THE EDUCATOR ADVISORY BOARD: Creating Our Study Guides

Educator Advisory Board members spend summers creating our study guides

If you were to ask the teachers in our Educator Advisory Board, “What did you do over summer break?”, they’d report that they’d spent significant time volunteering for Park Square Theatre’s education program. More specifically, they’d tell you that they were busy creating the study guides for the upcoming season’s student matinee plays. Because these study guides are actually produced by educators experienced in teaching 7th to 12th graders, they are mindfully designed to not just be grade-appropriate for our targeted audiences, but dynamically usable, as well. While our materials are ready for use, they can also be specifically adapted for particular class usage (we can provide a PDF file for you to modify); our materials are additionally designed with different types of learners in mind (e.g., visual, text-oriented, physical, etc.).

Last summer, I got to sit in on a few study guide creation sessions for an insider’s view on how it gets done. (I specifically observed sessions for the Flower Drum Song and Macbeth study guides.) A separate committee was created for each play that needed a study guide, and someone in each committee served as Editor (or Co-Editors). Education Director Mary Finnerty held an Editor’s training session to cover editor responsibilities, challenges of editing and style sheet expectations before the committees met.

The committee meetings consisted of three two-hour meetings per play to match the three steps in the process:

Meeting 1 – Discuss the play and what contents the teacher will need to prepare their students and assign who will write each article or activity.

Meeting 2 – Look at drafts of the materials and assess structure, approach and audience.

Meeting 3 – Proofread articles for grammatical correctness, parallel structure, consistent formatting and following of the style sheet.

As you can see, much of the volunteers’ tasks–namely, research and writing–were independently completed before being reviewed by their group as a whole.

When asked what inspired them to do this work, committee members provided a variety of reasons:

“After bringing students to a play, I was impressed by the Park Square Theatre guides. They were better than any I’d seen from other theatres. Other guides are often designed for college students or theatre aficionados instead of for students’ first exposure to theatre.”

Educator Advisory Board members in a meeting to look at study guide drafts.

“I believe in Park Square Theatre’s Education Program. It’s extremely strong. I work for the Folger Shakespeare Library in D.C., consulting on educational materials and leading teacher workshops nationwide. I am very passionate about Shakespeare.”

“I feel like being in this group and going through drafting and peer evaluations of lesson plans and the study guide makes me a better teacher. I also use a lot of ideas that come out of our meetings in the classroom.”

“This is interesting work that encourages me to look at plays more deeply, and I also benefit from the other advisory board members who bring their ideas for working with students.”

“I’ve always loved theatre. I think that theatre is an interdisciplinary art form, and I love to teach in an interdisciplinary way. Theatre talks about everything.”

“I’m not able to get involved in theatre. I don’t have a background in it. But I know how to create curriculum. This is a way to get involved.”

Sacrificing part of their summers to create study guides for classroom use reflects the deep commitment that the Educator Advisory Board has for theatre, their profession and the young people ultimately impacted by their work. In essence, it’s a generous gift of love that gets passed forward many times over. Thank you from the bottoms of our hearts.

——

 

NOTE: A study guide can be accessed by selecting a particular play at https://www.parksquaretheatre.org/education/education-matinees-2017-18/.

 

(To learn more about the Educator Advisory Board, also read the past post “A HISTORY OF OUR EDUCATOR ADVISORY BOARD: Teachers Helping Teachers.”)

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