Reflection 2

I have to admit that I was biased to this unit from the start. I really fell in love with this process over the summer and was most excited to teach this unit to my students. Again, I only attempted this unit with Advanced Theatre. I have a class of 11 this year and it was easy to gather the supplies needed and provide the time required to accomplish this unit for that size class.

In the future, I would definitely give my classes more time to watch each others Crankies. I would like to make it more of an event because it was such a long process. It felt too rushed to try to watch them all in a class period or two. I would have liked to have taken more time to chat with the class about what they liked and what they could have worked on to improve their performance. I would have loved to have given students more time to congratulate one another on a job well done.

This was one of those projects where some students did exactly what they needed to get the grade they wanted and some students felt like I did about the process and wanted to keep trying things and adding to their story. Some students chose to decorate their Crankie theatre and one student used his Thanksgiving break to build his theatre out of wood and decorate the front with foam.

Another place that students experimented was with editing their filmed performances. I have covered film and editing in previous years and they took that knowledge and applied it to this process. It was really interesting compared to what a live performance would have looked like.

I will definitely do this project again. I don’t think I will do it every year because I want to keep including it in the film section of the class and we rotate between animated and live action film in that unit. This is an interesting combination of both. I also want it to feel like a perk of being in the advanced class and something they can look forward to.

-December 2021