I am a lecturer in acting at The Liverpool institute for Performing Arts. Our BA (Hons) Acting programme is a three-year vocational programme and I teach a wide variety of subjects across the levels.
I also teach pedagogy to early career lecturers and I'm currently doing a PhD in Enhancement, Evaluation and Research of Higher Education. My area of interest is assessment and feedback, and recently I've been working on self-assessment.
Assessment and feedback in acting
There are many challenges in teaching acting. It is an art form that depends on external feedback. A painter can see her painting ‘as she is painting’, a dancer can look in the mirror ‘as she is dancing’ but an actor cannot see what she is doing ‘as she is doing’ it. She can watch her recorded performance but even then, the recording does not provide immediate feedback. Instead tutors, directors or coaches provide actors with immediate feedback throughout the rehearsal process, and students build an internal framework to adjust and consolidate their work.
A professional actor has a similar challenge regarding feedback. After an audition, she may not get the job but she will never know why, as she will not receive any feedback. Occasionally, for bigger productions, the casting director or the audition panel may provide feedback to the actor's agent, but this is not the norm.
Assessing acting is another challenge, this time for the tutor. Marking and grading can be difficult and higher education institutions try a range of methods of assessing and giving feedback.
Why self-assess?
Self-assessment has a few benefits. I've found that it engages the students with the work. The assessment stops being a mystery, it becomes transparent, and the student can see a causal relationship between her efforts and the enhancement of her work.
Secondly, especially in the final year, it teaches students how to develop an independent internal gauge for audition scenarios. Given that an actor will receive very little (if any) feedback as part of an audition process, it is essential that she can appraise how well she's doing in an audition. If she can spot what is going wrong, she can intervene and change course during an audition. Additionally, after the audition, she can evaluate her own performance, spot her weaknesses and target them with professional development.
Thirdly, it reduces the workload for the tutor. The students take ownership of their work and they begin to provide themselves with feedback, which the tutor can then moderate. I've found that self-assessment is actually very reliable and therefore can save a lot of time and effort.
If you would like to see ho w differently ‘acting’ is defined you could look at definitions from Melissa Bruder's A Practical Handbook for the Actor, Robert Cohen's Acting Power and Yoshi Oida's The Invisible Actor. For teaching, learning and assessment I am inspired by Gwyneth Hughes and her book Ipsative Assessment. In terms of subjectivity of assessing performing arts, you may find this article by Nicholas Till interesting: https://tinyurl.com/TDSp2-Toolkit
Questions? Thoughts? Onur would love to hear from you: get in touch with him on twitter @onurorkut or at onurorkut@gmail.com
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A masterclass in peer assessment can be done step-by-step to produce concrete results
Self-assessment ideas
Here are a few practical steps for thinking about self-assessment. They are by no means exhaustive and they mainly came about from my personal experience. Some of them will be less relevant to your work so feel free to adapt these to your needs. I am using ‘assessing acting’ as a broad concept. You may want to think about modifying these to specific learning outcomes.
- Utilise prior knowledge Start with what students know and understand about acting already. They may have knowledge about what you're planning to teach which may give you ideas about how to adjust your scheme of work to a particular group of students. You can think about asking the following questions of your students:
- Who is the best actor today/ever?
- Who is the best stage/film/mime/radio/TV/Shakespeare actor? Are they all the same?
- What makes a good actor?
- Who are the successful/famous actors? Are they good?
- Define and communicate criteria and evidence Next, the teacher and the students should all agree on what ‘good acting’ is. I did a lot of soul searching to try and answer this question. A century after Stanislavski, there are many contemporary textbooks on acting technique with many different definitions of what ‘acting’ is, let alone what ‘good’ acting is. And of course, there is a certain level of subjectivity. So, to define clear criteria consider the following:
- Think about what you ‘like’ as an audience. What do you think is good acting? (As a contrast, think about some financially successful or award-winning but bad acting.) What makes them good?
- What are the common elements in ‘good’ performances?
- Find example recordings and watch with the students (or flip the classroom by assigning them to watch it ahead of class). Look at sections in detail and discuss.
- Stick to elements that are observable. Point out what the actors are ‘doing’ to make their performances good. Vocal technique, gestures, tension, clarity, thought process, appropriateness to style/genre etc.
- Using the above, define a set of criteria and then a set of evidences relating to the criteria. For example: Criterion 1 (for good acting): Clear thought process Evidence for clear thought process:
- Utilising punctuation in the text
- Variety and rhythm of speech
- Communicate and contextualise these criteria and related evidence to your students. Give and show examples.
- Teach technique This seems obvious, but I try to ensure that transparency of assessment is carried throughout the learning process. Once the criteria and the evidence are defined and agreed on, I teach how to achieve each criterion by teaching how to produce the evidence for that criterion. For example, you have established that utilising punctuation is an evidence of clear thought process. Teach how to utilise punctuation in text.
- Step by step, teach how to produce each piece of evidence in isolation or in combination.
- Apply technique and peer assess When it comes to application of technique, I often work in a masterclass setting: one or two students perform, and others observe. I then intervene with the performance and encourage the performer(s) to think about how to apply the technique. Think about the following sequence:
- Ask a student to perform a monologue, let others observe
- Pick a technical aspect that you taught and intervene to enhance a particular criterion (For example enhance thought process by utilising punctuation)
- Ask if the performance after the intervention was ‘better’.
- If yes, ‘What makes it better?’ If not, what was missing?
- Try and relate the answers to the criteria/evidence that you've defined. Important: While it is expected that students should be able to perform in front of each other, they can get self-conscious. Also, when looking at each other's work, the students tend to give feedback using personal pronouns. ‘She was amazing. She was terrible. etc.’ I make sure that the feedback is worded in such a way to evaluate ‘the work’ and not the person. I use the following questions:
- Was that performance good/better?
- What makes it good? (Refer to the criteria and evidence)
- What does the performance need? For example: Can the rhythm of speech be more varied to aid the clarity of thought process?
- Self-assess This step almost happens by itself. I gradually begin to ask the evaluative questions directly to the performers. This step also focuses the students on what they need to practise to improve a particular piece of evidence. Think about the following questions:
- How was your performance?
- What do you think you did well?
- Which of the evidences could you improve?
- What do you need to practise? I hope that you will find the above useful and I'm sure you will find better and authentic ways of implementing self-assessment. My ultimate aim is to make the students as independent as possible while maintaining good quality teaching and reliable assessment for learning.