All the World’s a stage… even the classroom

So today I spent the afternoon at Stirling Management Centre for the launch of the new SQA courses in Drama. These new courses cover the areas of Acting, Technical Theatre and Musical Theatre.

As you may have read in previous posts we are currently tackling the new NC Acting and Theatre Performance Course (National Certificate) at Knox Academy. This exciting new course is at SCQF Level 6 (SCQF = Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework)

These courses are not a replacement for Higher Drama but offer a different approach to teaching and learning and enable pupils to sepcialise in highly practical courses. We decided to following this new NC course to meet the demands of our pupils whose Acting grades at Higher Level were extremely high. This new course enabled them to look at Acting in so much more depth than say the Higher or Advanced Higher courses could enable.

These new NPA Courses (National Progression Awards) enable pupils to follow smaller courses compared to the NC courses in Musical Theatre, Acting, Technical Theatre in Practice and Professional Theatre Preparation.

The above courses enable the pupil to specialise in an area that they are interested in and although each subject has Mandatory units the teacher and pupil can choose from a range of options to suit everyone. See below…

pathway one

or the pupil and teacher could choose the following pathway…

pathway 2

 or they could opt for this pathway…

pathway 3

so as you can see from the above a pupil studying NPA Musical Theatre can easily suit the course to meet their needs, this is the same for Technical Theatre and Acting.

These courses are great for pupils who excell in Drama but find the academic side to the courses at Higher and Advanced Higher difficult (Both courses are 50% practical and 50% written) These new courses offer a chance to sits units that have no outcomes with no final examination yet still meet educational needs.

At SCQF level 6 schools only had the option of doing Higher Drama but now with these new exciting courses schools can work to the strength of the teacher and the pupils to create courses that are engaging, meaningful and insightful (not that i’m saying the current courses don’t already offer this)

We at Knox are using these new courses to offer our pupils a curriculum fit for the 21st centuary and we think may be the first school in Scotland to be offering, as of session 2010/2011, the NC Acting and Performance (Musical Theatre) to our S6 pupils, being taught between Drama, Music and Dance – trully a Curriculum for Excellence.

Below you can see the table of where the new courses sit in line with other SCQF courses.

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