Talia Goldstein:
So what we looked at was what were the psychological skills that teachers were asking students to bring to the material of a theater classroom? So these are the acting habits of mind. This is how teachers are asking students to approach problems. The habits of mind have been used as a concept across education. So we have visual arts habits of mind and mathematical habits of mind and scientific habits of mind and legal habits of mind.

Matthew Worwood:
Hello everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Wurward.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood: 
This is the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the field of education.

Matthew Worwood:
We’ll be talking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Cyndi Burnett:
All with a goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood: 
So let’s begin. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. We don’t have many more episodes left in season nine, but nevertheless, we have a really super duper episode coming up for you today. Because if you’re interested in cognitive, special and emotional benefits of theater education, then you are going to absolutely love this upcoming episode.

Cyndi Burnett:
So today we welcome to the show Dr. Talia Goldstein, who is an associate professor and director of the Applied Developmental Psychology Program at George Mason University where she directs the Play Learning Arts and Youth Lab and co directs the Mason Arts Research Center. She is the co editor of the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts and is a fellow of the American Psychological Association. Her research focuses on children’s and adolescents, creative social and emotional development through engagement with pretend play and the arts. She has published more than 75 articles and recently published the book why Theater Education? Understanding its Cognitive, Social and Emotional Benefits which we will be talking about today. Welcome to the show, Talia.

Talia Goldstein:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Cyndi Burnett:
And for those of you listening, you probably remember that Matt and I both have backgrounds in performing arts and have degrees, our first degrees in theater. So this is really a topic that we are passionate about is how to bring theater education and the benefits of creativity into the classroom. So let’s start with this question, which is a question that came from your opening chapter of your book, which is what psychologically is an acting class?

Talia Goldstein:
This is the question of my life. This is sort of what I’m spending all of my research time and grad students time trying to answer. For me, psychology and theater are asking the same question, which is, why do humans behave the way that they do? What makes human beings tick? What makes relationships work and not work? What makes a meaningful life? What brings joy? They’re just asking that question in different ways. So theater is trying to take the specific, the hyper specific of a particular play or exercise and give it to an audience to make it universal. Whereas psychology is trying to use the scientific method to gather data from lots of different people, as large of a sample, as diverse of a sample as we can, so we can try and find the human universal that way. So it’s all about seeking the why for humans, right? Why do we behave the way we do? And why do we want the things that we want?

Matthew Worwood:
Wow, that’s a really impressive response. And the reason why I’m going to say that is Cindy referenced at the beginning. We’ve had a few conversations around theater and the arts, and Cindy and I are openly biased. We have children in the arts. We also have the background that Cindy referenced, and we feel that our creativity is very much connected to that experience working in theater. And believe it or not, we also have colleagues in the field that have backgrounds in some way to the theater as well. So we kind of like anecdotally see this connection. But nevertheless, sometimes I keep asking myself, you know, okay, but from a research perspective, why? And given your background, I’m wondering if you could answer that question.

Matthew Worwood: 
Why are we associating, Cindy and I, why do. Why do you think we see the value of theater and its connection to creativity, particularly in future life? What are we seeing?

Talia Goldstein:
Yeah, so what a theater education and what a theater classroom asks students to do is make connections with other people and go underneath the behaviors and the scripts and the materials that you’re being given to figure out the deeper reason, the subtext, the background, what happens off stage before you land in that theater classroom that causes those actions to. To happen. So it’s sort of an under the hood kind of art form for human behavior. So in an acting classroom, you’re being taught how to think about other people. You’re being taught how to think about yourself and the way in which you present yourself for other people. You’re being taught to figure out why cause and effects happen in any particular exercise, in any particular script, in any particular narrative and story. And all of that is the stuff of learning, right? All of that is how you learn, regardless of domain, regardless of what topic you’re working in. So even in something like a biology lab, you’re trying to figure out cause and effect.

