This past week, I have been reminded that we stand on the shoulders of educational giants. One of those ‘giants’ is the masterful teacher of drama, Dorothy Heathcote.
I have enjoyed watching her work in the extraordinary BBC Omnibus: Three Looms Waiting.
As a drama major in my own teacher training and having used drama so significantly in my teaching and leadership through the years, I recognise the sharp intelligence of Dorothy’s method.
Despite the 50 years since the filming of this BBC Omnibus, the lessons of her extraordinary teaching resonate today as much as they did then.
The opening sequence captures Dorothy working with a group of 14 boys in a residential facility. The camera captures her inviting them to suggest a topic as a context for their drama. They choose to be captured as prisoners of war.
A complex process drama then ensues with every boy committed in utter seriousness to suspending belief and allowing themselves to play their part.
Dorothy explains that she does not enter teaching with definite ideas about what is going to happen. She wants her students to bring forward their ideas so that the drama is not a form of acting but an expression of themselves dealing in real-time with the scenarios they explore.
Watching her pedagogical technique illuminates her brilliance. I noticed the firm structure she brought to her students’ ideas creating boundaries that enabled her to guide them towards moments of brave action, searing honesty, and group decision-making. These decisions were made in the moment, action, and reaction, none of which was planned or predictable.
It got me thinking about the challenge of modern teaching which in many ways has lost the memory of an education that arises out of powerful processes and is not driven by fixed outcomes decided before the learning process begins.
Such an approach is a wonderful example of the art of teaching and why machines can never replace the sort of careful thrust and parry of the interaction between teacher and student.
It is the perfect example of Learner Agency where the teacher, Dorothy, enables her students to have influence within their learning. She plays a careful role in guiding the work to ensure quality is derived from it.
She does this by using questions that are floated at her students but have clear intent to signal something she needs them to notice, to consider. Her students almost never fail to pick up on these cues without fully recognising them as the acts of teaching they are designed to be.
This example of Dorothy’s teaching is not machine-like, not ruled by adherence to an algorithm, nor ruled by an outcome that must be achieved. It cannot easily be measured.
Her method reminds us that if education is truly to be emancipatory and democratic then it must activate the individual as an agent in their own thinking and actions.
I have been working to support a deepening of the teacher as a professional in their understanding of Learner Agency across a large Kāhui Ako. This community of schools is exploring the responsibility to step closer to students in support of them as agent in their own learning.
Learner Agency is often mistakenly defined as enabling freedom for students to choose what they learn about. This is not a useful definition and one that often leaves teachers guessing at how they can ‘teach’ or be ‘intentional’ in bringing the curriculum to students.
A more useful way of thinking of Learner Agency lies in Dorothy’s approach to drama. Think of Learner Agency as maximising a student’s ‘influence’ within their own learning. Such a definition enables young people to contribute to their learning in meaningful ways and supports a teacher to be intentional.
Think too, of Dorothy’s careful learning design—of her invitation to students to own and participate in their learning and the prompts she provides in her role as the teacher to commit them to quality.
Such powerful teaching lives in the sciences as well as the arts. Perhaps one of the most powerful descriptions of this sort of pedagogy in an Aotearoa New Zealand context can be found in the early childhood curriculum Te Whāriki. The following descriptor of the value of working theories is a profound treatise on how to teach (including in content-specific learning areas such as science) in a way that maximises how students learn.
Where tamariki are given opportunities to “bump up against” new, diverse experiences, test out their ideas and actions, and express their thinking to others, their working theories are more likely to become visible. When this happens, the potential to expand thinking, and therefore learning, is significant if the adults around them are tuned in – aware of what to look for and how to respond.
These theories are called “working” because they change and evolve. This happens as experiences and interactions serve to disrupt and challenge existing ideas and assumptions. It is through this process that new ways to respond and make meaning are learnt (Te Whāriki Early Childhood Curriculum p.23).
Dorothy’s voice from the past is a clarion call to educators to keep the child and their meaning-making at the centre of pedagogy. This is the expertise of teachers, and we need to sing its value from the rooftops.
