Engagement in action

Many years ago, when I was an educator, I sat watching a school play and thought – what if the students created the story and wrote the script? I imagined it would be a lot more relevant and meaningful if they were to craft the tale right from the beginning. So, I put out the call and low and behold had 60+ students show up over lunch time.

First piece of business was to chunk the different parts of the process. I’ll acknowledge that engagement, that is learners co-creating and leading activities, requires more time to determine and figure out processes. It is this time that facilitates powerful learning, such as in this case,

o What is a script and how do I write one?

o How are auditions held?

o Who will design the set?

Instead of having these be teacher, or as I like to call them learning facilitator decisions, the learners decide how things proceed. I vividly remember families being blown away that all of the ideas and storyline had been generated by the children. I think they'd never imagined what was possible with a student-led play.

Over my career as an educator, I supported two student-led plays. In both cases, I witnessed the creative, innovative voices and actions of learners fully engaged in presenting a play from scratch!

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Have a lovely week.

Katy