Theatre in Education
According to some drama teachers, plays have built-in strategies to help students improve their reading skills. The acting out of dialogue causes readers to work more closely with the text to project and interpret meaning into the reading experience. Consequently, students gain improvement in vocabulary, comprehension and retention. Reading in a small group provides reading role models which is also proven to improve reading skills in students. Research has shown that Readers Theatre can improve reading fluency, word choice and comprehension.
One of the foremost authors on Readers Theatre was Dr. Leslie Irene Coger. Dr. Coger taught for most of her career at Missouri State University and wrote the book, Readers Theatre Handbook: A Dramatic Approach to Literature.
Read more about this topic: Reader's Theatre
Famous quotes containing the words theatre and/or education:
“Mankind’s common instinct for reality ... has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.”
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“The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.”
—Jean Piaget (1896–1980)