The Pitfalls of Dramatising Prematurely

a. Focus on a specific assessment task in your school. Describe the assessment and discuss its effectiveness

I have only secondary one classes - three Express and one NA and we when I took over, we were towards the end of Animal Farm.  Their creative assessment was to dramatise a scene from the book, and we were looking out for characterisation and entertainment value. 

Initially, I thought this would be fun to watch but given that the students only had 70 minutes each week and dramatisation required them to come up with a script, act and have props/costumes, it really wasn't that feasible.  When I took over, we had only 140 minutes to prepare them.  When I read the scripts they submitted, it was really awful with the "narrator" handling most of the lines.  It was a Herculean task to try to get students to understand that they don't have to include every single line from the text and they had to sift out what was crucial to the text and what wasn't.  This was high level for the Express kids and with the NA kids, it was a lot worse with them often not knowing where to start. 

When they finally performed, some kids from the Express stream came up with good performances where their performances showed a creative use of space and props, for eg using the slit of their chairs to act as the door opening to the barn where the animals spied on the humans and animals drinking together in the final scene.  However, I often got the sense that these were accidental revelations rather than something intended by them.  For the NA kids, on the day of the performance, none of them were prepared and some groups didn't even have their scripts with them.  In the end, they just stood in front of the class and read from their books.  

At the end of the day, I wasn't sure if dramatisation was such a good way to assess their understanding of the book.  First of all, it involved group work and I had groups that refused to cooperate and in the NA class, an ADHD boy simply refused to work with anyone!  Secondly, students within the group who were chosen to write the scripts were based on how legible their handwriting was rather than a synergy of the group.  Lastly, given that this was the first time they were doing literature, I thought it was a big step to have to come up with a script from a novel, act AND portray characterisation.  I think it was too much, too soon.

If I could do it differently, I would perhaps just use a tableaux for the Express students, and for the NA students, I would adopt the Glogster project my group and I thought of in QCR521.