Reflection 3

This unit was a challenge and I wasn’t expecting it to be. I teach Stanislavski every year, but this year I changed it up a bit because I really wanted to make the beginning portion of the lesson more interactive and hands-on than in past years. This was both successful and a big flop.

The thing that was the most successful was including videos in each daily lesson. I talked less and the students were more attentive than if they were copying vocabulary and then listening to me talk.

Another successful part of this lesson was breaking down the vocabulary over the span of the unit. Doing just a little vocabulary each day was a nice jumping off point. We didn’t get tired of it and it got the classes to pay attention at the beginning of the class period. I also didn’t give a Stanislavski test this year. I took their completed vocabulary as a test grade. This was a good idea for this year as students are struggling with note taking, class participation and behavior. I don’t know that I will always do this as it was super easy to just get the notes from a friend.

One thing that I thought was going to be a successful addition to this assignment was daily activities where students got up and partnered up to complete a task before writing about it. Many students did not participate. I want to keep this portion of the lesson, but need to come up with different activities and ways of monitoring participation.

I really liked the idea of students picking their own monologues from a published work and reading that work. With the ease and availability of e-scripts, this is much easier to do than in the past. Students were really good about reading their scripts in class, but struggled with comprehension of the play as a whole and how their character fit into the story.

We did not finish this unit and the students did not perform their monologues as intended. They did read them to the class and we chatted about them after, but we didn’t see this unit through the way I had planned. I have ideas for the future as to how to make this work better and will chalk this one up as a learning experience.

I think the changes I made were positive and I will continue to tweak this lesson and teach it every year.

-December 2021