So with the draft documents of National 4 and 5 out, the first year of Curriculum for Excellence almost over… what does the future hold for us?

I’m excited about the future of education in Scotland, the possibility to do a lot of interesting work, the new areas of development in the pupils learning with the National 4 and 5 and what we are doing as a Department, Faculty and School.

We have developed this year our S1 course to meet the new CfE and have worked on the theme of Heritage within our Faculty, we are developing resources and assessments that we can include on the NAR (National Assessment Resource)  site. We hope to offer a ‘specialism’ for one period a week in S2 and then possibly the new SQA Creative Industries course in S3 for those pupils who are able to achieve it.

In Senior school we are already offering the new National Certifiacte in Acting and Theatre Performance (both at Acting and Musical Theatre strands) and have offered for session 2011/2012 NPA Techical Theatre, NPA Acting and Theatre Performance, NPA Musical Theatre and Higher Drama – focusing on giving pupils a brochure of subject related courses to Drama.

Over the next year you will read Blog posts from me regarding how we are moving forward with CfE, as a Department and as a Faculty. From what we’ve discussed the feeling seems to be that we are still walking in the ‘mist’ but one thing is for sure that we need to give pupils ‘options’ to developed their needs.

I found this video and would love you to discuss it with me so please leave your comments…

As 2011 starts as does a new term and therefore new events; curricular and extra curricular to look forward to…

With still no word from SQA/Government re examinations for senior pupils sitting Curriculum for Excellence we move forward with developing our S1 and S2 courses with a cautionary step. I have to say that I feel we are currently doing some excellent work at Knox on how to meet the needs of our young people in S1 and S2.

Our Standard Grade Pupils are currently involved in a playwriting project with a school in America and are developing their plays based around the theme of ‘Home’. The aim of the project is to write a 5 minute play that will then be directed by a student in the other school, so the Americans will be directing modern Scottish plays and we will be directing modern American plays.

Our Higher students move into the Examination period with the Acting Exam just around the corner…

The NC pupils are currently working on their Musical Theatre Cabaret’s which will be showcased in Feburary before starting their final productions.

on an Extra Curricular side of things… Our school production is being shown in February after being delayed because of Snow in December. So Sweeney Todd is getting gorier by the second…

Our NC Make-Up course is going from strength to strength thanks to my wonderful collegue…

KWN will start filming their Global Citizenship video…

We have our trip to New York and London…

So as you can see… it’s all go… nothing like starting the New Year hitting the floor running.

On a personal note I was given my sabbatical for next session and have applied for some post graduate courses. I have applied for a few promoted posts lately which I haven’t been lucky to get and am kind of feeling maybe teaching isn’t for me. So this sabbatical will be a breathe of fresh air.

Teaching is a great job but there is too much paper work, red tape, people to impress, new ideas, governement schemes (i could go on and on and on) to actually be able to do the best in your job – we can but try – but it’s hard and this holiday I have realised that. I love my job but can I actually do everything that is asked of me? I try but can I do it to the standards I am happy with? Anyway… my sabbastical will hopefully make me fall in love with the job I currently do again… cause at the moment i’m on Act 5 of The Crucible!

To all the teachers out there… you do a wonderful job! Just keep reminding yourself that.

Have an amazing 2011!

I have recently been doing a six month project with a theatre company in Cardiff (Wales) where I have to write a one act play, involving six scenes, over six months (so one scene per month – numeracy box – tick – CfE).

Each month my ten minute scene would be workshopped with actors and a director and staged in Wales, the audience would give feedback on the scene and then from our feedback we would write the next scene and so on etc.

This process made me think about how do I structure this play? How do I keep the audience interested in my 10 minute play, so not only the structure of the play but also the structure of the scene.

I decided to use the Five Act Structure (shown below)

As a Drama Teacher you are constantly telling your pupils to experiment with form and structure – but as a practitioner I found that really hard to do in this project – why?! As a writer you are aware of HOW you wanted the play to end etc but couldn’t tell the audience that so the feedback you were getting, although interesting… meant that struggled to keep motivated by the piece. This made me look at how we teach playwriting and indeed Devising at our school, how do I enable pupils to keep their plays structured enough so that each and every scene would be engaging and drive the play forward but also allow them to develop as practitioners and enable them to experiment with form and structure.

We discussed the below

The above structure enabled us to really examine the development of a play and gave not only myself but also my pupils some serious thought on how  to keep the audience engaged throughout the whole product.

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.

Grid

I have been at Knox Academy now for two years and I have to say, i’m loving every minute of it. In the past two years I have been encouraged to experience new things and given space, by my line Manager Lynn Black and Head Teacher Janis Craig, to build and develop the department.

In my first year I was given time to create courses, develop resources and build up the department. I taught S1, S2 and Core S6.

This Year I continued to teach S1, S2 but welcomed two S3 Standard Grade classes into the department, as well as 22 pupils sitting crash Higher Drama. I was delighted when E Garwood said she’d help in the department by taking some Junior classes and we also had our first teaching student in the department.

