Pre-Internship ReflectionMatthew Carr

Following is my pre-internship reflection. I structured it so that my LIVED lessons and their content are in my bulk body paragraphs, as well as the events of note. Following those, I have my PDP goals and my cooperating teacher’s comments. Finally, I have an “in summary” followed by possible PDP goals for my internship.

Orientation (Thursday, March 5)Mr. Kris Dueck set up a temporary desk in his office for Eric and I, which is nice. His drama classes are very engaged and eager, which is a common thread throughout the entire student body at Luther. Eric and I explored the school during the second period while Mr. Dueck prepped for his day. He teaches periods 3, 5, 7, and 8. First off was his Drama 9 class, which is small (9 students). When we arrived in the drama room, Mr. Dueck said “good morning” and he got a cold response, basically nothing back. He stopped what he was doing and said, “do you know what humans do? They say good morning to one another, and when they do that, people say good morning back, and if you keep doing this, it may become rote, and you might find yourselves doing this to humans outside of theatre. Drama is as much about the stage as it is about learning to be human.” Mr. Dueck clearly had a great rapport with these 9th grade students, and the general tone of this interaction was lighthearted. I found this to be an amusing interaction, and I enjoyed the fact that he finds small, teachable moments wherever he can.

The 9th grade drama class had finished up their unit on method acting. They had done an activity where they looked at scripts, which were excerpts from a play entitled After Liverpool. The scripts didn’t have any information in the dialog or stage direction to give setting or other details, so the students had to decide what their scenes were about and what the motivation of their character was. Class concluded with a short activity where everyone mimed doing an action, focusing on a task we do alone. Mr. Dueck urged the class to keep their movements realistic. He gave the example of miming using a telephone; people usually gesture with their thumb and pinky held out as if their hand was a telephone. People don’t actually do that when they use a telephone, so try to refrain from fake movements or gestures like that. He also spoke about “acting with your scars”; we’re deciding what the motivations of are characters are, so we can use our past experiences and the emotions they make us feel to inform the actions and expressions of our characters.

Chapel is period 4 every day. Some chapel periods are spent as “tag” days (which is like a homeroom, but the students’ tag groups are comprised of students from grades 9 through 12. Throughout the school there are 6 groups in total, each named after a planet. I can’t recall which planet Mr. Dueck’s tag group was named after). Today, chapel period was a tag period, and Mr. Dueck’s tag group had a student that I recognized from teaching guitar last year at Mother Teresa Middle School. He recognized me and came up to me after tag and we had a nice chat. I asked how he is enjoying Luther, and he said “lots of homework!”. During tag on this

day, they were meeting to brainstorm ideas for service day. Service day is a day in April that the whole school spends volunteering.

During period 5 Eric and I sat in on IB English with Mrs. Wilkinson. The class was working on commentary exercises with the Sophocles play Antigone. The students were quite advanced, their groups were well organized in their tasks, roles, ad planning ahead. They had a strong grasp on the material.

PD Day (Friday, March 6)I decided to attend the PD Day as they had a lecture and workshop with Dr. Angela Weenie. She read from a book called One Drum, about tobacco offerings. She gave us a brief personal and professional history, speaking to ways of indigenizing education throughout her history. She taught us a greeting in plains Cree and encouraged us to try it with our neighbors (Tanisi, Namoya nantow). She spoke about respecting beliefs, indigenizing, about the trickster in Saulteaux stories. She urged us to teach from the heart, we’re all indigenous to this earth. Acknowledge place as a teacher and learn and respect the customs of where you are. She supplied us with a list of great books as resources, and there were some breakout groups and question work. It was interesting to see the different approaches to indigenizing the classrooms at Luther.

