New Teacher Resources Collection

The New Drama Teacher toolkit has links and resources to help you with your first year in the drama classroom.

These resources will help you set up your classroom for the first time.

Links to DTA curriculum for a beginning drama teacher.

Resources to develop your classroom management skills.

Resources to help you establish drama classroom procedures.

Resources to help you choose plays for classroom study and performance.

Posters for your classroom, and scenes for classroom study.

Resources specifically for assessment in the drama classroom.

Video on how to put our fires in your classroom, using the DTA course modules.

Are you stepping into the classroom for the first time? Are you stepping into the classroom for your 20th year? Both have their joys and obstacles. This resource anticipates the challenges you will have, or you have faced in the drama classroom. It is designed to provide materials that will help you claim or reclaim a functioning teaching environment, your curriculum and relationships with your students. So whether you are a seasoned teacher or a brand new teacher, use this book to rethink your practices and see your spaces in the best light possible. Start the school year off right!

Use this journal to take some quick notes in the moment for your lessons. What worked? What didn’t? How did your time management on paper work in real time with students? This way when you’re ready to assess your curriculum in full, you’ll have a good picture of the individual pieces and where changes need to be made.

There are a lot of challenges that come in the first few years of teaching, especially for new theatre teachers, including non-traditional teaching spaces, entire classes of students who have no interest in theatre, a lack of a standard curriculum, and creating objective assessments for subjective materials, just to name a few. This book will help you anticipate the preparations you will need to address before a student ever walks into your classroom and the kind of philosophical questions you need to ask, and answer, as you begin your teaching career. This toolkit examines four fundamental building blocks of teaching: Classroom Setup, Classroom Management, Lesson Planning, and Assessment. It also provides you with tools and activities that will help you integrate these fundamentals into a drama classroom. If you are a new teacher, or are still in your teacher training, these tools will provide you with a lot of supplemental, practical information that will help you prepare for your first few years of teaching.

It’s important to keep track of your own personal journey as you step into the classroom for the first time. This way, you have a document you can use to review and reflect on at the end of the year. You don’t have to write volumes every day. Just enough to jog your brain and help you take steps to continue doing something or change something for the next school year. There are two months worth of daily journal pages and weekly reflection pages in this journal. Save/copy a blank one so you can continue recording your personal journey!

In this toolkit you’ll find exercises, activities, and information that will help you get you through your first days, build your classroom management skills, and articulate the importance of your program.

If you’ve never done a first week in the drama classroom, how do you know what to expect? What to say? What to do? Let the New Teacher Primer be your guide. We’ve divided this toolkit into high school and middle school sections. There’s definitely a specific way to approach each level. However, there will also be some overlap between the two, so don’t be afraid to read it all and adapt for your situation.

In this toolkit, you will learn the structure and terminology of a standard lesson plan and how that lesson plan can be adapted in the theatre classroom. You will learn how to identify and utilize Bloom’s Taxonomy in the creation of your lesson plans and explore the National Standards for Theatre with an eye toward including specific state standards in your completed plans.