We are now moving to the new timetable and our numbers are up again; as well as seeing my two great S3 SG classes moving into S4, we will welcome 3 new S3 SG classes (which is brilliant), 22 pupils taking crash Higher Drama and now we see the challange of offering two new courses at Knox; Intermediate Two Drama and Advanced Higher Drama. I amalso extremely excited to be told we are getting an NQT in the department for next session.

I am so happy the pupils at Knox are enjoying being in the Drama department and enjoy are courses, it means a lot to see the work I enjoy being rewarded in new courses being offered, more pupils opting in and the school allowing the dept to grow.

I couldn’t have done this without saying thank you to Ellie Garwood this year, who’s been an amazing support in the department by teaching S1 and S2. Also to my line Manager Lynn Black who supports our work within the school and also to Janis Craig, our Head Teacher, who alwyas encourages our work. Thank you.

Well my pupils have sat their Higher Drama Exam and I would have to say I thought the paper was quite fair. Section A questions seem to the usual variety of asking pupils to think of themselves as either an actor or director and some good questions in relation to key scenes or characters. Section B slightly surprised me by using a random episode right at the end of the play and Section C (Scottish) had a good variety of questions in Gender and Politics, if I were them I would have chosen to write the essay discussing the relationship between women in Scottish Theatre.

Although I didn’t have pupils sitting the SG exam this year I have heard that a lot of teachers weren’t happy with the paper so will be interesting to see what they are talking about when the paper comes out.

So we’ll have to wait and see till August how well the pupils have done…. but i’m sure they’ve ‘done me proud so they have’.

Well this week I had the pleasure of presenting 18 pupils to the SQA for their Higher Drama Acting Exam. This is an external exam which is now worth 50% of their overall grade.

We have had a tough time at Knox as all the pupils sitting the Higher are doing what we call a ‘crash higher’ in the subject; which means they are sitting the subject with no previous school experience, that is not to say that they have not risen to the challenge.

The year has been building up to this moment where all 18 pupils got the chance to showcase their talent in front of an audience of keen Standard Graders and the SQA marker. (I don’t know who was more nervous, me or them?!) We had performed to parents on the Monday Evening as an Open Dress rehearsal and I think they were surprised at just how professional these young people actually were!

The Exam asks the pupils to perform two roles; one from a Classic Text and a contrasting role from a Scottish Contemporary Theatre text. Our pupils performed Classic scenes from

• Antigone
• The Importance of Being Ernest
• Lovers
• A Taste of Honey
• The Crucible
• The House of Bernarda Alba

Although our set text is Antigone I wanted the examier to see a variety of scenes but also I didn’t want pupils to feel they were beking compared if they repeated scenes from the same play.

The second roles were from the following Scottish Texts

• Men Should Weep
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• The Architect
• Sleeping Around
• Borders of Paradise
• Perfect Days

It was a long day, both mentally and physically exhausting however I am so proud of all of them, they really shone and hopefully will do well oncethe results come out in August.

The Higher Drama is a hard course, I bet we all say that, but honestly the course asks pupils to be Writers, Directors, Actors, Dramaturgs, Researchers and Academics. I suppose the SQA did not want to see the course being seen as some see it as a ‘Mickey Mouse’ subject, I for one know that we are not and indeed, having just studied the play, i’m sure Miss Brodie would have had a word or two to say about it!

So we are fully underway with the Higher at Knox. We successfully performed the investigatives Drama’s (Unit One) last week in the Drama studio to packed audiences of Staff, pupils and parents. The Groups chose the themes of ‘Teenage Life’ and ‘Cruelty’ and created engaging plays based on a variety of topics including self-harm, eating disorders, animal cruelty and women’s rights to name a few. After tears, drama strops and a few shouting matches they really shone as Playwrights, Directors, Drama-turgs and Actors.

A lot of people don’t seem to understand the amount of work that the pupils have to do to achieve the first unit and parents were quite shocked at a) how mature they approached the topics being dealt and b) how much work they had put into achieving their first unit. The SQA ask that each pupils research a choosen topic and from their research write a play. Their written play is then directed by them and they have to liase with the technical pupils to light and sound their production. They must also act in their peers plays and all the plays had to link to make one whole production – phew even writing it i’m shattered!

So we’ve now moved on and we’re all a go go! for Unit Two we are studying ‘Antigone’ by Sophocles. I studied it when doing Higher and my Drama Teacher, Mrs Chetty, was passionate about the text that it’s last with me all these years! It’s such a great story and how amazing that it was written ove 2500 years ago and still relevant to the world today!

Unit 3 is Contemporary Scottish Theatre and again another passion of mine so it’s been great to start teaching this and seeing the pupils really engaging in the first two lessons (Lecture on National Theatre Scotland and an introduction to playwright Linda McLean). We are going to be studying ‘Passing Places’ by Stephen Greenhorn, ‘One Good Beating’ by Linda McLean, ‘Black Watch’ by Gregory Burke, ‘The Women of Lockerbie’ by Deborah Brevoort and ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by M Spark.

So we are all go at Knox and through practical workshops our pupils will, hopefully, be ready for their acting exams in March/April and the written exam in May!

