At Turnaround Arts: California, we believe that everyone in a school is a learner, not just the students. A key part of our work is engaging teachers as learners themselves. When we partner with schools, they commit to devoting valuable staff time for teachers to engage in professional development in the arts, allowing teachers to expand their toolkit to include a variety of creative strategies. Public school classrooms contain a diversity of students with a wide range of learning styles and abilities. Teachers need ways to reach all students and the arts are a proven tool for increasing student engagement, collaboration, and achievement.

We’ve been partnering with Finney Elementary for two years, supporting the school in identifying and developing arts strategies that build student learning and family engagement and create a welcoming and joyful school environment. Over the past year, teachers at Finney Elementary worked to expand their use of the arts to include theater in classroom teaching. Principal Rachel Scott shares, “Dr. Niki Elliott says that art is a vehicle to the brain, a gateway to learning. We want to make language come alive through theatre.” In partnership with their Turnaround Arts Coach, Deirdre Moore of Arts Education Connection San Diego, the school identified “tableau” as a theatre strategy that they would use schoolwide. According to Arts Education Connection San Diego, there are numerous benefits to using tableau in elementary schools, including:

• Encouraging collaboration and social skills as students work together and respond to each other’s ideas.
• Enhancing critical thinking as students create, observe, and interpret tableaux.
• Supporting diverse learning styles as students get to embody concepts, better reaching students who might not typically excel in traditional, text-heavy learning environments.
• Improving communication skills as students learn to convey meaning through body language and facial expressions.
• Developing social-emotional intelligence as students depict different perspectives, emotions, or interpersonal dynamics.

All teachers at Finney participated in an interactive training workshop, learning the art of tableau, where actors stage a scene that is silent and motionless, in order to depict an event or convey an idea. Teachers learned practical techniques to help them use theater in everyday classroom teaching to make learning fun, meaningful, and memorable. Following the training, teachers received individual support as they began to implement the new theatre arts technique into their teaching, and reflect together on the impact it’s having on student engagement and learning.

After participating in this training, Christopher Turner, a 6th-grade teacher at Finney Elementary shared:

“With tableau, students get to express themselves in such unique ways. Students constantly show levels of understanding, expressed through their creativity, that they normally don’t get to show. It is a great way to gain access to my students’ thinking and comprehension.”

Pictured above: Students in Melissa Showman’s 3rd-grade class use tableaux to collaboratively represent key events from Jack and the Beanstalk. Ms. Showman shared, “They were fully engaged, thinking creatively, and having fun as they planned their frozen pictures. The activity required them to cooperate, compromise, and demonstrate their understanding of both the plot and characters. It was rewarding to see the children bring the story to life while strengthening their comprehension and teamwork skills.”