Talia Goldstein:
You’re trying to figure out what’s happening under surface behavior for animals or under connections where there may be a chemical reaction. And so it’s about scaffolding, the structure of how you formulate questions for yourself, and then you bring yourself into it, and you bring your collaboration with others into it. And so that’s, I think, where acting sets you up to have a structure for the rest of your life.

Cyndi Burnett:
I love it so much.

Matthew Worwood: 
I love this. I absolutely love it. But my next question is that is this relevant to everyone? The reason why I bring this up is I have three children now. Of course, I’m now playing a stereotype, but I feel my eldest and my youngest, dare I say it, make great theater kids. I think everything you’re talking about, they are going to see the benefits of theater. My middle son, he’s completely immersed into sports, and I don’t see him being the theater kid. So my question to you, do we want to promote theore education for everyone, or is it a specific group or type of individual that might benefit more than others? And if so, why?

Talia Goldstein:
I think that’s such an important question. And I’m going to do the researcher thing where I say under some contexts, for some kids, under some circumstances, however, I think everyone can be included in that. So the way that I think about it is there is always going to be a range of motivation and a range of interest, right? So there are going to be those kids who just like, are super attracted to the performance aspect or the storytelling aspect or the emotional vulnerability aspect because it feeds something in them for performance or for exploration or for psychological insight, right? And these are individual differences in children, in adolescents, and in adults, how much you want to think about other people, how much you want to be extroverted and perform while you’re on stage. So those kids, I think, are the sort of easy sell, right? They want to get involved in acting classes, they think it’s super cool, and they want to be there for those kids who are more interested in other things. It’s not to say that theater is the only way to get at creative behaviors or to get at creative exploration of beliefs and thoughts and emotions and all of these other things. There’s other ways to do this as well. But for kids who are a little more reticent or maybe who aren’t as naturally attracted to an acting class, I think there are tools that can come from the theater classroom and be used in other contexts entirely. So one of the things that’s really inherent to A theater classroom is this idea of rele your inhibitions and being playful.

Talia Goldstein:
This is one of the habits of minds I talk about in the book. It’s this idea that it’s a sort of consequence free environment in the theater classroom in some way because you’re allowed to be playful and try out new things and it’s encouraged to make mistakes and it’s encouraged to act in a way that’s maybe a little bit silly, maybe a little bit outside the norm. That tool, that tool of how do you promote playfulness, how do you promote releasing inhibitions, what are the kinds of exercises and how do you set up an activity for a group of 12 year olds or 14 year olds or 9 year olds to release their inhibitions and be playful that can be brought into even a math classroom, that can be brought to a soccer team as they’re doing their warmup. Right. And so that’s how I think about those kids who are maybe less interested in theater for theater’s sake and less interested in art for art’s sake. But that can still really benefit from the toolkit that theater has developed in order to enhance and foster all of these intra and interpersonal skills that I think are inherent to a theater classroom.

Cyndi Burnett:
So Talia, I really appreciate that response because I have two teenagers, a freshman and a junior in high school and so I could really relate to this book. And I feel really fortunate that my kids go to school where they offer a course that’s a whole year long called the Freshman Survey of the Arts. So a quarter they learn about acting, a quarter they learn about dance, a quarter they learn about visual arts, and then a quarter they learn about music theory. And what’s great about that is it gives them the exposure. And my son, when he did the freshman dance and the acting, he was very outside of his element. I mean, he is a full on science robotics kid and really sees himself in that light. So to put him in that, he walked away and he said, I really enjoyed it because it put me in a situation where I was looking at things in different ways. But what I love about this program, this year long program is it really gives students this opportunity to play and to experience things that they may never have been exposed to because maybe just the parents haven’t been exposed to it.

Cyndi Burnett:
So you know, when you haven’t had that exposure of being in an acting class or being up on stage, that just being able to have that opportunity to develop these eight acting habits of mind that you mentioned in the book, which we’re going to talk about is just a beautiful benefit. So I love your yes and approach to this.

