All The School’s A Stage: Embedding drama techniques across the curriculum

Published: 12 March 2021 

Sarah Seleznyov, Director of the London South Teaching School Alliance, describes the learning journey undertaken by artists and teachers over the course of their TDF programme, All the School’s A Stage, which finished in Spring 2020.

All The School’s A Stage is a partnership between Shakespeare’s Globe and London South Teaching School Alliance. The project sought to enable teachers to embed learning from a short-term project sustainably into whole school practice. It explored how artist practitioners could support teachers to embed drama techniques into the curriculum, making a long-term sustainable difference to teaching and learning in seven participating primary schools.

Phase one of the project used Shakespeare’s iconic plays to provide teachers in Year 1 and 3 with the skills and confidence to incorporate practical, arts-based approaches to literacy into their classroom practice. Skilled artist practitioners from The Globe modelled how to use drama and structured role-play in relation to two Shakespeare plays per year group. Over five weeks of structured collaboration, team-teaching and coaching, allowing multiple opportunities for teachers to practice their newly learned skills, the artist practitioners supported four teachers from seven primary schools to gradually take responsibility for delivering the pre-planned units of work. A combination of training, expert modelling, in-class support, coaching and mentoring, team teaching and focused feedback from a supportive peer eventually leading to independent delivery, led to both qualitative and quantitative evidence of improved learning for all pupils, but especially those experiencing severe disadvantage.

“[the pupil] loved A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She was thoroughly engaged through-out the module and she particularly enjoyed all the magic in the story and the opportunity to explore the story through drama. [She] has increased dramatically in her creative writing. She has truly found her author’s voice and writes with purpose, humour and enthusiasm. Her stories are an absolute joy to read.”

Teacher, Year 3 

The Globe had run this successful Shakespearean storytelling project for several years with teachers and pupils, but had never before explored strategies to embed these pedagogies across a whole school. Phase two was therefore an experimental phase, in which the four trained teachers in each of the seven schools would disseminate their learning to their school colleagues, and effect whole school policy and practice change.

With the support of experts in school improvement from the Teaching School Alliance and expert artist practitioners from The Globe, teachers first began to apply these new pedagogies to non-Shakespearean units of work, thereby embedding the techniques into their curricula. The teachers were then trained in approaches to designing and leading professional development, both the theory from research evidence, and the practice, from observing Globe Education Practitioners leading professional development sessions with other schools. Next, they worked as a team to design and lead a series of whole school professional development sessions across 2019–20, replicating the experience they enjoyed in the first year of the project, demonstrating how to embed these pedagogies into units of teaching, and finally using them to reshape the curriculum across the school.

As the balance of expertise shifted from the Teaching School Alliance and The Globe experts’ to the Lead Teachers, there was a deeper engagement with the project’s goals and a commitment to really making a success of the project. In each school, a natural leader emerged from the team of four teachers, who became a champion for the project and drove it forwards. Not only did the pedagogies become embedded in participating schools’ curricula, but so did Shakespeare, an accidental by-product of the project. Several schools began to teach one Shakespeare play in each year, or to plan whole school Shakespearean units of work.

The project showed us that whole school change with an arts focus is best achieved by expert educators working in a co-constructed way alongside expert arts practitioners. It demonstrated that empowering teachers and leaders helps drive through sustainable change in schools. We believe the lessons we learned present a blueprint for arts projects seeking to achieve the same goals in the future.

Read the full impact evaluation and read in more detail about the project in our article for Chartered College of Teaching’s Impact Magazine.