Exploring, Sharing, Connecting and Affecting

As a new Secondary school teacher of Drama, I created The Sequential Learning Model in September of 2014. It was a Drama curriculum that introduced key stage 3 students to the study of Drama; the model was a reaction to the disappointing GCSE results our centre received in 2013, which I felt this was partly due to an ineffective key stage 3 Drama Curriculum that was created long before I joined the school.

This study examines the extent to which the revised version of The Sequential Learning Model entitled 'Exploring, Sharing, Connecting and Affecting' (E.S.C.A and beyond), promotes progress for eight students as they embark on their study of Drama. Exploring, Sharing, Connecting and Affecting are essentially the core values that underpinned my existing teaching practice and curriculum, and will be examined in part 2 of the Literature review and forms part of the Methodology.

Since 'progress' is rather a broad term, and could present itself in a myriad of ways within a classroom setting, this study will focus solely on progress specific to the devising aspect of Component One from the Edexcel GCSE Drama (9-1). Moreover, this study will only report on the progress of the aforementioned eight case study students. These case studies represent a broad spectrum of students and follows their journey as they learn using the Exploring, Sharing, Connecting and Affecting model; details about the case study selection process will be explained in chapter 5 (Methodology).