Day 1 (Monday, Match 9)Drama 9, period 3Today Eric and I co-taught for the first time. We began by playing a game of whoosh, then we sat down and created a talking circle. In talking circle, we each introduced ourselves and mindfully expressed our position. I spoke about the importance of positioning, and about how it is important that we reflect on where we are and how we may be complicit to colonialism. We introduced the play we would be working with, and gave roles, and read through the play, stopping to talk about the content and the culture illustrated in the play. We had about 5 minutes left, and one of the extensions we had was to listen to one of the songs that are used in the play, the “Women’s warrior Song”, but it wouldn’t load. We spoke with Mr. Dueck afterwards and he cautioned us that the WIFI was really bad on the stage (which is where the drama classes were held), and he suggested we download media we would like to show/play to ensure it works well.

PDP Goal: Both Eric and I had the same goal, “to consistently ask questions to engage students; strive for in-depth responses”.When we spoke about the content of the play, some of the responses were vague from the students, but so were our questions. In conversation with Mr. Dueck, he suggested we have better prompts and/or questions; they should be more specific, and maybe supply the students with some good examples. Mr. Dueck mentioned that we should give some time for students to think, don’t rush to another topic. There may be moments that feel awkward, and it is a natural tendency to want to get out of those moments, but try to get used to them. He gave us some pointers; “whenever teaching a game or exercise, it is important that students feel it is

intentional and connected. Don’t be afraid to articulate this for students (for example, draw the connections to power and control and think about how this might provide a segue to talking about residential schools)”.

Some general comments from Mr. Dueck:“I like the opening exercise of positioning- grounding ourselves in our cultural identity. Good modelling by Matt at the beginning”

“Important to consider that we live here now but our tradition is not from here”

“Do students know what ‘complicit’ means? This might be a good thing to engage with?”

“I like how Matt stopped during reading the script to speak about land acknowledgement”

“What links might you articulate for students that might pull in previous knowledge (method acting checklist)?

Justice class, period 7This class had gone on a trip to El Salvador. Mr. Dueck had led the class in a discussion about the criticisms that can be made about mission trips; they are costly, the money spent going on a mission trip can be better utilized by the locals. “Mission trips” should have participants who want to learn, immerse, and plant seeds that grow. After they return home, they should consider visiting again, and continue the relationships they have made over a long distance. It’s about helping them, not yourself.

Mr. Dueck made a large diagram on the board and brainstormed/reflected on injustices that they witnessed in El Salvador. On the diagram, he had the class go up and write the struggles, issues, and injustices that they think happen in El Salvador and which ones happen in Canada. The two circles overlapped and most of the injustices went in the middle; he was illustrating that, though things may be worse-off in El Salvador, the problems that are occurring over there are mainly the same problems that are occurring over there.

Drama 10, period 8First group presented workshop on Elizabethan Theatre/Drama to start off the Student As Educator presentations.

Day 2 (Tuesday, March 10)Drama 9, period 3We began our radio play adaptation of the radio play Aunt Lottie’s Leftover Café that we got off of a drama education resource website. We did a trust game to illustrate trust and collaboration. We did a silhouette game to get used to working with the “scrim”. The game was that a group would receive a prompt and they would have to act it out behind the curtain with only a few minutes to prepare, and then the other groups (the audience) would discuss what worked and what did not. The class was divided up into three groups of three, each group did

two rounds, one round with a prompt from me, one round with a prompt from the class. When debriefing at the end of class, we still lead with vague questions, but they got specific after. We should LEAD with specificity. Class got kind of rambunctious during the activity. We wanted them to have more awareness about physicality when behind the screen.

PDP Goal: “Give space for collaboration and responses”.Mr. Dueck spoke to my PDP goal, saying “I’m not sure I saw particular attention paid to your PDP goal for this lesson. I think however that you did give groups time and space to collaborate when groups were coming up with small scrim scenes.”

“The opening game was affective and well-linked to your lesson content, and students seemed to enjoy it. It’s great for you to build trust building into a warm-up.”

“Good references back to method acting.”

“The scrim activity was really engaging and students seemed to immediately understand the concept!”

“You let groups go more than once. This is fine, just something to consider in the context of what you had planned for the lesson. You were still playing the game at 9:58. In the end, this worked out well.”

