Performance and the Classroom: Part 1—My First (Misconceived) Effort

The following excerpts of David’s upcoming book, Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach: Reflections on Education as Transformation through Dialogue (Summer, 2014), are used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

I got the idea to incorporate performance into the classroom from the choir director at Carthage College. I went to the annual concert of the choir, a magnificent Christmas concert held each year in December. The concert was repeated several times on the weekend and drew thousands of people from the college and from the area.

As always, I was awed by the quality of the student performances. John Windh, the director and professor of music, had a personal and a professional manner, and he knew how to draw the most out of his choir. But the student singers! Wow! How did he get the students to work so hard in preparation and to work together in the various dynamics of harmony necessary to produce such a magnificent sound? And the amount and range of music they had prepared was impressive.

Communal = Excellence?

My immediate thought was this: “OK, I am a teacher. What would I have to do with my students in a class to draw that level of commitment and that quality of work? I know students want to function at a high level. So what could motivate them to do it?” At the time, I was preparing to teach a January interim course on “Daily Life in Jesus’ Time.” The January term is a month-long intensive course that lends itself to innovation and experimentation. So my mind went to work in figuring out what I could do that would result in such high quality work.

My first idea was that the motivation of choir members came primarily from working together. After all, it was a communal project. Sopranos depended upon altos, who both depended on tenors and basses, and vice versa and so on. I could imagine that each student knew how much the others counted on her or him to be there and to sing well in order to produce the desired sound. Only by cooperation could they together create the marvelous music that was much more than the sum of the parts—music that filled the auditorium and the ears and hearts of those present.

So I devised a process for the study of daily life in Jesus’ time that would replicate the interdependence I saw in the college choir.

The Big Idea

Here was my idea: I had fourteen students signed up for the class. Each student would be responsible for one area of daily life, such as houses, clothes, work, synagogue, marriage and family life, geography and travel, economic life of peasants, priests, the temple in Jerusalem, festivals and pilgrimage, coins, and so on. The student responsible for a certain area would need to be study so as to be an expert in those matters.

At the same time, each student would create an imaginary person out of the First Century (no known figure from the Bible or elsewhere) and write an autobiographical story about that person’s life—a peasant wife and mother, a farmer from Tiberias, a widow, a tax collector living in Capernaum, a priest from Jerusalem in the Temple, and so on. In order to do this, however, each one would have to depend on the other students in order to find out from their areas of expertise what their own character would wear and where they might live and what their labor would be like and to construct certain events in their lives. In other words, the students would be interdependent. They would count on each other. And this would provide the motivation for quality work.

Misconceived Plan

I was quite pleased with my plan for the upcoming class. So when I encountered John Windh one day in the college mailroom, I asked him if he had a minute, and I proceeded to explain to him how I had been inspired by the choir and his leadership. And I told him about my idea for the January class and what I was planning for the students to do and how it would lead them to be motivated as the choir members had been.

His immediate response was clear and direct: “It won’t work!”

I was stunned and somewhat taken aback. “Why not?” I asked.

“Because,” he said, “You need a performance.”

Then he explained it to me, “It is primarily because the students know that they will be giving a performance before an audience that instills in them the desire to work hard and to perform well and to take such pride in their work.”

Instantly, I saw the wisdom of his words.

Take Two

Okay. Back to the drawing board. I did not abandon my earlier idea, but now I had a new challenge. How could I incorporate a performance into the class? Well, I just arranged for a performance. I called several churches in the area whose pastors I knew and got us invited to do a program for a senior citizen group on a Wednesday morning in late January. I stayed with the earlier plan for the interdependent work of the class and then added a performance into the mix. And what a difference it turned out to be!

On the first day of the class, I told the students about this and asked if they would like to accept this invitation to do a performance. They were enthusiastic. We decided that we would develop a program in which we would perform scenes from first century Jewish life. The students began choosing their areas of expertise from a list I gave them. Then they each chose an imaginary character. This freedom to choose meant that students had an investment in creating such an imaginary person. So they got to work on their research and reflections.

Each day they shared what new they had learned; and they conferred with each other about their projects. Then the students had the idea to approach the theater department and ask if we could borrow some costumes. With their help, we picked out garb that was appropriate to each of the characters. In the end, the students not only made up their characters, they also became their characters.

Educational from Preparation to Performance

Once these things were in place and the process of working interdependently took off, the rest fell into place. The students created the program entirely. The scenes were made up of interactions between the characters. So we had a priest declaring a leper clean. There was a scene in which a tax collector demanded tribute from a fisherman on the way to market. A Roman soldier arrested a Zealot. Three women talked at the well. And there was a wedding! There were other scenes I cannot recall now, but the whole thing was quite entertaining and informative. The students had to practice their parts to know them well.

The program was planned for the third week of the class. And it went really well. Someone would introduce and explain the scene, and then the students involved would act it out. The presentation took almost an hour. One of the additional features was that we arranged for the audience to ask the students questions after the scenes were over. The students remained in character and answered the questions as their first century persons!

The whole thing went so well that the students agreed to repeat the scenes for the religion department at the school—faculty members, religion majors, and any other students they wished to invite. This experience took it to another level, because now they had to be able to answer the questions posed by faculty and fellow students. As a result, the last week of the course involved more study in their areas of expertise and more refinement as they rewrote the stories of the characters they had chosen. The performance at the school went super well. And note, the students did it, with enthusiasm, at the beginning of the second term, after the interim class was over!

Why it Worked

John Windh was right: “You need a performance.” I learned a lot from that experience. But more importantly, the students learned a lot. There is a Chinese proverb that says:

Tell me,

and I will forget.

Show me,

and I will remember.

Involve me,

and I will understand.

I really felt as if students got a grasp of First Century life in ways they never would have done without this “involvement.” And as we were coming out of the church after the program, one of the students in the class who had been most skeptical said to me: “That was fun!” So I might add to the Chinese proverb:

Make it fun,

and I will want to do it again.

Also, in all of this, my initial idea to set up an arrangement in which students were dependent upon one another for their learning worked well. And the cooperative learning was enhanced by the fact that they were actually working together to prepare and to put on this program. They did it together.

What Made the Difference?

Why was performance so central to the success of this class? Why were the students so engaged? And why were they motivated to do so well? There are probably a lot of good answers to those questions. But a key one is this: An activity done in a classroom can be somewhat artificial, but a performance to an outside audience is for real.

Clearly, this is overstated, but it is accurate enough. In a classroom, we do things just for the teacher or for other students. It can easily feel like it is “practicing,” or an activity done for a grade. But when there is a real audience outside the classroom, the stakes are raised and the desire to do well is magnified. It is amazing how this event transcends any motivation a teacher may give the students as a means to bring the best out of them. In fact, the teacher now becomes a coach or director working with the students to prepare for an (outside) activity, rather than as evaluator and judge.

I believe students long to engage in learning that is meaningful, not only for themselves but for others as well. The whole experience of college and seminary often becomes a liminal state comprised of opportunities to “take in” information and skills rather than an active experience of “giving out” in meaningful action for others.

Education often becomes a hoop to jump through, a matter of learning something that will be practiced only after the college or graduate school programs are over. The performance was a way to engage students in an activity in which they were definitely taking in historical knowledge about first century life and they were also offering something that was meaningful for others. The best learning may be “learning by doing.”

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