Talia Goldstein:
The thing that I love about this idea of a sampler that your kids are getting is that they’re seeing that there’s many different ways of thinking about the world. And this is true when they take their maybe more mainstream or non arts academic topics right. There’s a historical way of looking at the world where you look at documents and you look at evidence and you try to figure out and piece together what the world was like. There’s a mathematical way of looking at the world where you have to break down every problem into its component parts and make sure you’re solving it in the right way. There’s an engineering way of looking at the world right, where you have to sort of piece together the parts and tinker with it and figure out there’s design ways of thinking. And so a sampler class like that is amazing because it’s introducing students to this idea that there’s multiple ways of thinking about the world and multiple artistic ways of thinking about the world. And that’s where creativity comes from. Creativity comes from forming metaphors and making connections across disparate ways of thinking about the world in order to come up with something new that’s personal and works well for the student in the classroom.

Matthew Worwood: 
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Cyndi Burnett:
Curiosity to Create is a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging professional development for school districts and empowering educators through online courses and personal coaching.

Matthew Worwood:
And if you’re craving a community of creative educators who love new ideas, don’t miss out on their creative thinking network. Get access to monthly webinars, creative lesson plans, and a supportive community, all focused on fostering creativity in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode. So, Talia, you’ve recently completed the first large scale systematic qualitative analysis of acting classes for adolescents. And out of that you have eight acting habits of mind. Can you share a little bit about this process with us and share some of the habits with us?

Talia Goldstein:
Absolutely. So I really wanted to go back into the classroom where theater education was happening on the ground by real teachers with real students. So over the course of three years, starting in the fall of 2017 and ending, unfortunately, on March 13th of 2020, the last day that schools were open in the district where we were collecting data, we collected 56 and a half hours of acting class films from five different school districts across the United states. So we were in urban schools, rural schools, suburban schools. We were in large general education schools where this was maybe the only theater class that some of these students were ever taking. We were in small, private conservatories where these students had to audition to get in. And then we’re doing 15 hours of acting class per week and several other schools in between. And what I did was I filmed these classrooms, and then we brought all the video back to the lab.

Talia Goldstein:
And just as Covid hit, we sort of went, okay, well, I guess we’re not collecting any more data because the schools aren’t having their in person schooling anymore. So we decided to just start analyzing from that point. And I’m really glad that we did, because I feel like we got a wide enough sample and enough data that I don’t feel like we missed anything. And, you know, getting feedback from acting teachers and from theater professionals and from students, it doesn’t seem like we did. So what we looked at was what were the psychological skills that teachers were asking students to bring to the material of a theater classroom? So these are the acting habits of mind. This is how teachers are asking students to approach problems. The habits of mind have been used as a concept across education. So we have visual arts habits of mind, and mathematical habits of mind, and scientific habits of mind, and legal habits of mind.

Talia Goldstein:
The acting habits of mind are the different approaches that students can bring to bear on the problems and activities that are being given to them in theater classes rooms. So basically, teachers set up different activities and different problems for students to engage in, and they can approach these problems in different kinds of ways. And what we found was that using grounded theory, which is a qualitative, systematic analytical technique, There are eight different ways that teachers are asking students to answer and solve problems in the acting classroom. So the one that sort of was the most apparent to me and popped out first was body awareness and control. Acting is a physical art form. You know, music asks you to use an instrument. Visual arts asks you to use a paintbrush or clay or crayons. Dance and theater ask you to use your body.

Talia Goldstein:
In dance, it’s being used as a representation, right? Movement as exploration of music and approach to sort of performance. In theater, there’s this interesting dualism because, of course, students are being asked to use their body and voice both as themselves, but then also in service of an exercise or in service of character. So students are being trained to think about their bodies, what the motions of their bodies mean, what they’re Doing how their body works in space and time compared to the other people in the room. And for me, this learning of the body and this awareness of the body is deeply related to things like kinesthetic awareness, interoceptive awareness, and emotion regulation. Because emotion regulation is all about figuring out what your body is feeling, what are you feeling in that moment, and then what is appropriate for the context that you’re in. So body awareness and control was really apparent across all of the different classrooms, rooms. As I said, there’s eight overall. But other ones that I saw that were interesting and surprising.