“Ending the class is a thing to consider. You might want to have their focused attention at the very end so that the dismissal of the class has a sense of finality to it”Day 3 (Wednesday, March 11)Drama 9, period 3Our advisor, Brian Hicks, came to observe Eric and I teach Drama 9. We did some warmups to explore physicality and creative collaboration. The warmups went a couple of minutes over, which was okay, but we could have used the time while creating our stage directions. We had planned to finish our “devising” and perform what we have created, and then debrief the process. This will have to be moved to the beginning of tomorrow’s class. Good feedback from Mr. Hicks and Mr. Dueck. We skipped chapel to do our post-conference with both of them.

PDP Goal: “Use names often and with confidence.”Mr. Dueck said I used names often, but there were some opportunities I missed.

Some general feedback:“I heard Matt say a number of times, ‘it is your performance, it is your choice, it is up to you’. I think this is good.”

“You let some creative chaos happen for nearly 10 minutes once students were working with the shadows. This can be good and bad, but it might have been good to structure this a little more as once you tried to reign them in, they did not hear many of your prompts or questions.”

“They were calling you by your first names, are you cool with this?”

“*Student* left to answer her phone… she came right back and was not an issue. Just reminded me that phone usage is something that you need to think about.”

Day 4 (Thursday, March 12)Drama 9, period 3We finished up our work with Leftover Café, and did three run-throughs of the performance. The first run-through was a rehearsal. I encouraged the class to do a third run-through because they were very good and I wanted to videotape it, but unfortunately my phone “gave up” recording about 30 seconds in. We returned to the Vera Manuel play, reading through the script once more. *Student* suggested skipping reading the stage directions (to save time). I initially wanted to resist going this route, but I decided to have a brief conversation about the importance of the stage directions in this play. A good deal of the performance and context that is present in this script lies within the stage directions. I took the opportunity to ask the class what they thought. I wanted them to consider what was important in the stage directions. I asked them if we should or shouldn’t read them, and there was not much of a response. *Student* said, “I just thought we’d get through more of the script this way.” I agreed and said she was right, but stressed that the stage directions are very important in this play. I decided to try out her suggestion to save time, and “see what it feels like”. I had skipped ahead to the scrim scenes after reading some of the script to jog their memories. I didn’t want to go into the scrim scenes cold because we had just spent 1.5 days doing something else. In the future, I wouldn’t break up the projects (the scripts) this way. Once we skipped ahead to the scrim scenes, I took some extra time to read the stage directions that introduced and accompanied the scrim scenes. The actors positioned on the stage to emulate a class photo at a residential school accompanied by the song “Took the Children Away” sets the tone for the following scrim scenes.

Because we haven’t had much of a closure (Mr. Dueck had suggested we try to be conscious of doing this with our lessons), we had planned to spend the last ten minutes on a debrief and preparation for the next class. To make sure I was on schedule, I set an alarm for this time on my phone because the stage doesn’t have a clock. My alarm went off while we were reading the script, and I turned it off and kept going. In our post-conference, Mr. Dueck commented about me getting a phone call. I clarified that it was an alarm. After I had gone home, I had realized that I should have addressed the sound of my phone to the class, and told them that it’s telling me that we only have 10 minutes left of class. Also, I realized that if I want to use an alarm in the future, I should consider setting it to vibrate. We finalized our lesson by asking about the process we went through for Leftover Café and how we can utilize what we have learned in our next adaptation.

PDP Goal: “Asses students’ understanding of the connection between residential schools and Vera Manuel’s illustration of the destruction of family in her play Journey through the Past to the Future.”Mr. Dueck’s comments:

“Conversation around clothing and situation with the scrim scenes had elements of checking for understanding.”

“Interesting conversation with *Student*- you can say no to students. I don’t think it’s good to not read stage directions. I like the way you allowed the student suggestion around stage direction to happen but then stopped and addressed it. Thoughts?”

