Unit 2 Part E: Final Review

 

The Drama Club is done and the performance has been performed. Now I am gonna review it personally and say if I think anything could have gone better.

What Went Well

I improved upon my leadership skills and have successfully organised a public showing of the performances. I feel quite proud of what we achieved over the course of the last few weeks and I feel like all the students learned something. This experience has helped boost my confidence by no small a degree and it has helped me to develop my skills in acting and in teaching. The greatest achievement we made was definitely our final performance that we gave to everyone. It felt good to see the performances that we had worked hard on over the last few weeks come to life and see people experience them.

Even Better If

I think I could have spent a little bit more time working on the club as the students could probably have done with a few extra weeks working on their performances. As the feedback that I received that I included in an earlier post states their was not enough time for too many rehearsals and whilst we did the best we could there were still little slip ups like a kid not looking at the audience. If I had given us a few more weeks, by pushing back the event, then I think we could have ironed out these mistakes and sorted everything out so that the pieces were more fluid and more enjoyable for the audience.

What I Have Learned

I improved my skills as I have said and I spent a while assisting with the performances so I have learned a few teaching techniques. Working with Rochelle has taught me a good deal about dealing with little people. She and I began with quite different styles of teaching when we began the club but when I notice people reacted better to her more light-hearted attitude to the club I began to imitate that and found the it produced positive results and a better performance from the kids. The feedback I got has shown me what I can do better and if I were to do it again I would take said feedback to heart and extend the process of performance making by a good month giving us enough time to create our own visions of the performance and not have to compromise them for the sake of meeting a rapidly approaching deadline.

 

 

Unit 2 Part D: Drama Club Performance

Today we performed our final pieces to the audience and got feedback for each one. The theme of each piece was the time and they based their performances on the poems that Rochelle  found on the internet. Photos above were taken by the audience and show the variety of performances techniques learned by these year 8s during the Drama club. Their faces are all hopefully blurred sufficiently by the way. I introduced the event talking to the audience for a few minutes about the time that the kids had spent rehearsing the performances and preparing for the public showing. Rochelle greeted everybody at the door and showed them to their seats whilst I talked to the kids about how everything would go down including order of their performances and when we would need to rap it up for.

The public showing helped me improve my leadership skills a good deal. I was organised by running the show smoothly and keeping everything within a strict time limit. We were able to get everything done in lunch including a feedback from the audience and so We didn’t run over time therefore being organised. I able to be flexible when one of the groups was missing a kid because they were running late. I rearranged the order that the groups would go on so that the group with missing kid could run after the other couple of groups thereby being able to perform with their entire group and not miss a crucial element of their performance. And I was focused the entire time as I made sure everybody paid attention to the performances and people were able to give feedback when the pieces ended.

I have included a paragraph written for me by an audience member where she talks about what she thought of the event.

“I think that the performances themselves were fairly impressive. You could tell that they had created them themselves as they were a little rough around the edges and it was fairly clear that they could have used a little bit more preparation but I think for what it was it was very impressive. The pronunciation was clear from all three groups and the movement was fluid. It was a little hard to tell what was going on at some points in some of them as they were fairly abstract but I think that was an intentional inclusion as I understand they were based on poems. The only thing I would say that definitely needed improvement was their positioning on the stage. I can’t imagine they had too many rehearsals but one child spent the whole performance with his back to me and I think that child have been handled better. Other than that I thought it was quite good. Well done.

 

Unit 2 Part D: Plan For Public Showing

On the 28th of March I am planning on hosting the public showing of the performances to an audience of teachers and my friends. The performances will start at 1.20 pm and end at 1.45. The audience should arrive at around 1.10pm in order to get everybody seated and ensure that anybody who is late does not interrupt the performances. There will be a 5 minute section at the end where the audience will give feedback and the cast will talk with everyone and then everyone should be out of the room by 1.55pm and the room be clear by 2pm.