Talia Goldstein:
I mentioned release inhibitions and be playful. Students were constantly being asked to go outside of their comfort zone a little bit, do something silly or unusual that they might not do in their everyday lives and not have a sense of self consciousness against it. Right. This was a trust yourself judgment free zone. And everyone was really encouraging of each other across the different acting classes. So students learning how to release sort of self inhibition in order to achieve something new. There was the classic pairing, which I think anyone who has a theater background is going to be very aware of, but is also deeply related to creativity in the creative process. And those were the habits of mind, of be flexible and commit to choices.

Talia Goldstein:
So students were constantly being asked to come up with new material and to not necessarily just stick with the very first idea they had and not think beyond it. It was sort of like, okay, that’s an interesting choice that you’ve made. What else could you do? How else could you solve this problem? What other way could you engage in this behavior? So that was be flexible. Students were being asked to come up with new and new and new, and then in concert with that, they were being asked to commit to a choice anytime they had to perform or try something out. So commit to choices is one of those things that, you know, I have a bunch of acting training. Anyone who has acting training, it’s like the number one thing a director will tell you. It’s like make a firm and bold and definitive choice for your acting and then perform it and then we’ll see whether it works or not. Right? But the first thing you have to do is commit to that choice.

Talia Goldstein:
Because if you’re trying to play two different emotions at the same time or two different responses simultaneously, it’s going to look muddled or unreadable to the audience. So students were being asked to, yes, be flexible and come up with an ideate, a bunch of different responses to prompts and then pick one, commit to a choice, make a decision, try it out and if it works great, you can keep going. And if it doesn’t work, you go back and you’re flexible and you try something new, and then you commit to the choice, then you do a little bit of judgment, then you are flexible, then you commit to the choice. So these two habits of mind really worked in concert with each other. And it’s pretty clear to me how they could transfer and be applicable outside of the theater classroom. Right? You want to come up with lots of different ideas and then you want to try them out and see if they work. And then the last one I’ll mention now, just because I’ve been going for a little bit, is reflect and think metacognitively. So the students in the theater classrooms were being constantly asked to reflect on their own acting choices and the acting choices of other people and the acting choices of the group when they were working collaboratively.

Talia Goldstein:
So they had to reflect on whether or not they thought the choice they had just made worked. Worked well, answered the prompt, solved the problem was interesting as a performance choice. And this sort of metacognitive thinking, this thinking about, thinking and thinking about behavior really is central to the learning process. If you can reflect on and think about whether or not you understand the material or whether or not your response is appropriate, it’s more likely to sort of sink in deeply and be retained for longer. And again, this is one of these skills that we don’t have data yet, but I’m chasing right now to see whether the type of reflection and metacognitive thinking that students are being asked to perform in the theater classroom works outside of the theater classroom to enable them to understand their process in other domains and topics as well.

Matthew Worwood:
I’m really blown away by everything that you’ve, you’ve shared. And I certainly need a little bit of time and some Marco Polos between Cindy and I, going back and forth, back and forth. But one thing, I’ve shared this with Cindy before. You know, sometimes when we have guests, I know that something’s been rattled or awoken inside me in terms of connections that’s being made, but I typically need a few days to articulate them. But I certainly feel that everything you’ve shared, multiple things you’ve shared, are certainly going to contribute to what I think is some new insights and new thoughts on theater education. Because I think for the first time, for me anyway, you’ve really started to nail down this big question I’ve always had. Yes, I get it, but why now? One quick follow up question, and maybe it’s in future research. But is there certain times during a child’s cognitive development where maybe having these types of theatrical experiences are more beneficial than others?

Talia Goldstein:
Such a great question. Again, it’s one of those questions that, like, haunts me at night, right, because we want to make sure that we’re not going beyond what a student can do or holding back when a student has more potential. Again, I keep coming back to this idea in my own work of theater as a flexible toolkit. The reason why I think theater education is so hard to pin down is because while there are these psychological fundamentals, these underlying foundations of what happens in every theater classroom, the application of them is so different, depending on context, depending on age, depending on background, depending on expertise. My familiarity, of course, is with theater education in the United States, because that’s where I’ve done most of my work across my career. The way in which theater happens in the United States is you have creative dramatics and sociodramatic play in preschool and young elementary school classrooms. And this is really where kids are given costumes or maybe one prompt to do, and they get to just go and free play, right? It’s very unusual to give a bunch of five year olds a script and ask them to sort of act it out. You’re not going to have a lot of success there.

