As a varsity diver in college, I have often been
asked about the subjective nature of scoring in the sport, and whether this has
a large influence over who wins and loses in a diving meet. Generally, I
respond by saying that there is usually an observable consistency between judges
scoring each dive. The crowd members and other observers of the meet usually
agree with the scores thrown by judges, and the subjective nature of judging
does not play a highly influential role in changing how contestants place
within a meet. Likewise, one might ask how a drama class can become stratified
by skill level, and whether a teacher is justified in any objective sense in
dividing up a drama class based on skill level. I believe that metacognitive
development provides objectively verifiable grounds for determining the skill
level of drama students, and that the metacognitive development of our students
is integral both to developing our students as individuals and for furthering
their academic success.
Metacognition develops gradually as an individual comes to have greater
conscious control over cognition that monitors, regulates, or reflects on
first-order cognition (Kuhn 2000, 178). Deanna Kuhn differentiates between
declarative knowing ("knowing that") and procedural knowing
("knowing how"). She proposes that the metastrategic cognition of
procedural knowing plays a major role in selecting adequate strategies for
problem-solving while also expelling inadequate strategies. This is important
because it fills the previous gap in Developmentalist psychology of addressing
how change occurs in cognition, and, perhaps more interestingly, why it does
not occur in some situations.
The freedom within a drama program permits students to demonstrate their
understanding of the adequacy of various strategies to problem-solving in a
given situation, as well as their proficiency to monitor and regulate the
influence of outside sources upon their declarative knowledge. Teacher feedback
from strategy employment at the degree of performance occurs at the meta-level;
students in an advanced class, then, should be more willing to adapt to
teaching comments and be able to modify their behavior in class through
strategy training at the advice of an instructor. Since the early 2000s,
metacognitive functions have been investigated in terms of text comprehension,
memory, reasoning, and problem solving (Kuhn 2000, 80). We see a parallel to
the acting world in each case: text comprehension for understanding a written
script; memory to remember lines and character development from other members
of a production as well as logistics of drama production; reasoning to make
quick decisions in how to act onstage; and problem solving for the process of
staging a play through taking directions from a script.
Complex meta-knowing capabilities stand as the end goal in metacognitive
development for Kuhn, which some adults never reach. Meta-level control of both
one's own knowing processes and the knowing processes of others in social
groups are integral to raising one's awareness and becoming reflective upon
their thinking, as well as acknowledging the sources of knowledge that
influence one's thinking. Due to its emphasis on social interaction, a
successful drama class should enhance the meta-cognitive capacity of its
students, and it should give them the creative room to demonstrate their
relative level of meta-cognitive development. In turn, effective drama teachers
should be able to gauge the meta-cognitive development of their students and
assign them new tasks that are adequately difficult for their level of
meta-cognitive development (Vygotsky 1978, 31).
For Lev S. Vygotsky, learning is specific to the elements in a set of tasks
which one is given: Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to
think; it is the acquisition of many specialized abilities for thinking about a
variety of things. Learning does not alter our overall ability to focus
attention, but rather it develops various abilities to focus attention on a
variety of things. This is due to the fact that each activity depends on the
material with which it operates, and the development of consciousness is the
development of a set of particular, independent capabilities. (1978, 31)
Adhering to
Vygotsky's view might imply that the skills learned in a drama class would only
be extricable to other instances of improvisation games, modeling emotions, and
interacting with the emotions of others -- despite these being no small skills
to learn. Daniel Goleman's book Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter
More Than IQ spurred a worldwide interest in Social and Emotional Learning
(SEL). Throughout the globe, more than ten thousand students currently uphold a
SEL curriculum requirement as an essential skill for living, and it can be
present from kindergarten to the last year of high school (Goleman
"Emotional"). While these curricular goals were originally instated
to solve behavioral problems among students, they have also been shown to boost
the academic performance of students. Likewise, the business world is also
latching onto the necessity of emotional intelligence within the workplace,
which Kids Are Dramatic seeks to develop through students at the middle school
level.
Works Cited
Goleman, Daniel. "Emotional
Intelligence." Daniel Goleman. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2013.
Kuhn, Deanna. "Metacognitive
Development." Current Directions in Psychological Science 9.5
(2000): 178-81. Print.
Vygotsky, Lev S. "Interaction Between Learning
and Development." Readings on the Development of Children (1978):
n. pag. Print.
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