To Develop Students’ Creativity and Social Skills: DRAMA WORKSHOPS

A class is handed a letter: a museum needs a team of experts to design a new exhibition, and the team starts today. Nobody is pretending to be a curator for thirty seconds. They are the team — with a client, a commission, decisions that have consequences, and a story that continues tomorrow. That is the distinction Dorothy Heathcote built her teaching method around, and it is what this week teaches.

Heathcote’s “Mantle of the Expert” gives students a fictional professional role with genuine responsibility inside a classroom drama — not a one-off performance, but an ongoing structure. It is closely related to the process-drama approach later articulated by Cecily O’Neill. You do not need any acting experience: nobody performs for an audience, and the work is done in the group.

• Monday — you take part in a first Mantle of the Expert moment, learn what makes it different from role-play, and choose a topic from your own curriculum.
• Tuesday — you learn the working structure of a drama lesson and build your team of experts, your client and your first commission.
• Wednesday — you put your curriculum topic inside the fiction and plan the first lesson of your unit.
• Thursday — you work with role, voice, body and rhythm, build a scene within your group, and see what the group had to do together to make it work.
• Friday — you open your unit for a small group of colleagues, adjust it from what you see, and plan your first lesson back.

By Friday you have the opening of a Mantle of the Expert unit for your own subject, tried out on colleagues and revised, and a first lesson you can run in your first week back.

In a Mantle of the Expert unit, the class becomes a team of experts working for a client on a commission — designing an exhibition, running a rescue, advising a town. The teacher usually works in role too, as the client or a colleague, which lets the teacher steer the fiction from inside it rather than from the front of the room. Heathcote developed the approach in the second half of the twentieth century, and it is used with pupils of many ages because the curriculum content sits inside the task: to make a good decision for the client, the team has to find out, read, measure or argue about the subject.

The week teaches it through one unit that each participant builds for their own curriculum, adding a part each day. That keeps the techniques — improvisation, role-play, re-enactment — attached to something real: you practise each one at the point in your own unit where it is needed. The week uses a five-step working structure for a drama lesson — preparation, warm-up, playing, improvisation and evaluation — as a plan you can check a lesson against, not as a rule.

The course is called Creativity and Social Skills, and both are treated as things a drama lesson can be designed for. Creativity comes from the open decisions inside the fiction. Social skills come from what the fiction demands of a group: agreeing roles, listening to a client, deciding together when the brief changes, and disagreeing without stopping the work. Thursday is built around this. After a group has built a scene together, the group looks at what it had to do together to make the scene work — who listened, who negotiated, who took the lead — so that the social skills are named and can be planned for in your own lessons.

Some boundaries are worth stating plainly. This is drama as a teaching method, not drama therapy: the aim is learning in the curriculum and skills in the group, and the arts therapy work is covered in our course Art as Therapy: Emotional and Social Development in Schools. It is also not a performance course. You are not asked to act for an audience, you can take a small role, and you can step out of any activity. The work fits a normal classroom: a room where chairs can be moved is enough.

You build one opening, try it on colleagues, and take one lesson home — you do not have to build a whole term of drama to start.