Conference on New Ideas for Experienced Teachers

June 9–13, 2001
Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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by Susan B. Apel¹

I have been using theater techniques in the classroom for over six years. The genesis of this idea came not from my role as a teacher, but rather, as an adult student struggling to learn French for the first time in a class at Dartmouth College taught by Professor John Rassias.² I noticed how much time students in that class spent engaging the material with their bodies as well as with their words. The experience transformed my law teaching.

The exercise that I have chosen to present is one that I have used for several years in my family law class, but can be adapted to any subject matter. In my case, I have used it to introduce the concept of “family.” One could just as easily try it to engender a discussion about “corporation” or “the environment.” The technique involves the use of in-class, student-generated skits.

The following explains how to do this in a step by step fashion. The step by step nature of this exercise is important to employing it quickly and well. But there is another reason that I have chosen to break down the exercise in this way. The entire exercise incorporates several different teaching and learning techniques, which I will identify. For those for whom the use of skits seems too intimidating or difficult (it is not), or for those who fear that performance of the skits will take too much time ( they won’t, and it is time well spent), or simply for those who don’t want to use skits as a technique (your choice), it is possible to use pieces of this exercise. Some of the steps can stand alone and you might wish to use them independent of full skit mode.

Step #1: Assign readings in advance of the class on the subject of the skits. The first place to look is the casebook you are already using. Judith Areen’s Family Law book, for example, contains some introductory material from other disciplines discussing the definitions and functions of family.

Step #2: Give your students a task to complete before the class. The task in this case is a mini-“free write” to complete the following sentence: “A family. . .” Students are instructed to finish the sentence with a definition or description of a family. One might want to give examples such as “A family is related by law or blood,” or “A family takes care of its members.” I prefer not to provide examples for fear that it will hinder rather than help students by confining them only to definitional or functional statements.

Step #3: Once in class, assign students to small groups of 4 to 6. For convenience’ sake, I generally do this based on where they are already seated. Instruct them that they are to do the following things in this order:

1. Each student will read his or her completed “A family. . .” sentence to the rest of the group.
2. The group will choose one of the sentences, or if they prefer, they can combine or otherwise alter one of the sentences.
3. The group will put together a skit of no more than one minute (less time is fine.)
4. I demonstrate a skit to the group. I cajole two students into joining me at the front of the room and give them their lines, e.g. “I live at 123 Main Street.” I perform the skit with them, each one saying the line, and then ask the rest of the students what we were trying to convey. (A family resides at the same address)

Step #5: As each group finishes and after a few guesses from the audience, have one student from the group write the group’s sentence on the board.

Step #6: When all of the groups have finished, you will have a list of descriptive sentences about the concept of family. These provide a rich basis for a larger class discussion. General questions that I may pose to the students include asking them to review the list to determine if there are any themes or patterns. (For example, students often describe families in functional terms, i.e, what families do-“support each other in bad times”-rather than concentrate on legal constructions of families (“Families consist of parents and their children.”) Other questions might include:

• Does the list represent a complete picture or have we left anything out?
• If some aspect of family appears to be missing, why might that be? For example, in most years students tend to describe families in positive terms rather than negative ones. That may engender a discussion in two directions: 1) what are the missing negative descriptions and 2) why were they not on our original list?
• Are all of the statements on the board true? (My example of families living at the same address is often found wanting in this regard).
• Would our list look different if we had done this exercise 20 years ago? If we were in another country? If we were a more culturally diverse group?

What is the value of this exercise? I would answer in three ways. First, students generally find the exercise to be fun, which helps to balance much of the rest of traditional legal education. Second, this exercise incorporates many different pedagogies: learning from printed texts (reading), a “free-write”, albeit a short one, small group discussion, small group interaction skills, large group discussion, analysis of the final work product, and a memorializing of the work product for future use in the course. Thus, the exercise should help to “teach to the whole class” in providing not one, but many, teaching techniques.

Third, I cannot overstate the number of times students refer to the skits in class discussion throughout the semester, and in their exams and other course projects. The connections are made clearly and forcefully and help them to situate an individual day’s lesson within a larger whole. Moreover, the skits provide a sort of shared culture for the class, much as (dare I say it?) television might. So in addition to references that I or students might make to popular culture (“This is like the episode of The Practice last week. . .”, or in my time-warped mode, “This is like Leave It to Beaver. . .”)students can refer to our shared culture of the skits. (“Remember when the group in the back of the room did the skit about men feeling alienated from families? Maybe that has something to do with this default in the payment of child support that we read about for today.”)

Finally, I am convinced that this exercise is long remembered not just because it is fun, or unusual in the context of legal education. Rather, it stays with students because it contains actual physical activity along with mental activity, use of words and visual images, all of which involve more of the students’ whole persons.