Day 5 (Friday, March 13)Sanctions are underway and teachers are not arriving until 15 minutes before class. I bus it and I have to arrive before that in order to make it on time, and it is a bit eerie being there alone, just with the janitors.

Drama 9, period 3We did talking circle and a brief warm-up of Eric’s, then we went straight into the Vera Manuel play. We gave new roles because we wanted everyone to have a role. We assigned one student to be the director. We read through the scrim scenes, and then I spoke about Duncan Campbell Scott (he made attendance at residential schools compulsory) and read some quotes from and showed some pictures from Shattering the Silence. During last class, one of the students had stated that he hasn’t seen pictures of residential school class photos (which is in the play setting the tone for the scrim scenes), so we looked at some. We looked at the iconic photos of Thomas Moore, one beside the other, like a bit of a before and after image of his old clothing and his “civilized” clothing.

We got up and began working on adapting our scrim scenes into silhouette scenes (3 scenes). Our student director gave good direction. Eric worked with scene 1, and I worked with scenes 2 and 3. We ran out of time, and I said that we need to revisit on Monday. We chose to close the lesson by listening to “Took The Children Away” and I stopped it during the guitar solo to give some context; the artist is an Australian Aborigine, not Canadian. “Why do you think Vera Manuel chose to include this song by this artist in her play? *Student* spoke eloquently about the tone that it set for the scrim scenes. I agreed and thanked her for her input. Also, when this play was written (1989), there may not have been many songs from Canada that would fit as well. I continued the song and we finished off the class. We said our goodbyes and spoke about returning to these scenes on Monday, and I asked about the upcoming birthdays that were mentioned during talking circle.

PDP Goal: “Asses students’ understanding of the connection between residential schools and Vera Manuel’s illustration of the destruction of family in her play Journey through the Past to the Future.”

Mr. Dueck’s comments:“Provided background to the issue- speaking about Duncan Campbell Scott, this was good.”

“It was good to prompt them with ‘imagine you were in this situation’.”

“Great use of quotes and pictures. This bit of teaching did illustrate the connections between the play and history and you did some checking in.”

“Did a good job at splitting between two groups and working with students in an informal way that still kept them focused.”

“Good link to Aborigines in Australia.”

“It seemed like you had a bit more time than you thought and could have used a bit more time with the shadow staging.”

Day 6 (Monday, March 16)There is plenty of talk in our office in the morning about teaching-at-a-distance in case school is closed due to COVID-19. What will that look like for drama, a physical practice that particularly benefits from meeting in person? Discussed Google classroom/Zoom adaptations and the modifications to the projects in Drama 20/30. We spoke about how we might have to change our lessons for our classes.

Drama 9, period 3We finished practicing our scrim scenes from Vera Manuel play. We ran through each scene and spoke as a class as to what worked and what didn’t physicality-wise, and what worked and what didn’t with the way students have approached their roles. We did one run-through with the lights on and settled on a working direction. Then I redirected the class to the lyrics I wrote on the white board, the chorus to “Took the Children Away”. I played the chorus once and sang it, and then I encouraged the class to sing along, and payed it twice more. I told the class that I will be playing the song to open up our performance, and I asked them if I should play it at the end as well. They said that we should sing it at the end as well, and they also suggested that I play it in between each scrim scene. That was a great suggestion and it fit very well, as I saw it. I made a point of asking our student director what she thought and told her that it was her decision. The student director had decided that it was good to play it at the beginning and the end, and that I should play it in between the scenes, but without the lyrics. Taking her direction, I said that this was a great idea. I told the class that I would play through the progression for the chorus twice in between each scene, and I played it to illustrate the length it would take.

We then ran through the play with the floodlights out, only the lights to create the silhouettes were on. We ran through the play once, and then Mr. Dueck offered to film it with my phone. We then ran through it once more. I think that knowing they were being filmed helped them speak louder, and also be quieter in the wings, when they were not on stage, but they were also clearly more nervous and they flubbed a lot of their lines, which is totally fine. Because of this, I suggested we do it once more, and some of the students were very eager to give it another try.

