Teaching Year 7 Drama remotely via Zoom

Using vocal and physical warm-ups, Shakespearean dialogue and design elements, this scheme of work was created to allow the teaching of Year 7 Drama remotely through Zoom in normal class sizes or whole year groups at a time. It introduces students to famous lines of Shakespeare and also includes small, easily manageable pieces of practical work. It also works as a Zoom scheme of work for Year 8 or 9 and can be adapted for class-based work on return to school. The lines of Shakespeare can be chosen and adjusted to reflect your teaching groups.

The scheme of work is broken down into lessons (averaging 50 minutes) with individual tasks for each session. Catch-up sessions are built into the scheme as well as extension tasks, to incorporate differentiation.

It assumes that students will be able to film their own work and hopefully then share it with Drama teachers via applications like Box or Google classroom. The work filmed will be extremely short and therefore should take up relatively little memory space.

This scheme explains the teaching process, but to support this we used PowerPoint versions of key tasks and lessons, which students could then download before the lessons, and follow should there be any issues regarding connectivity during the lesson. Students seem to find PowerPoints very useful when working on their own remotely, as it recreates reasonably closely the usual classroom experience.

The scheme of work is broken down into lessons (averaging 50 minutes) with individual tasks for each session. As Year 7 students often work at very varying paces on their own when taught remotely, catch-up sessions are built into the scheme and extension tasks, to incorporate differentiation.