Protecting Into Role by Matthew Milburn

Drama teachers are regularly taunted by colleagues who say that "all students do is mess around and fight in drama lessons." Such comments are often based on their experience covering drama.

Successfully enabling pupils to inhabit a role is not easy, particularly as they get older and progress through adolescence. Part of the teenage condition is navigating and understanding of who they actually are; to ask them to be someone else is a tall order if they are yet to feel confident in their own skin.

Like a game of grandma's footsteps, protecting into a role takes negotiation, skill and sensitivity from the teacher who must act as artist, assessing the moment and judging the pace. The best drama teachers I've worked with set the tone from the very beginning of the lesson. They invite the students to contract in, they make sure that the mood is light and positive and that the group appreciates that what they are doing is serious. The best drama teachers get the group into drama mode as quickly as possible by using tight constraints that make it less likely that children will drift off or even reject the task. They carefully manage the transition to in role work by building in appropriate investment activities like hot seating, thought tracking and still image until they are confident that students are ready to make the final leap into the role.

It can take a long time, often more than a fifty minute lesson might allow. Like all creative enterprises, it can fail, but persevere and the results can take students to another level; intellectually and emotionally.

Interested in learning more about protecting students into role? Matthew Milburn is one of the NATD’s practitioners running a series of workshops across the country looking at engaging young people in GCSE Set Texts. Book your place on a workshop near you.