Teacher Professional Development Workshops
Advocating for Advocacy: Strategies for Achieving Positive Change
Presenter: Jim Palmarini, Educational Theatre Association
Join EdTA Director of Educational Policy James Palmarini for a discussion about the state and local policies, issues, and legislation that impact theatre education in New England and how you can build relationships with the key stakeholders and organizations that can help you effect positive change. We’ll move into a roundtable dialogue in which attendees can share their specific advocacy challenges and successes and wrap up with a “next steps for change” brainstorming exercise.
Writing Meaningful Standards for Performance
Presenter: Rick Osann, Bonny Eagle High School
Having trouble writing meaningful standards that really get to the heart of what you want your students to learn? We’ll review the language in a variety of standards, performance indicators and rubrics (tasks), then observe a student performance and try to write our own language to identify what we wanted the student to learn. We’ll also try to find clear language to identify what differentiates “Meets” (3) from “Partially Meets” (the dreaded 2 or 2.5). We hope you will come out of this with some practical assessments you can use in your classroom.
The Play’s The Thing: Acting Shakespeare
Presenter: Hannah Cordes, Portland Stage
The focus of this workshop will be activating Shakespeare’s language through play and on-your-feet activities. We will explore the use of language, status, group play, rhetoric, physical storytelling, and more!
Ovations Offstage: Tableaus of Courage: How to Help Students Engage with Complex Content through Theater
Presenter: Catherine Anderson, Portland Ovations
Ovations Offstage Director Catherine Anderson will introduce workshop participants to Ovations Dynamic School-Time Performance Series for 2018-19, and model for teachers how to help students engage with any story, or content (fictional or not) through the use of the “tableau”. Tableau is a wordless theater activity for small groups of students that can be adapted for any age group. Participants will leave with a lesson plan with clear learning targets, and assessment criteria. Most recently Catherine presented this workshop to over three hundred eight graders at Scarborough Middle School to help students integrate and grapple with concepts of discrimination and segregation as part of their unit on Japanese Internment Camps.