Workshop Reviews: Design Our Country's Good webinar

We Teach Drama's Our Country's Good webinar in early 2021 focused on helping students attain top marks in the exam questions, with a particular focus on the design elements, which is always an area those of us who specialised in acting and directing tend to find a bit more daunting to teach. The Student Pack created after the event has been an excellent resource in teaching this set text.

In September 2021 I attended the next Our Country's Good webinar, on lighting design, with designer Josh Tomalin, which offered ideas and insight into an effective lighting design for the play. The information shared seemed simple yet created a new understanding with my students on the elements of lighting design with a particular focus on this play. This has been eye opening but also has rekindled an enjoyment in my students as we tackle a different element of analysing and working with the set text.

After two successful webinars, the next Our Country's Good webinar was announced, on set and costume design with professional designer Richard Cooper. I was sure I would find this as informative and useful as the ones before. The key focus from these webinars is that We Teach Drama is trying to help teachers find ways for students to connect and understand the set texts holistically, while giving them an insight into how professional theatre-makers would design for these texts.

The pre-webinar video of Cooper discussing his own set design for Our Country's Good was informative, and useful to look at an alternative design idea for the play. Having watched the production live eight times over the last ten years, all with differing design ideas, it was nice to work through a designer's ideas on how to design for the play. Richard was thorough and his ideas were set out clearly. The insight into how a designer works was really helpful when discussing these elements with my class on producing their own design concept for the play.

The actual webinar covered far more in terms of detail and instruction on how to develop design skills with students and what to pay attention to when answering these questions in the exam. Cooper and host Lucy Bellingham shared their input well, and the result was an insightful webinar for teachers in being able to teach these design elements, work through the creation of our own designs in class and how to then write about these and sketch/label for them in the exams. I thoroughly enjoyed the webinar and have taken away some fantastic ideas and resources which I have used in my lessons already!

As well as the wealth of knowledge given to Our Country's Good, We Teach Drama have created the ‘Design Set Texts’ CPD series for various other texts, such as Machinal and The Crucible, and I'm sure the information and resources for these are equally amazing: well worth the time and money for any teachers using these texts. I've subscribed to We Teach Drama, and continue to be amazed by the wonderful resources and CPD opportunities made available to teachers.