you were out experiencing life – the highs and the lows? Do you learn better when you are having fun and love the content you are studying or do you learn better when you are forced to memorise something you hate? Do you learn better when you are given the freedom to take risks and fail or when you are told that the mark as the end is the be all and end all? Having fun, feeling, playing means that we are not only learning, but we are doing it the best way possible.
 
You daughter is not ‘too smart’ to study Drama. Like every other child in my class, she is just where she needs to be. In a place where she is valued, lifted up, challenged, encouraged and loved. A place where she experiences freedom to explore and express who she is and what she believes. A place where she can learn and have fun at the very same time.
 
So please, reconsider. Drama will give you daughter every opportunity to reach her full potential. Will you?
 
Warm regards,
A Drama Teacher

Our school operates under a vertical tutor group system. This means that each morning I get to spend a short period of time with a wonderful group of girls from year 7 through to year 12. I am meant to mentor them through their schooling years and provide them with pastoral and academic care. I view this as a privilege and an honour and I want to ensure that my students flourish under my care and guidance. However, this can be challenging when I only see them for 20 minutes, 4 times a week.

At the start of this year I asked my students what they wanted to use their tutor group time for, the answers were varied, but one struck a deep chord with me. A quiet year 12 student said, "I would love to have more meaningful conversations... deeper conversations... about the world and stuff." Yes, the world and stuff.... deep huh? Then I realised, when do we ever give the students a chance just to reflect on their week, their day, their lives, the world? When do the just sit together and listen to each other without the pressure of completing work or being graded? So, I decided to do something about it.

This term we have embarked on The Tuesday Project. On a Tuesday the girls come into tutor group, sit in a circle and ready themselves to listen. I have a jar which holds a number of conversation starters. I draw one out of the jar and we begin. The results have been amazing. This week one student, who appears to be confident and self-assured, shared that she is lonely in her classes. The other students in the group gave her strategies to try and alleviate her loneliness and also discussed how they could help others that might be in lonely in their classes.  Last week, the question was 'What do you love about yourself?' and two of the students in my group couldn't answer. The other students responded by listing what they loved about these two girls.  Meanwhile, another question led one student to concede she wanted to be a lobster farmer when she left school!

I believe that deeper conversations in the classroom can lead to more self-awareness, care for others, resilience, the development of active listening skills and a more mindful and nurturing school environment.

This term I am sourcing my conversation starters from Momastery's Key Jar as a starting point. Next term I am going to ask the students to write two of their own questions to place in our jar. I am excited about this project and the deeper conversations we are yet to have.

Playbuilding can be the perfect opportunity for students to share their stories. Mark Twain wrote, "Write what you know" ... but let's be honest, Mark Twain clearly did not teach teenagers! How do students write 'what they know' without presenting mere teenage angst? This was the challenge I was faced with last year. I wanted students to create beautiful pieces of theatre that shared their stories without the angst.

As a result I created these prompts for playbuilding. I set up various stations in the drama space, chose some reflective music and invited my students to respond either privately (in their logbooks) or publicly on post-it notes, butcher's paper or the iPad. The result was a beautiful collage of thoughts to stimulate the playbuilding process.