I don’t have no skills

I want to correct a message that was briefly presented in our Drama PLO skit the other day. The main focus of the skit was to get across the main for content areas in drama and one exemplar of each. At one point the student (Ida-Mae) said she lacked drama skills, to which her teacher Mr. Raskob replied, something down the lines of ‘that’s alright, you don’t need skills!’ (I am obviously paraphrasing here, but that is more or less the impression I got).  For the sake of our skit saying this was fine (we had lost our script from the previous day, and therefore didn’t have much time to review the new script).

When teaching in a "real" class, I would like to suggest that it is never a very good idea to tell a student that they don’t need skills to do ____ activity. If our drama activities are not building confidence in some sort of skill then why are we practicing them? We can let students know that the activity is fun, but also that they have some skills to work with, and hopefully they will improve on them by participating. In truth, Mr. Raskob did show little Ida-Mae various skills throughout the skit, and assured her that she had some basic skill in these areas and would build on them. So, when a student says “I can’t do that, I don’t have the skills,” do what Mr. Raskob did, show them what the skills are, and that they can indeed do them!

(Photo adapted from: Hip Hop Shakespeare)