Talia Goldstein:
But if they get to just free play in a costume, then they’re really using their imagination, their envisioning of what that might be like. And that’s really different than high schoolers, right? Where you can give them complex stories and complex characters for them to really delve into. Think about subtext, think about emotion and knowledge and belief, think about relationships and how relationships change and develop over time. And that’s a different. I don’t want to say it’s a different set of psychological skills, but it’s a different depth of the application of those skills, right? Because the little kids dressing up as princesses and superheroes and teachers and doctors, they have to imagine and envision what it would be like to be a doctor. Imagine and envision what your day would look like if you’re a dentist and you have customers and clients coming in and patients that you’re treating and how do you talk to them. That is different than doing Little Shop of Horrors where there’s like an evil dentist, right? And you have to figure out why the dentist is evil and, and what the dentist’s motivation is there. And then also what do the behaviors look like when you bring someone into that dentist’s office.

Talia Goldstein:
But the imagining, right, the Psychological foundational skill of imagining what the world looks like and why it looks that way, I think is the same. So I think there is obviously developmental trajectories in cognitive development across time. But again, the reason I believe in theater so strongly and the reason I’ve been researching it for, you know, 25 years at this point is because I think that it can be flexibly applied as long as you have a teacher who’s aware. Right. As long as you have that adult guide that knows how to get to the kids, where the kids are, and you’re doing a little bit of following their lead and then leading them, and then following their lead and then leading them and that flexibility again, I think the context of theater allows that to happen cleanly in a way that maybe it can’t as well in other contexts.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Talia, this is something I’ve been actually thinking about for literally 30 years. I went into the field of creativity because I wanted to understand why people, why some people were creative and some people weren’t. But it was all based on my experience as an actor. And I love your 8 Acting Habits of mind. And one I had not thought about before was committed choices, which I think think is so fascinating because when I think about it, I’m like, yeah, that’s why it’s like, all right, let’s try this. Let’s give it our all and let’s go for it. The thing that I’m. I feel like I’m missing and I feel like it’s a little bit an imagine based on what you just told us and a little bit on consider others is this gift of being able to see things from a different perspective.

Cyndi Burnett:
And I’ll give you an example. When I was a freshman in college studying theater, I was in St. Joan and I played the Executioner. And not only did I play the Executioner, but I got a call out in the local newspaper for my wonderful one line which was, her heart would not burn, my Lord. And it was just like this moment of like taking off, you know, this Executioner outfit and holding this thing that was a heart and really putting myself in this place of what would it be like to witness this as the Executioner? And how would I feel? And like something you would never ever think of as, you know, when I was an 18 year old young woman and really being able to see things from different perspectives and when I talk with people about theater, I really feel like that’s the gift that it gives us is to really shift our perspective on life in the world. And understanding humans. So I don’t know if that. Is that a bigger piece? Is that the overarching piece of it all? I would love your perspective.

Talia Goldstein:
These are such great questions. This is like, you guys are really getting to the heart of what I’m trying to do with my book and how I’m trying to think about this work and think about the psychology of theater education, perspective taking, empathy, theory of mind, all of these, like sympathy, compassion, kind of other oriented. How do you bring the other into the self and how do you make connections with other people? I think those terms in the psychological literature have really been broken down into their component parts. Right. When we think about perspective taking, there’s a bunch of different pieces of it psychologically. First you have to recognize that other people might have a different perspective than you have. Then you have to think about the connections between your own experiences and what you know and what somebody else may know that’s above and beyond your own background or your own experiences. And then you have to put yourself in that place and you have to think about what it would feel like if.