Unit 2 Part C: Drama Club Feedback

We asked a few of the drama club members to complete a quick survey of what they thought of the club. This is a selection of opinions on the running of the club because the rest of the questions were filler and a few answers were inappropriate

Fun-filled Sissy Merrick

Different from everything else – Lilly Mai Cartwright

Always doing something interesting – Laddie Oxley

Like the variety of people but not the noise – Lisa Green

Like just doing drama stuff – Lottie King

Like the warn ups, doesn’t like poetry – Raquel Quinn

Whilst I did that my partner Rochelle had them answer a quick questionnaire about the club and I have included a photo of the results below.

 

 

Unit 2 Part B: Plan for Arts Event

Unit 2 Part C: Reflections 12/03/19

We have completed the performances last week and we are prepared to show our performance next week. I have organised for next lunch time to be reserved and for posters to go up around school to advertise the performance and get an audience going. The only problem with the performance next week is the chance that no body will show so I have arranged for a couple of teachers and a few friends to show up and watch it guaranteeing me an audience. I have developed my leadership skills significantly. Especially when it comes to orgnisation. Before I began developing my leadership skills I would not have set up this final showing before the day before but thanks to the progress I have made through this drama club I have organised this in enough time and made sure that if anything went wrong I would have had enough time to sort it out. I think that the benefits of this club is that I will not leave stuff to the last minute anymore an will sort them out before it is absolutely necessary.

Unit 2 Part C: Reflections 19/02/19

The Club has been going for three weeks now and I think that we are on schedule to perform to an audience on the 18th of March. My Leadership skills have improved after teh past two weeks as I have become used to leading these kids in the club. I had to be flexible and adapt to the events of the second club when it became clear that the club members would not be at a consistent number because some kids were off ill and some kids came new for that week. I organised everybody into their groups, allowing them to chose a partner and then I pared two pairs of partners up forming each group. Rochelle gave them a choice of poems and we both took control of one group. I had to be organised for the third week as I was given all of the documents for me to write up and I needed to bring them back fr the next session as had I left them then the session could well have been ruined as I would be unable to continue the development of each performance in  time for the public performance. Next week it is clear that I am gonna need to focus really hard as whilst we are making time their is a strong chance that we could fall out of the schedule and fall behind causing a big problem for my planned schedule.

Unit 2 Part C: Proof of Drama Club

The drama club has been going for around 5 weeks now. The crowd that it draws varies from week to week but we always have enough people to do some drama-y stuff.

I have developed a number of skills over the past 5 weeks of the club. Crowd control is one. The leadership roles that Rochelle and I took on has helped us to achieve the aims that we set at the start of the course and whilst I still can’t walk on walls, not for lack of trying, I believe that the club has helped me to improve my communication skills and my team working abilities.

Unit 2 Part C: Reflections 29/01/19

The first session of the drama club went well. We met with the students and welcomed to the club. We began with a game to learn each others names by throwing bean bags at each other and me and Rochelle used the session to get to know everyone who will be attending the club for the next two months. I have not yet had much of a chance to improve many of my skills as I have only been working on it for a week. But I can see that it will take a fair bit of working in order to get the club going as the students are fairly rowdy and one or two of them are fairly problematic. This reflection is quite short but I really don’t have much to write about at the moment.

Unit 2 Part B: Health & Safety

Fire- Ensure awareness of Fire exits an protocol. Familiarise self with protocal for school and check fire alarms are working and can be hard. (I’ll do this by hanging around until 4 O’Clock when the fire alarms are checked on a Wednesday.

Trip Hazards- Ensure the room is clear before the lunch time session and inform the students to watch whee they are stepping and do not leave any personal items lying around. I will also remove anything we are not making use of that session in order to minimise this risk.

Accidents/injury- Recognise issues when they arise and be aware of location of first aid box. Keep 999 on speed dial and ensure that students are being sensible.

I have reviewd this plan with Jasmine Evans who is a trained first responder or something similar and she has agreed that this plan could be used to help save someones life if it comes to it.