Teaching and learning as theater

I watched Les Misérables recently with my family and as the show washed over my senses, I was reminded why I love theater. Well presented theater goes the extra mile to bring a story to life, to make it seem real and important. Could school work like this?

Teaching with the believable scenario



I was a theater major in college and as such I acted, designed and built sets, designed and ran lighting and sound and helped dismantle sets after performances. If you haven’t figured it out yet I’ll tell you, I attended a small college where you had to do and learn to do everything. Theater was no small part of my young life and it gave me many opportunities, including the opportunity to meet the woman who became my wife. We started dating during a production of Spoon River Anthology. Both of us had multiple roles in the show and I was assistant set designer with the keys to a University maintenance truck. Seeing her play multiple characters and dialects and personalities was a great test drive for a relationship. Eighteen years of marriage and one kid later, I’m still doing theater. I’m not in plays constantly but I’m staging learning in theatrical ways to bring the script (learning) to life for young actors. Something magic always happened after set day when the lights on the set worked and the furniture was there. Newbie actors would say things like, “This is like real life”. Once a group got to this level of commitment, the entire cast started to believe and the acting got much more believable.


In my classroom I spent far too many years not remembering the magic of theater and it’s ability to make an experience real and relevant. I did what the education department taught me to do. I designed lessons and followed Madeline Hunter’s steps and “did” learning “to” kids, not with them. I could win them into compliance with my personality but they were doing my lessons, on my stage and walking through their predesigned roles according to a pretty uninspired script. It looked good and I believe kids learned a lot but the opportunity to personalize their classroom performance was limited to individual (small) efforts, afforded room or space in the script.


Script One:


Teacher. OK kids, today we’ll review the vocabulary for automotive design.

Student One. Will we be tested on this?

Teacher. Of course

Teacher. Tomorrow you’ll get your 4”x 4”x 8” piece of clay and begin your car designs


In this script, kids were challenged to do individual designs according to a predesigned lesson I’d done for years. I liked this lesson and was proud that it simulated a real industry in the real world. It was published in Arts and Activities magazine and I thought I was really pushing the envelope.


Fast forward a few seasons and one Brain Based Learning book later and automotive design script looked like this:


Script Two:


Facilitator. You’ve all been hired by Chrysler to design their next sports car. They want it to have bold styling but to look as if it has grown organically from their current line.

Automotive Designer One. What is the timeframe?

Facilitator. Chrysler wants to see early prototype sketches by Friday

Automotive Designer Two. Friday! Good grief, no way.

Facilitator. It’s an aggressive timeline for sure but I know we have the talent on your teams to pull it off.


See my PBL template


I moved my classes grades 1-12 to what I came to call the corporate construct and the approach was rooted in the PBL model, coupled with a theatrical focus on pretending the situation was real. Some might call what I was doing a simulation but to me each unit was like a play where we were writing the drama as we went, based on a believable scenario. The problems were always aligned with those challenges faced by companies and since I taught art, they were designed to support my curriculum. If I was teaching the human form, we were hired to create a fashion catalogue, therefore covering the human form in the context of the fashion industry. The glorious side effect was that numerous other curricular opportunities that presented themselves along the way. I was teaching the human form but principles like proportion, color scheme, contrast, pattern and much more became part of the problem to solve. Experiences were embedded in relevance as they grew organically from the experience. If I was to teach basic design, we were hired by Nike to design a new basketball shoe. (there is a lot of design in a shoe!) Complexity was introduced as we tried to guess what styles, colors and symbols customers might find appealing. Whatever I was teaching, I found a way to embed it in a real world scenario and the learners played the part of employees in a company with an innovation focus. Of all of the approaches I employed over my 13 year tenure in the classroom, this one returned the richest dividends in terms of engagement, career focus, motivation and collaboration among and between learners. I continue to refine this approach based on research and reading I do and I partner with schools to implement this and like approaches in classrooms. Books like Brain Rules put new fuel in my tank as I continue to focus on real world and engaging approaches to education.


I invite you to visit my PBL website called Innovations Unlimited and share your thinking about the ways we can make engaging theater out of the education process.