Teaching Experiment Design Brief

Objectives:

This assignment asks you to articulate your design for a unit plan, workshop plan OR study guide, and to propose a small, specific element of it to try out in a teaching experiment. While the topic, level and context for your design and experiment are wide open, the experiment must use a drama-based practice or convention.

The scope of your unit plan, workshop plan or study guide is modest — it is not expected you will design a whole course or program of study — this would be beyond the scope of this assignment. Think of planning something more brief in timescale, say something that would happen over a few relatively brief classes or sessions at most. The purpose of the assignment is to learn by refining clarity of intention, informed use of practice, ethical awareness, and experimentation in practice, and reflection. In short, you learn a little preparation, presence and practice. Doing an effective job of this design brief means I can give you helpful feedback heading into our final classes, putting you on stronger footing for a good finish in the course.

Choose your group and topic:

Decide whether you are working solo or in a group of 2 or 3.

Next, think about what format you will use for your teaching experiment project:

1. Unit Plan – A structured plan for a learning experience in a public school classroom setting connecting directly to the Ontario curriculum
2. Workshop Plan – A structured plan for a learning experience outside the public school classroom setting without a connection to the Ontario curriculum
3. Study Guide – A learning guide for an educator guiding learning around a specific chosen play or performance

I’ve provided further detail, models and resources for these formats on a separate page .

You should also work out some specific theme, issue, topic, or play/performance.

Remember, while you must use drama-based approaches to teach your theme/topic, it can be anything (especially for the ‘workshop plan’, which does not need to even have a curricular connection). Please, choose something that you’re passionate about! In the previous run of this course, students chose to teach all sorts of things: creativity to elementary students, emotional intelligence, safety in sports, second-language learning, coping with grief, better practices for university student services–you get the idea. Students who worked on study guides chose some popular plays or some lesser known ones (anyone want to do Lady in the Red Dress!?). Think about something you’d really like to teach, something you’d be good at and care about, and use the project to work out how you could bring drama-based appraoches to bring that learning to life for an imagined group of learners. Teaching will always be more effective and compelling when the teacher is personally invested in the topic.

Next, think about which “pro social capacity” your project will support:

1. Active listening
2. Empathy and perspective-taking
3. Collaborative problem-solving
4. Conflict navigation
5. Community-building
6. Care-oriented relational practice
7. Ethical attentiveness to power and context

I have identified these to be common “learning outcomes” for drama-based learning activities. You can choose more than one. You want your teaching designs, ideally, to support the pro-social capacity you’ve chosen. For instance, if you choose “conflict navigation”, it should be clear in your idea how the project is about conflict, and will provide an opportunity for learning how to deal with conflict.

Instructions for the Design Brief Assignment:

Now that you have some ideas, you can complete your assignment by answer the following prompts clearly and in order. You are welcome to either a) prepare this in a written document, or b) record a presentation using powerpoint or similar software that permits you to show slides and provides audio or video. Regardless of the format, you will be evaluated on the same rubric as below–so please be sure to address all the details.

1. Project Overview (approx. 100 words)

Begin with a concise overview of your proposed design. Clearly describe the learning context or audience you are imagining, the pro-social capacities you are seeking to cultivate, and the overall goal of your project. Identify the level of learners you imagine (elementary, junior/intermediate, secondary, post-secondary or other context outside of school). What are you trying to help participants practice, understand, or experience? What broad approach are you taking? This section should allow a reader to understand, in a few short statements, what your project is and why it matters.

2. Practices and Influences (approx. 250 words)

Explain which drama- or theatre-based practices or conventions will be used your project and why. Identify where these practices come from and what they were originally designed to address. Demonstrate that you have engaged with relevant professional examples or our teaching design resources , and explain how they informed your thinking. If you are drawing on an existing model unit plan, study guide, or workshop outline for inspiration, be explicit about what you are borrowing and what you are changing. The goal is not to duplicate an exiting model but to learn from them.

