The Paper Birds are a UK-based theatre company, founded in 2003. They are known for their verbatim pieces and devised work, including In a Thousand Pieces, Thirsty and Others.
This CPD pack focuses on structuring devising theatre. It comes with a link to a video in which creators Kylie, Jenna and Georgia explain all the different elements. They then provide exercises that can be used to help encourage research into areas such as verbatim, history, politics, public culture and facts and statistics. The depth in the methodology makes it extremely relevant to approaches with both GCSE and A-level devised work. Within the video there are examples of a company putting the exercises into practice. While you wouldn't necessarily want to show the whole video to the students, as it is very much aimed at teachers as a CPD session, it would definitely be beneficial to share clips of the work.
A section of the CPD that I really like is the approach to encouraging groups to come up with a mission statement. This ensures that ensembles are really clear about who they are and what they want to achieve in their performance.
Teachers are then provided with a series of exercises that Paper Birds use to explore creating scenes and narrative. They explore devising the fragments that are the five key elements of a performance: character and narrative, verbatim, movement, motif and exposing the method. They give examples using a range of ideas that encourage to think out of the box of how you may usually approach ideas and encourage students to explore in more depth. Throughout the CPD, they include clips of their own performances, which are discussed and linked to the skills and methods that they outline. These clips can definitely be used with students to make them think about different ways to perform.
As an experienced teacher, I found it very interesting to listen to the ideas and approaches that they were using to explore themes and research. I found that this refreshed my own ideas and approaches, which perhaps had become a bit stale. A useful resource to really refresh approaches to devised work.