Walk into any teachers’ lounge and you might hear some version of “It feels impossible to compete with their screens!” While educators have dutifully added the platforms and programs asked of them, schools are still struggling with a reading recession and troubling chronic absenteeism. I believe part of the answer is play, specifically the games we use in theater education, which are physical, spontaneous, and joyful. For the last decade, I’ve helped teachers bring these games into their classrooms and seen them build their students’ voices, executive skills, and command of the material simultaneously.
So, let’s zoom into a professional development session I led with a room full of K-8 teachers on New York’s Long Island. I was brought in by Sara Ortiz, the district’s curriculum director, to give educators strategies that would strengthen student engagement and connect curriculum to creativity. The teachers had been frustrated by their students’ perceived lack of enthusiasm and wanted new ways to motivate them as writers and thinkers.
In the classroom, games inspired by theater and the world of improv provide opportunities for students to play with and engage with one another around content, but academics are only a part of it. A host of executive function skills are being built through this kind of play. During the games, students are using working memory, active listening, turn-taking, and response inhibition.
Just as important are the true social-emotional connections that students make through this active play. Some of these games can help kids actively express themselves and learn the variety and richness of emotions far more powerfully than pointing to emojis on a chart to indicate their feelings.
In my recent PD session, the scene was lively as I taught the “curriculum of play”: One teacher was pretending to swim in an ocean while the rest of them held their hands above their heads in the shape of a fin, all sharks ready to attack. I hummed the familiar theme from “Jaws,” and the group erupted in laughter. We practiced the thrill of “writing on our feet,” generating ideas collaboratively and physically, and working our way through a dozen or so games. We played the “What Are You Doing?” game, in which participants pantomime a series of different activities moving around the circle.
The structure of these games offers a blueprint that is adaptable to the subjects, curricula, and grades they teach. The reassuring scaffolding of simple rules and repetition ground the teachers even as they venture outside their comfort zone.
At the end of the workshop, the participants traded ideas they could bring back to their classrooms: A science teacher wanted to play a movement game to establish context for his students’ study of biomes. A math teacher decided to bring in a competitive circle game to help students memorize their multiplication tables. A 1st grade teacher committed to a relay race game to help her students retain spelling words. Still others responded to the community-building games that will help their students feel seen and known.
I had the opportunity to later visit the classrooms and watch their play-based strategies in action.
One teacher introduced the same “What Are You Doing?” game to her 5th grade writing unit. Instead of opening the lesson with a Chromebook and blank stares, she started with a game. “You won’t know what you’ll be acting out until the person before you tells you,” she told them. Some kids giggled nervously, but soon, all 25 students were on their feet, literally showing what they knew by embodying the key moments from the novel Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. Acting out a scene gives students a way to remember it. Throughout the game, the students were rapt, laughing, or “ooh-ing” as their friends jumped into imaginary lakes, ran in place to evade a bear, or pretended to fly a plane, all actions from the book they were bringing to life with emotion and detail.
Once everyone had a turn, the teacher gave them a writing prompt inspired by their actions, saying, “Have fun, be creative, take risks. Go!” For the next 12 minutes, students were locked into focused writing, with abundant ideas, filling the page with words. As the period came to an end, they proudly asked to read their paragraphs aloud.
In a classroom down the hall, 3rd graders who read a biography about Jane Goodall split into groups to use a tableaux game I call Sculpture to share elements of the primatologist’s life story. One student, as the “artist,” molded a small group of students (the “clay”) into a still picture or tableaux that represented a certain part of Goodall’s life, becoming the researcher, chimps, and even trees.
In a 2nd grade classroom struggling with kindness, the students used a version of Silent Circles of Sameness, where they connect with their classmates by stepping into the center of a circle when they self-identify with a prompt (“I am a helper,” perhaps, or “I like chocolate ice cream”).
An inclusion room of 1st graders used Four Corner Emotions: Four distinct feeling words were posted in the corners of the room, and one at a time, students pulled a sentence from a hat that they would announce with joy, disgust, anger, or awe. They relished in their expressivity, the fun of the exercise, even as they practiced the vocabulary of the week embedded in each sentence.
A 6th grade history class debated the merits of King Hammurabi or Emperor Chin using the game Love It/Hate It. When cued by a classmate, a speaker would fluctuate between extremely praising or denigrating the historical time period. Using details from their research, the students made impassioned arguments only to then have to switch perspectives at a moment’s notice.
Games like these require a mere five to 15 minutes, but their impact is substantial. The curriculum becomes engaging, and the learning is visible. Students activate knowledge and practice the human skills that will be the marker of access in this brave new world. All students, and teachers, deserve to experience this joyful education, with less clicks and more claps.