3. Description of the Project and Experiment (approx. 500 words)

This assignment asks for greater detail about your project. If you imagine a unit or workshop plan, what will be its general nature or approach? If a study guide, what play/performance will you focus on, why, and what theme(s) or angle(s) will be your focus from the many that are possible? What is the ideal scope (amount of time, number of sessions, number of participants, etc). What context will you need to provide (what preparation do you need to do) and what presence would a teacher/facilitator need to have (what presence will you need to have). What resources, preparation, materials, or conditions are required? Responses here should help me see the different basic components you see as necessary.

Next, identify a single, small part of the unit plan / workshop plan / study guide that you will attempt to experimentally try out. The idea here is to have you learn something from a contained, brief experiment — to try out a convention on someone and see what you can learn from its efficacy or its shortcomings. It isn’t practical to try out all your learning activities, nor a multi-sessional unit plan–instead, you want to try something you can execute simply and without a lot of organizing to see what you can learn about presence and practice. Since we don’t have a handy group of experimental students, here we will have to be creative, recruiting peers from the course as experimental ‘students’ to your learning activity, or otherwise finding someone outside the class to help you. What do you propose?

4. Best Practices in Equity, Diversity and Access (approx. 250 words)

Your designs should be mindful of how teaching practices can be made more inclusive, accessible and culturally-responsive. You should have a think about the potential tensions, exclusions, or risks that might arise in your design and facilitation. Consider issues of consent, comfort, power dynamics, cultural context, and accessibility. Explain how you will address these thoughtfully. Strong Design Briefs anticipate difficulty rather than ignoring it. I’ve provided a lot of resources that support inclusive design, safety, university design for learning, culturally responsive teaching, ability and neurodiverse learning design .

5. What You Need Help With (approx. 150 words)

Here, help me help you by telling me what you feel you still need help with. Be clear about what you don’t yet know and what guidance you would benefit from. Do you need better sources? A more practical idea for your teaching experiment? Drama practices that are more effective in achieving the goals you’ve identified? (Please note that I always encourage and reward humility. Being honest and aware of the limitations of your knowledge — the clearer you are in what you don’t know, the more effectively I can guide you).

6. Process Reflection (approx. 250 words, written)

At the end of your Design Brief, include a brief reflection on your groups research and design process. You might address some of the following:

• How did your group approach researching and shaping this project? What resources did you consult (Teaching Practice Resources, scholarly texts, professional models)? How did your thinking evolve through discussion?
• How did you use LLMs, AI, or translation tools, if at all? Please describe any use of these tools, whether for searching, brainstorming, drafting, or editing. Transparency is expected. If you did not use these tools, say so.

This reflection should use a searching voice and demonstrate honesty about process.

General note 1: Research Expectations

Although this course has relatively few prescribed readings, you are expected to engage meaningfully with relevant professional or scholarly resources when developing your design. Work which is grounded in the literature will be well-informed and solid of design; work that is not will be weaker and assessed as such. Your brief should reflect informed decision-making rather than invention out of thin air. You must draw at least partially from the resources I’ve provided to support this assignment, , , and . If you bypass these higher quality resources and only use poor, unverified sources from Google/LLMs this will affect your assessment. All sources must be cited in a consistent formal academic format both in text and in a works cited list. I suggest MLA format which you can find guidance on here (I attached it). If you have not learned how to do in-text citations there are some resources supporting this .

General note 2: LLM use

Please refer to the document in our Quercus modules for the policy on LLM use in this course.

To summarize here, you may use Large Language Models, Generative Artificial Intelligence, or translation tools to explore sources or brainstorm ideas. These tools can be useful if used strategically and judiciously; however, an over-reliance on them will produce vague and conventional writing that drowns out your unique ideas and voice, the very things you are here to develop. Your sources should not come purely from LLMs–these are generally partial and poor and lacking practitioner perspectives and expertise. You are asked above to detail your LLM use in your submission. Misrepresenting LLM-generated material as your own will be considered academically dishonest and may constitute an academic offence.