After our final run-through, we felt good about our show. More students sang along with the song, too. I made a point of breaking down our roles. I asked each student how they felt. I

asked them if they had any challenges delivering the lines of their character. This took some encouragement, but we got there. There was good discussion about feeling different than what our characters felt or thought. Was it hard to try to realize our roles when they conflicted with our actual thoughts and feelings? We spoke about portraying the characters stereotypically. One student brought up how she thought her character deserved to have her child taken away if she was neglecting it. But was she neglecting her child? What kind of evidence does the script give? What we know is that a mother never really means to neglect their child. We spoke about the struggles that some people face, spoke about addiction and family conflicts, maybe the mother had to go to work and couldn’t afford childcare? Maybe there was a babysitter that was untrustworthy or disagreed with the mother? There was some great conversation.

PDP Goal: Create more equity for ‘stage time’ for all members of the class.Mr. Dueck’s comments:“Structurally, the class was split into groups that gave all the opportunity to play roles. The split screen method got all the students working and acting at the same time.”

“You did not switch roles from what they had before, if giving students more lines was a concern, but this would take time.”

“You noticed that the group was taking a bit of extra time and went with *Student* to ensure she had a performance opportunity.”

“You said ‘I would like if someone could take the role (absent student)’. This was a good opportunity to give more ‘stage time’ to a student, and *Student* took it!”

In summary, I found this experience to be very exciting and educational. I was not expecting to do drama, but I absolutely loved it. I was very happy to be paired with Eric, as he was a team player and he had great ideas. I also really enjoyed my cooperating teacher; we know some of the same people and we share a similar sense of humor. He has great experience teaching drama and his feedback was practical and informative. I learned about ways of getting students to engage better, and how to give room for equity for all students.

On my mind a lot throughout the week (and one day) was assessment. There was great discussion and feedback, but how would I translate that into a mark? How would I communicate that to parents or the principal? This is something I will consider greatly when designing lesson content and activities for internship. I feel that I grew a lot as a facilitator for drama because there was a lot of the drama lexicon and scaffolding that I had minimal experience with, but I feel a lot more confident now. I also feel more confident talking to staff members and students in high school.

I have discovered the importance of voicing concerns and letting people know what I can or cannot do, and asking for help when I need it. I often want to be a “yes man”, but that can get me into trouble. I have noticed, throughout my time there, gradually, that I had switched from worrying about how I am going to do what I need to do, to concerning myself more with

helping students in their needs. I feel that building positive relationships is really important, and there are plenty of opportunities to do so. That being said, you’ve got to give students their space, especially in high school. Some PDP Goal ideas for internship:Strengthen my observational techniques while lecturing, during work periods, etc.

Do not allow students to use my first name.

Incorporate more structure during creative work periods.

Incorporate sound assessment practices that align with curriculum outcomes.

Utilize formative assessments when creating activities/projects.

Develop lessons that incorporate the students’ interests.

Artistic reflection:Below are two collages I created to reflect on my time at Luther College High School. As stated, my cooperating teaching taught Christian Ethics (referred to as “Justice” class), and his class had gone on a mission trip to El Salvador. From our periods observing that class, and during discussion, it didn’t appear to be a trip where they exercised traditional missionary activities (conversion to their faith, etc.) They spent their time making connections with people and learning about their culture.

For the first collage, the sky is outer space and the foreground illustrates a meeting of cultures. I decided to place it in outer space because, at the risk of being too banal, I thought that their mission trip was “out of this world” and they should “shoot for the stars”. The second collage is set in a beautiful sunset to illustrate a peaceful mood that I felt after getting settled into teaching the class at Luther, but it was cut short due to COVID-19 (setting sun). Both collages have characters with dog-heads which symbolize the method acting that the 9th grade class was working on before our arrival, and that our lessons were based around.