The Chase Theatre Educators Fellowship Program seeks to provide support for professional development needs and artistic revitalization for outstanding theatre teachers in Los Angeles County. Educators may design individualized courses of study that will provide engagement in their own creative work, the opportunity interact with other professional theatre artists and educators, and the ability to stay current with new teaching practices and resources.
Reposted from the Center Theatre Group Chase Fellowship blog.
I can’t help but fixate on the teaching style of this week’s sketch writing teacher. It is an interesting contrast to last week’s teacher, as are his instructional objectives. Last week’s teacher’s objective was to set the groundwork, the structure of the sketch writing process. He was neither boring nor charismatic…he was consistent, very organized and amazingly explicit in what he required from us. His discourse was lean and always relevant. He was patient and incredibly accepting and supportive of all his students’ work…in a classroom with many inexperienced sketch writers.
This week’s teacher is charged with taking us from the basic sketch structure and formulas we learned last week to helping us find our own voices, our personal stamp on sketch writing. Classroom learning has gone from linear skill-based learning to a more abstract, creative brainstorm. Last week, I experienced explicit instruction and was given formulas/outlines for developing my ideas. The lessons were scaffold, beginning as short, one joke, and one-twist objectives and each day formulas were added that required longer and longer sketches with three or four beats to construct and heighten. I realize how essential explicit instruction is in helping students master any type of basic skills. In my quest to inspire my 2e students to work toward their potential, I might have failed them by focusing more on keeping them emotionally engaged than being explicit in stating and restating the objectives we were working toward.
2e students are adept at covering their incomprehension and it is up to the 2e teacher to beat them at this game. Many times, the high intelligences of 2e learners belie their lack of comprehension. They will smile and nod at you, pretending they “get it,” because admitting they don’t is like admitting they were mistakenly deemed gifted. This irrational belief is a consequence of both their chronological age and desire for peer acceptance, and their asynchronous emotional and cognitive development as 2e learners. Regardless, a good strategy for checking who is clear in the task objective and who is not is asking each student to state the objective orally before beginning the task, and asking a few quick follow up questions that ensure the student is using his words and not repeating yours. This can and should be done discreetly, so the student does not feel his lack of understanding opens him to ridicule by his peers.
Though I believe I am learning useful formulas and exercises for teaching basic writing skills through sketch comedy writing, my long-term goal in fulfilling my fellowship, I am also processing the way in which I am being taught these skills, and see the areas in which I can improve my own instructional approach…a welcomed, additional benefit to learning sketch comedy writing that I did not expect.
