(A) I was lucky enough to begin teaching my unit as the first unit the students would be diving into in their dance and theatre curriculum. The sixth grade students at Rising Tide Charter Public School participate in theatre/music on a rotating semester schedule, meaning they spend half of the year in music class (September-January) and then they spend the remainder of the academic year in dance and theatre. I was greeted with excited classes that were eager to get started. I began the unit with some simple theatre games and spent half of a class period on some introductory class notes. My students were ready to get on their feet and truly dive into the material after spending the first few weeks of their semester working on team building and focus exercises with my supervising practitioner. The only downfall to the overall classroom readiness, across all four of my classes, was that about 90% of the students had no prior background knowledge in relation to the content that was being introduced to them. A few of my students are dancers or have done theatre clubs or programs outside of school, so some terminology I was using was a bit familiar to them. In that case, I allowed those students to take a bit more of a leadership role when they were split into smaller groups, because they were familiar with the vulnerability and creativity necessary to a presentation such as this one. Despite the fact that students had little to no background knowledge on elements of the unit such as tableaux and gender blind casting, they were ready for the material when it was presented to them, which made the physical teaching and later, the assessment of their understanding all the more seamless because they were ready to receive the knowledge and run with it, with a little help and guidance of course.

(B) Due to the nature of the class and my preparedness to teach this specific curricula, I didn’t need to make any written modifications to my unit plan or its associated activities as a result of my pre-assessment. Many of the students completed the pre-assessment to exactly the standard I was expecting and the rate at which I planned, so it was almost as if for one moment I was living in that perfect world where everything was going right. While no changes needed to be made to my initial planning, the changes came in the spur of the moment, in a very specific example of having to switch a group member due to a recent conflict between students, as well as having to light a bit more of a fire under students who weren't completely content to be vulnerable in their small groups when they begin to build toward their final presentations. School closures due to COVID-19 truly interrupted the line up of assessments that I had initially planned for, so adjusting to that knowledge had its own types of pressures attached to it. Many of the elements I would have been looking for in informal and formative assessments now served as the summative assessment for student understanding throughout this unit, which in the grand scheme of things, didn’t work out terribly, but still posed quite a roadblock for me when it came to wrapping up my time in the classroom so early, and so quickly as well.

The intended summative post assessment that was to accompany this unit was a final presentation, from students in their small groups. In small groups that were randomly assigned to students, they were given the following stories from which they had to build a series of tableaux to tell the story:

• • “Seriously, Snow White was So Forgetful!” by: Nancy Loewen

  • “Honestly, Red Riding Hood was Rotten!” by: Trisha Speed Shaskan

  • “Trust Me, Jack’s Beanstalk Stinks!” by: Eric Braun

  • “Seriously, Cinderella is So Annoying” by: Trisha Speed Shaskan

During the final presentation, the instructor would serve as narrator for their performances so there was no memorization of the story required. The heavy emphasis on character in the below rubric was what led me to choose a pre-assessment based on character traits as my control in this particular situation. Unfortunately due to the school closure amid the COVID-19 global pandemic, my students were not able to execute their final presentations. This posed a serious roadblock for me in gathering the data necessary for this assignment. However, in the middle of the unit, I delivered an informal, formative assessment with the same initial prompt but with answers from students as applied to their small group stories/characters. When the time arrived that I knew I would not be able to see the student’s final presentations, I chose to use this assessment to gather my data and to assess understanding and progress.

As this was a performance based class and performance based unit, I do not have any student work examples to include as there was no paper-work required from my students during this unit. Initially, students were to receive grades using the designated rubric in correspondence to their final presentations. The original plan was that I was going to use my classroom ipad to record their presentations and watch the videos on a loop to grade each individual student. Due to the varying levels of commitment, creativity, and overall retention of material, I opted not to give group grades and to allow each individual to be solely responsible for their grade on this project. However, without students being able to perform, they were not assigned a letter or % grade for this unit. The unit was opted to be pass/fail, in which all students passed based solely upon their in-class participation.

The data above demonstrates a clear increase in student understanding. After introducing some key terms and topics to the students on the first day of work with this unit, they read the story, “No Lie, Pigs (and their houses) Can Fly!” by Jessica Gunderson as a class and were assigned characters that were picked using an online random name generator . As their exit ticket, and unbenounced to them, their pre-assessment to gauge pre-existing knowledge and initial understanding of the content to come, I prompted them with the following: “Please list three personality traits of your character”, meaning three non- physical traits. In the data detailed above, 52% of students were able to list 3 true character traits, for example, they listed characteristics like “mean”, “hungry”, “spoiled”, and “annoying”. Overall, 78% of students were successful in this pre-assessment which posed a promising outlook on their ability to retain the knowledge that would be available to them during the instruction of this material. For students that may have only listed one or zero traits, their roadblock came in the form of listing physical traits like “tall”, “brick”, or listed things like “made of straw”. Students that listed no traits either handed back an index card with no writing or nothing but their name, or wrote words/sentences completely unrelated to the prompt all together.

(A) This data and my findings did not surprise me in any way, they generally reflected exactly what I was prepared to see from the students and their work toward reaching the goals I had set for them before I began teaching this unit. Overall, I can’t say that there was a time student performance was weak, during each class period where time was dedicated to their tableaux work, students were on task and ready to work. While there were, of course, moments where the students were chatty or got distracted from the task at hand, they were self-sustaining in getting them back on task. Between all class periods I only had to step in to refocus small groups twice. The main factors that played into weakness in student performance, where there was any and it wasn’t often, was mostly based on the chemistry between group members (as it usually does in the performing arts). Unfortunately, due to school closures I didn’t have the opportunities to further the team building with students in the way I would have liked to , but during time in the classroom, students were driven and excited to complete and meet their goals.

(B) The primary challenge I was faced with in terms of equitable teaching was the amount of IEP, 504, and required modifications students had, specifically all in one particular class. In one of my classes of 21 students, 11 of those students were on a specialized education plan so configuring the ways in which to guarantee their success posed a daily challenge. However, even though some students that fell into the lower performing areas of the pre-assessment did remain there come the second assessment, the overall growth displayed by students demonstrated that the methods I used were effective for student learning. I do wish that after the second assessment that all students would have been able to name two traits. Even though this wasn’t the final assessment I was hoping to use, I do believe that there were changes I could have made to make this lesson more conducive to all students. In the future, I will consider spending more time, perhaps through warm up activities or exit tickets and other in-class activities, on true character development and what it means to play a part in a play or live-action storytelling. Learning to tell a story and play a character can be an integral part of child development, and teaching 6th grade, it was such a joy to watch some of my students blossom throughout this process. As someone who wants to go into adaptive theatre in the future, I know that I still have a lot to learn about how to make theatre accessible to everyone, but for this particular unit, I would like to be able to go more in depth into the world of character work to perhaps make the introduction of this particular material more equitable to all students.