When students tell me, ‘I feel we learn more this way’, the head teacher reports on how excited the teachers are to share what is going on in their lessons, and parents are saying ‘my child has never come home talking so much about what they are doing at school’ then something significant must be happening. That thing is a project called DEAL and it's happening in Stockport's primary schools.
What is the DEAL?
DEAL is Drama, Engagement and Active Learning. As drama practitioners, Rebecca Bell and I have regularly used drama as a pedagogy in Stockport's schools on a range of innovative programmes. However, Howard Bousfield from Stockport's School Improvement Team wanted to have an impact in all schools, saying ‘we value drama in education and the role it plays in engaging our pupils in their learning.’ The emphasis was on learner engagement, without which all educational outcomes are impaired: and so the Stockport DEAL initiative was born.
Vision and phases
We needed a clear vision that could be shared and supported by teachers of all year groups. Five characteristics were established as defining vibrant and engaging learning environments:
- students actively engaged in learning
- drama processes ignite curiosity, provoke enquiry and demand critical thinking
- emotional and experiential learning increases attention and retention
- imaginative contexts inspire purposeful learning, and
- collaboration and co-operation are seen to be vital to learning and life
To reflect this vision, we created a logo: a heart, a hand and a head to reflect the affective, psychomotor and cognitive domains of learning.
We couldn't wait to get into schools and ‘do some drama’ but needed to take a more strategic approach in order to achieve real borough-wide impact. We planned to have four distinct phases of DEAL to ensure long-lasting impact:
- Resource and Develop
- Engage and Launch
- Empower and Implement
- Embed and Extend
The DEAL journey begins
The first phase involved creating high-quality, accessible resources to support the professional development training we would offer. Rebecca and I pooled our combined forty-plus years of drama experience to create nine drama strategy cards: each containing three strategies under a generic title, e.g. Adopting Roles. In addition, each card had sections on Why use these strategies? and Management Tips. We also produced a digital version of the cards for Stockport's interactive online learning system (Learning Leads). When asked what else they wanted, teachers’ overwhelming answer was to see the strategies in action. Given the number of schools we hoped to reach, this was a challenge, and so we created a film of classroom teachers using each strategy with their own classes. This film was also made available online.
Gathering pace
With resources ready and fifty schools declaring their interest it was soon time to ‘engage and launch’. Immediately, it was clear that there was a real appetite for this approach to learning and teachers welcomed not only the the opportunity but also the permission, the encouragement and the resources to use these strategies and teach in an active and engaging way. The ‘empower and implement’ phase asked each school to nominate a DEAL link teacher to be its advocate within their own school. Four DEAL clusters, communities of sharing and learning, were established, and Rebecca and I facilitated training sessions which included modelling strategies, leadership thinking and curriculum planning. Soon each cluster started to drive its own unique agenda combining input from its leader and the successful practice of the teachers themselves.
The school experience
Laura Vose is a classroom teacher and Deputy Head at Ludworth Primary School; when she attended the launch she immediately thought ‘this is what Ludworth needs, it will put some passion and some power into our curriculum.’ The school has been amazed at the impact: ‘what we have seen happen in our school in one term is unbelievable’. From Reception to Year 6, strategies such as Teacher in Role, Opinion Line and News Report are now being used across the curriculum on a daily basis and the children are so engaged that they can be heard talking about it on the corridors, over lunch and to their parents at the end of the day. As Laura, says, ‘We wanted that engagement; we wanted that passion and now we've got it.’
The future for DEAL
Stockport's School Improvement Team is delighted with the progress, ‘… the vast majority of schools have now got a DEAL action plan to support teachers …what has been particularly welcome is the renewed passion for drama work in our schools’. The final phase, ‘embed and extend’, will see teachers take the lead not only by renewing and re-fashioning strategies but also by re-modelling their curriculum to become more dramatic, more active, and therefore more engaging.