Talia Goldstein:
Right. That sort of magic if that UTA Hagen and other acting theorists talk about. So all of these component parts happen in these different acting habits of mind. So acknowledging and recognizing other people have different perspectives and opinions than your own. That’s in the acting habit of mind of consider others, where teachers were constantly asking their students to think about the whys and think about the knowledge of the characters in the script and then also the other people in the classroom. Right? Why did she act that way? Why would the character say that? Why does he have this set of beliefs? So that’s the first thing, right? The cognitive understanding that other people have different beliefs maybe than what you have, then this body awareness and control I mentioned before is also a big part of it. Because you have to recognize, well, what do I feel? What is my body telling me? What is my own knowledge about this topic? And how can I shift and change that in order to better understand what it is that this character is going through? And then another acting habit of mind is collaboration. So the students were being consistently asked to work together in groups and teams of certain sort of sizes.

Talia Goldstein:
Right. Sometimes it was just pairs where they were doing dialogue in a script. Sometimes it was the whole classroom all at once having to work together. And implicit in those exercises, implicit in that kind of work is this mental shifting of perspectives. Because if I want you to behave in a certain way, and you want me to behave in a certain way, we need to find the common ground between us. So what’s really interesting is that both in this Acting Habits of Mind book that I wrote, but also way back, like 15 years ago when I was doing my dissertation work, I was really looking directly for perspective taking. Because when you talk to acting teachers, and I’ve done, I have data on this, actually, when you ask acting teachers what they think is happening in the acting classroom, the first thing they talk about is empathy. The first thing they talk about is perspective taking.

Talia Goldstein:
It’s the most obvious sort of surface thing, makes a lot of sense, but you don’t get a lot of it when you actually analyze the discourse in the classroom. When you actually look at what the acting teachers are saying out loud to the students and the implicit behaviors that they’re asking the students to engage with, they’re actually doing it in the component parts. And it’s really interesting because that’s where actual change happens. If you just go out there and say, why don’t you have empathy? Go have empathy? Go try some empathy. People don’t know how to do that, right? Because what does that mean? What are the parts of that? How do I shift my psychology in that way? But if you tell people, how is their perspective different from yours? What do you think and feel about this behavior, and how might you shift that? Why might you make a different choice than you’ve currently made? Those are the component parts, psychologically and cognitively, that empathy is made up of the emotional understanding in the self, the cognitive understanding in the other, and the belief that other people’s perspectives are worth taking. So I the component parts sort of build together, get at this experience that teachers are having that we call empathy, that we call perspective taking. And I have a really interesting little anecdote about this. Actually, one of the schools I was in was a magnet school for the arts where students had to audition to get in.

Talia Goldstein:
But it didn’t matter what their academic grades were. They were admitted on the strength of their audition. And then they got four years of really high quality acting training. 10 to 15 hours every single week over the course of the four years. And I filmed the freshmen, sophomore, juniors and seniors in this school. So I really got a sense of sort of the range of the acting training that’s happening in this school. This school is in inner city Boston and it’s majority students of color. And in one of the classrooms, I believe it was a junior level classroom that I was in, they were rehearsing a play in which the woman at the beginning of the scene is white and she says a number of racist statements all in a row.

Talia Goldstein:
And the young actress who was playing this part was really struggling to say these words out loud because they were horrific words that she would never say to her friends in this school where she had been for so many years. And so she didn’t want to say these racist statements. She’s like, why do I have to say this? It doesn’t feel comfortable. I would never say this. And the teacher got up with her, and she was like, I hear you. Let’s talk about this. The way in which you get an audience to change their mind about what is right and what is wrong is that you show them plainly what it looks like when somebody is a racist. When someone says racist things, you show them authentically why someone might have the motivation to do that.

Talia Goldstein:
And then you show them the consequences of that behavior. You show the consequences for themselves, and you show them the consequences for the community that they are harming through their racist words and behaviors and actions. But the only way you can get the audience to understand and change their minds is by showing them the truth. And so you have to, as an actor, figure out a way to show them the truth. You don’t have to believe it. No one’s gonna think you believe it because it’s acting. But you can show them the truth so that they can change their minds. And I just thought that was such a.

