Fourteen Copies, Fifty-Five Students, Four Weeks: Teaching Drama as Performance
At a girls' senior high school in Kumasi, Mr Boateng has four weeks - twelve periods of 40 minutes - to teach a prescribed drama text, Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel, to a Form Two class of 55. The school owns 14 copies. Many students have bought commercial study guides containing scene summaries, character sketches and 'likely questions'; in class they recite the guide's phrases, such as 'Lakunle is a progressive but confused modern man', but cannot point to a line, explain why a character changes, or say what a scene looks like on stage. Mr Boateng's colleague advises reading the summaries aloud and doing past questions. The text carries a 25-mark essay question on the end-of-semester paper, which falls in week six.
1. Decide how the play will be taught in twelve periods with fourteen copies. Set out the plan and the principle behind it.
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Principle. With 14 copies for 55 students, line-by-line coverage is impossible and pretending otherwise wastes the term. Drama is also written to be spoken and performed, so hearing, staging and acting it is not a shortcut around reading - it is the mode of reading the genre requires. The teacher becomes the class's chief reader: the person who performs the text aloud so that every student has access to it.
Organising access. Fourteen copies means groups of four (one group of three), each with one copy and a rotating reading schedule: the copy goes home with a named student each night and the group reads the assigned scene aloud next morning. Key scenes are copied onto the chalkboard as short extracts, four to six lines at a time, so close reading happens from memory and from the board.
Twelve periods.
- 1-2: Orientation; who wants what from whom, tracked on the board as a table; the opening scene read aloud by the teacher.
- 3-5: Scene jigsaw. Expert groups prepare one scene each and teach it to home groups: two-minute summary, two key lines, one question for the class.
- 6-7: Conflict and turning point; close reading of two short extracts on the board, arguing about what a character's words conceal.
- 8: Staging. Two groups perform short scenes; the class directs.
- 9-10: Essay workshop: thesis, evidence, commentary.
- 11: Timed paragraph under examination conditions.
- 12: Revision quiz with quotations.
What is deliberately cut. Full coverage. Five scenes are studied deeply, the rest mapped on a class timeline.
2. Write three tasks or questions that a study guide cannot answer, and explain why each one defeats guide reliance.
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1. The gap between word and deed. 'Lakunle describes himself as progressive. Choose two moments where his language is grand but his behaviour is not, and explain what the gap reveals about him.' A guide supplies the label 'progressive but confused'; it cannot supply two located moments or the reasoning that connects them. The student must search, select and interpret.
2. Staging the ending. 'The play ends in marriage and celebration. As director, decide what the audience should feel in the final minutes, and quote one line that justifies your choice.' This has no single correct answer but does have wrong ones, because the choice must be warranted by the text. It also tests whether the student understands that a play is a set of decisions for performance, which no summary explains.
3. Tracking a word. 'Trace the word progress through the play. Who uses it, about what, and how does its meaning shift between the first and last occasions?' This requires a search of the whole text and comparison across scenes. Summaries list characters and plot; they do not provide word-level patterns.
Why these work together. Each demands one of the moves that guide reliance removes: locating evidence, connecting two distant moments, and defending a judgement against the text. They are also hard to answer from memory of a summary, because the summary contains conclusions without premises. Mr Boateng should ask them orally first, in pairs, so the language demand does not hide the reasoning.
3. How would Mr Boateng assess understanding of the play in a way that is valid for drama and manageable for 55 students?
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Validity first. A drama assessment that only asks for character sketches rewards recall of summaries. The assessment should sample three things: knowledge of the text, interpretive reasoning about it, and understanding of it as a performed script. Those are different traits and should be scored separately rather than merged into one mark.
Component 1: a quotation-based short-answer test (10 marks). Six items, each requiring one to two quoted words and one sentence of explanation. This is quick to mark and impossible to answer from a guide alone.
Component 2: performance with a director's note (10 marks). Groups of five stage a two-minute scene; each student also writes 250 words explaining one choice - casting, movement, pause, tone - with a quotation. Assess six groups across two periods using a four-criterion checklist: control of the extract, comprehension of the character's motive, use of voice and body, and coherence of the director's note. Manageability comes from the checklist and from having only six groups, not eleven.
Component 3: the examination essay (25 marks). Use a rubric with three bands: argument, textual evidence, and expression. Require at least one embedded quotation, since the essay is where interpretation must be defended.
Moderation and feedback. Anonymise performance scores and have the class apply the checklist once to a model performance so the criteria are transparent. Return the short-answer test within three days, with the two most common misreadings discussed in class rather than individually annotated.