As a varsity diver in college, I have often been asked about the subjective nature of scoring in the sport, and whether this has a large influence over who wins and loses in a diving meet. Generally, I respond by saying that there is usually an observable consistency between judges scoring each dive. The crowd members and other observers of the meet usually agree with the scores thrown by judges, and the subjective nature of judging does not play a highly influential role in changing how contestants place within a meet. Likewise, one might ask how a drama class can become stratified by skill level, and whether a teacher is justified in any objective sense in dividing up a drama class based on skill level. I believe that metacognitive development provides objectively verifiable grounds for determining the skill level of drama students, and that the metacognitive development of our students is integral both to developing our students as individuals and for furthering their academic success.
Metacognition develops gradually as an individual comes to have greater conscious control over cognition that monitors, regulates, or reflects on first-order cognition (Kuhn 2000, 178). Deanna Kuhn differentiates between declarative knowing (“knowing that”) and procedural knowing (“knowing how”). She proposes that the metastrategic cognition of procedural knowing plays a major role in selecting adequate strategies for problem-solving while also expelling inadequate strategies. This is important because it fills the previous gap in Developmentalist psychology of addressing how change occurs in cognition, and, perhaps more interestingly, why it does not occur in some situations.
The freedom within a drama program permits students to demonstrate their understanding of the adequacy of various strategies to problem-solving in a given situation, as well as their proficiency to monitor and regulate the influence of outside sources upon their declarative knowledge. Teacher feedback from strategy employment at the degree of performance occurs at the meta-level; students in an advanced class, then, should be more willing to adapt to teaching comments and be able to modify their behavior in class through strategy training at the advice of an instructor. Since the early 2000s, metacognitive functions have been investigated in terms of text comprehension, memory, reasoning, and problem solving (Kuhn 2000, 80). We see a parallel to the acting world in each case: text comprehension for understanding a written script; memory to remember lines and character development from other members of a production as well as logistics of drama production; reasoning to make quick decisions in how to act onstage; and problem solving for the process of staging a play through taking directions from a script.
Complex meta-knowing capabilities stand as the end goal in metacognitive development for Kuhn, which some adults never reach. Meta-level control of both one’s own knowing processes and the knowing processes of others in social groups are integral to raising one’s awareness and becoming reflective upon their thinking, as well as acknowledging the sources of knowledge that influence one’s thinking. Due to its emphasis on social interaction, a successful drama class should enhance the meta-cognitive capacity of its students, and it should give them the creative room to demonstrate their relative level of meta-cognitive development. In turn, effective drama teachers should be able to gauge the meta-cognitive development of their students and assign them new tasks that are adequately difficult for their level of meta-cognitive development (Vygotsky 1978, 31).
For Lev S. Vygotsky, learning is specific to the elements in a set of tasks which one is given: Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialized abilities for thinking about a variety of things. Learning does not alter our overall ability to focus attention, but rather it develops various abilities to focus attention on a variety of things. This is due to the fact that each activity depends on the material with which it operates, and the development of consciousness is the development of a set of particular, independent capabilities. (1978, 31)
Adhering to Vygotsky’s view might imply that the skills learned in a drama class would only be extricable to other instances of improvisation games, modeling emotions, and interacting with the emotions of others — despite these being no small skills to learn. Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More Than IQ spurred a worldwide interest in Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). Throughout the globe, more than ten thousand students currently uphold a SEL curriculum requirement as an essential skill for living, and it can be present from kindergarten to the last year of high school (Goleman “Emotional”). While these curricular goals were originally instated to solve behavioral problems among students, they have also been shown to boost the academic performance of students. Likewise, the business world is also latching onto the necessity of emotional intelligence within the workplace, which Kids Are Dramatic seeks to develop through students at the middle school level.
Article by: Reginald Anderson, KAD Instruction Intern
Kids Are Dramatic 