Talia Goldstein:
An empathic way of working with this young actress who wasn’t comfortable with difficult material, but showing her how to perspective take so that she could perform the truth and the audience could change their minds.

Matthew Worwood: 
So, Talia, we are getting really short for time, and I don’t want to cut. I want to cut one thing from this interview, so I’m going to be quick. You have to provide us with three tips that teachers can take when it comes to theater and creativity in their classroom.

Talia Goldstein:
Oh, only three? Okay, this is a rough one. I’m going to start with don’t forget about the body. So we know that little kids need recess and breaks to run around. It helps with their executive function. It helps with their attention. It helps them be focused. Big kids need it, too. Even when they’re 14 and 15 and 16 and 17 years old, even when they’re 21 and 22 in your college classrooms, big kids need it, too.

Talia Goldstein:
So give yourself permission to take stretch breaks and walk breaks, to have activities that get students up on their feet and moving around to allow them to process things in an embodied way. Right. Is there a way that you can bring the body into a chemistry classroom and physicalize movements, you know, movements in molecules or movements and atoms in a physics classroom or the solar system or what have you. So don’t forget about the body. That’s my first tip. The body is still necessary even when you’re not four years old and running around anymore. My second tip is that role play can be used no matter what it is that you’re talking about. You can always.

Talia Goldstein:
I know there’s. There’s an old adage, right, that the best way to learn something is to teach it. So if you have to break something down and teach it to somebody else or explain it to somebody else, then that’s a great way to learn something. But it can be a little scary, right? If you’re a student learning something for the first time, you sort of go, oh, I don’t know if I know this well enough to teach it to somebody else. But if I say to you, you now get to be Chip Chipperson, Action 9 News, and you’re going to go around and interview everyone in the classroom about the latest discovery on, you know, squirrel behavior in the spring or what have you. Kip Chipperson, Action 9 News with the Squirrel Report. And now you’ve made it a game, right? Now you’ve sort of lessened the consequence of knowing something or not knowing something or asking a weird question or not having the answer. And the role play will enable you to have a sense of fun about it and still get the information right? And it’s more motivating to do it that way than it is to just write a list of activities.

Talia Goldstein:
So that’s my second tip. Put role play into your classroom. And then I think my third tip is that you can teach students how to engage with critique of each other’s work without it becoming personal. So in the reflect and metacognitive acting habit of mind that I saw over and over again, that’s just one piece of it. The other piece of my book is talking about the fact that acting classrooms have four main sections to it. And one of those four main sections is a reflection section. This is a formal period of time in every class where students sit down and they reflect on their own work or they reflect on others work. And many, many, many of the teachers start that with pure observation.

Talia Goldstein:
Just visually, what are you looking at? Right? Not opinion, right? Not a judgment of somebody else, but just visually. I saw that they stood close to each other. I saw that they stood far away from each other. And then after you have a established the observation, you can say that closeness, I thought, made it seem like you guys were having a secret conversation. Is that appropriate? Is that not appropriate? Was that good or bad for the scene that you’re trying to play? Right, but observation first as a way to teach students how to reflect and think metacognitively about the material that they’re seeing. And I think that that can be applied to many, many different classrooms as you build a sense of camaraderie and peer critique. And also a sense that reflecting and thinking metacognitively about your work is a thing that you’re allowed to do. You don’t just have to perform and produce and then walk away.

Talia Goldstein:
You can stop and reflect and think back, do I want to change something? Could something else be better here? So that’s my third tip.

Matthew Worwood: 
Well, Talia, thank you so much for an absolutely brilliant episode. We’ve got to bring you back on to talk more about your work. And if you’re listening to this episode and you really want to learn more about creativity and theatre, we do have a section of all of our episodes that have covered theatre and creativity at our website, fuelingcreativitypodcast.com My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This this episode was produced by Matthew Warwood and Cindy Burnett. Our podcast sponsor is Curiosity to Create, and our editor is Sam Atkins.