So it’s been a couple of months since I last posted anything! It’s been all a go go here at Knox! So here is what has been keeping me busy and some educational thoughts on a couple of things.

Timetable

So my timetable has been pretty hectic and on minimum time isn’t easy but having great classes always helps. The new S1 have settled in really well and i’m really seeing this years S2 classes creating some amazing work. I find jumping from different mind set levels always interest and a monday is always interesting going from basic drama, to standard grade, to S2, to Higher, to acting technique!

Health and Safety

We’ve been having some interesting discussions lately about Health and Safety in Drama and had an excellent chat with Judith Wood (Health and Safety Officer for East Lothian). As our course at Knox is so practical we are always aware of how dangerous it could be if we don’t follow guidelines. So we’ve been working on getting a manual together for Health and Safety in Drama. Doing units like Stage Combat and Dance/Drama it can be quite easy to injure yourself, i’ve done it myself!

One thing that arose from our discussion and is an interesting debate is where do we stand in a PPP school? According to FES all our furniture should be bought new (what if we were doing a period play? Where do I get my set from?), The lighting is owned by the PPP so in theory we aren’t allowed to focus them (how does this work for a pupil doing Lighting for their SQA exam?).

The manual will hopefully be ready soon.

School Productions

So the Junior Production of TROJANS is underway and looking great! we have over 50 pupils from S1 – S3 involved onstage and about 10 involved backstage! It’s going to be good!

Sadly we didn’t get our uptake of boys to do THE CRUCIBLE so we are now working on a small studio piece that could be a bit controversial but will spark debate (we like a bit of controversry!), more about this later.

‘Across the Pond Theatre Company’

As some of you may have read, Knox Academy recieved the International Schools Award for a second year, well done! Part of this was due to the work we have been doing with our link school in America. Carol, our American teacher, has came up with a fantastic idea of a collusion project based on Martin Lurther King ‘I have a dream speech’. This will involve pupils from both schools creating work based around this text.

Expressive Arts Faculty Night

Knox had it’s first Expressive Arts faculty evening last week and it was a great success, well done everyone involved. Pupils showcased work in an informal setting. Work from P.E., Drama, Music and Art showed what talent we have here at Knox. Several Higher pupils showed a piece of work about teenagers and gangs. Using the ‘Home Office’ manual as a starting point it told the story of why young people get involved in gang crime. The second piece was from our S2 actors who created a very camp and over the top murder mystery called ‘The Butler Did it!’. Both were excellent. Well done.

Holocaust Memorial Day

This years theme is ‘Stand Up To Hatred’ and after last years success of our Holocaust Memorial week we have decided to continue what we had already started but this time we are wanting to involve the wider community in our work, with the ownership pf the project very much on the pupils. Teachers from various departments have met and the ball is now a rolling! Watch this space.

Goodbyes!

On the note of the Holocaust I would like to say a huge thank you and good bye Elaine who left Knox at summer to start a new life elsewhere. She was a great help during our planning for Holocaust Week and a great support to me when I first started.

I would also like to wish another collegue, A Wood, all the best as he leaves Knox to start a new post in the West. He has been great support and a great team mate during our Holocaust work and I hope he continues the hard work in his new school.

Higher Drama Performance

The Higher Drama pupils have been busy being dramaturgs, writers, directors and actors as they get ready to showcase their hard work for their first unit in the course. Unit One asks them to research, write and direct a play about an issue or topic they feel strongly about! Let’s just say it won’t be the most happy night but should be excellent to see their hard work on stage!

Standard Grade – Mary Poppins

Last night we went to see Mary Poppins at the Edinburgh Playhouse! We took both SG classes and what a treat! An amazing piece of theatre! Our pupils were awe struck at what they seen on stage! Stunning!

On that note I need to ‘spit spot’ and have to dash just now but I want to discuss a Curriculum for Excellence – so when I am less busy i’ll be back!

JC x

P.s. How gutted am I that Legally Blonde has been cancelled on Broadway… NNNNNOOOOO!!!!!!

So session 2008/2009 has begun and it’s all go already! I feel like i’ve been back months!

Knox Academy are offering Higher Drama for the first time and our cohort of pupils doing the course are brilliant with some really exciting script writing ideas taking place now for their Investigative unit. The Standard Grade students are underway looking at characterisation and S2 are already using all they have learnt from first year to produce some excellent work. So we are already well underway for an exciting way.

Some exciting things to look forward to in this session

Junior Drama Production – TROJANS

The House of Troy have abused their position for too long. They deny the Youths their rights, have destroyed society and squander the country’s wealth on a stalemate war with Sparta. Enough is enough! While the Royal family plan a big party, the Council of War plan one final assault on the enemy and as Princess Cassandra tries to appeal for peace the Youths are preparing to fight back. Will the House of Troy fall? Will the rebellious Cassandra jump? Will Helena be returned to Sparta? All will be revealed in this powerful drama that takes the legends of the Trojan Wars and throws them into the madness of the 21st Century.

Senior Production – The Crucible