UNIT PLANS
Context For Learning
About the school
Gotham Professional Arts Academy is a Title One, progressive Consortium high school located in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. In place of regents exams students complete Performance Based Assessment Tasks. Gotham has specialized art tracks, which include Studio Art, Art Criticism and Theatre. The school is quite small and has less than a combined 200 students in all four grades. The student body population is 95% Black and Latinx individuals. The building is shared between two schools. Gotham is located on the 4th, 5th, and 6th floors of the building. The cafeteria and gym are shared. There is no auditorium.
About the class
All sessions take place in the Theatre classroom, which is set up to depict a black box on the 5th floor. There is a riser to represent a small stage in the back of the room and there are chairs for all students. There are no desks. The room is also equipped with a smart board and a theatre books/plays bookshelf. Students have access to laptops, markers, highlighters, pencils, pens, headsets and other art materials. There are no lockers so students often place their belongings under their chairs. Since there is no auditorium, the theatre students often perform in outside venues. Grading is done on a 4-point system. The students are working on a scene study unit. Within the scene study unit there are several mini-units to prepare the students for their scene performances. The Tactics and Vocal Skills units outline on the website are examples of these mini-units.
About the students
The Vocal Skills and Tactics Units were designed for the 10th grade students in the Theatre Track. There are 19 students in total: 14 females and 5 males. The 10th grade attends Theatre four times a week. Three of those sessions are for 45 mins and once a week they meet for 70 mins.
Six students have IEPs for learning disabilities. It is recommended that these student have extended time (time and a half), sentence starters, modeling, graphic organizers, repetition, redirection, verbal and visual prompts, chunking, visual aids, project based instruction, positive feedback, small group instruction, anchor charts, partial credit for late/incomplete work until can complete on time, vocabulary lists and teacher check ins.
Students begin vocal warm up with breathing exercises. By holding above their stomach, students are directed to breathe into their diaphragm.
This video shows snippets of a lesson on operative words that invites students to explore five different physical stations. The students define operative words, two students model a station, and then the class explores the other stations using lines from scenes they are working on.
“I THOUGHT there was some monkey business going on”.
In the operative words lesson, (seen in the above video) students are placed at different stations to explore the operative words in their scenes through physical action. This student kicks the box to emphasize her operative word.
SCENE STUDY: VOCAL SKILLS
In this unit, students are introduced to key vocal skills including projection, articulation, enunciation and operative words. Students will explore these skills through various modalities while applying them to their specific scenes. The unit ends in a mini-performance. This is one unit within a larger scene study unit.
Students recite the tongue twister “Sally sells seashells by the seashore” to practice projection and explore fricative sounds.
Vocal Warm Up: “Pah, Tuh, Kuh,” Students explore plosives P T & K as a means to practice enunciation and articulation.
Students were asked to complete the “Operative Words Questionnaire” after exploring several physical stations. This student identified her operative words of “wanted” and “show”. She believed by choosing these words it helped to “comfort” her scene partner and allowed her to “flirt” more in the scene.
Student reviewing the Tactics worksheet. She identified the objectives for each character and begins identifying the tactics.
Students excited to try their hand at playing tactics in order to get their objective… a piece of candy.
Students playing “Grandma’s Footsteps” working together as a team to get the green ball on the floor. They explore different tactics to get the ball without being caught by the student at the front.
SCENE STUDY: TACTICS
Through hot seating, interactive games, vocal and physical exercises students learn to define and apply tactics into pre-selected scenes. This is one unit within a larger scene study unit.
Student Work
Identifying Tactics
During the Candy Game Activity, students explore different tactics in order to get a piece of candy. The class created a running list of what tactics were being used in order to reach their objective of getting a piece of candy.
Observing Tactics
During the Chair Game students explore different tactics to get to the other side of the room. Their obstacle is a chair blocking their way. Students wrote a list of what was observed as different students attempted their tactic.
Annotating Tactics
Students work to select and annotate the tactics they want to explore in their scenes. Students are invited to explore emotional and physical tactics. This student has identified “to step over”, “to smirk”, “to check out” and “to mock”.
Playing Tactics
Student A’s (left) tactic in this beat of the scene is “to help”. We discussed how the tactic can be expressed physically, by closing the window. Initially, she was giving no dimension or weight to her pantomimed actions. Here she has more clearly defined where the window is and how she’s trying to close it.
Student B’s (right) tactics are “to explain” and “to search”. Initially she was rushing through her lines, especially when she was off stage. In this take, we see a clearer beat change. She is “explaining” and physicalizing the cold before she goes off “to search” for a useful tool.
Student A’s (left) tactic is to hide. Initially, she was playing the scene showing off her lipstick although her character was worried about how it looks. In this clip she is physically hiding her lips from her partner.
Student B’s (right) tactic is to flirt and to invite. We see this here by how she calls her partner over and pulls her partner’s hands down.
Scene Clip
The below clip show students incorporating what they learned from both Vocal and Tactic Units.
In this scene both students are working on projection, enunciation, operative words and tactics.
Student A (blue outfit) chose to focus on her operative words and projection in this clip. Operative words include: do, two, suffer, spoiled.
Student B (light grey outfit) chose to focus on incorporating her tactic “to get attention” emotionally and physically. She does this physically by spinning in at the beginning of the scene, pulling her partner over and by clapping.
Final Presentation Videos
Sexual Perversity in Chicago by David Mamet
American Buffalo by David Mamet
The blocking and objectives in this scene were clear. The student in white is on the spectrum, and he did a tremendous job projecting, memorizing his lines, and finding emotion and operative words throughout. While his partner was a bit on the quieter side, he connected with his lines and was an incredibly supportive scene partner throughout the entire process.
The students in this scene came a long way from the beginning. They had clear projection (the female used to be inaudible) and they had clear blocking and intensions throughout. They were on the track to making the romantic relationship between the two characters clearer.
Left by Lauren Henley
The scene takes place in two different parts of the country with the characters speaking on the phone. The scene has come a long way in terms of projection and carving out specific moments. In reflection, the students felt they didn’t fully embody some of the actions they had practiced in rehearsal.
Collected Stories by Donald Margulies
This pair did an excellent job of listening and responding in the moment. The student on the left knew the scene inside and out and supported her partner during moments where her partner dropped lines. The student on the right wasn’t as confident with her lines, however when she was comfortable she was very engaging and connected with the scene. This is another example where several key moments were carved out clearly.