Some learning tasks are losing their value.

I am back after a summer of rest and reflection with my first blog post of the academic year.

The case in point is that AI has continued to ramp up in scale and scope and, whilst this post will not delve into this as such, it will share my recent quest to develop more AI-resistant pedagogy. There is a place for AI and technology, for sure, but I am conscious, as are many, that cognitive offloading to AI is likely to be detrimental to student development and therefore judicious use of it is a necessity.

Anyway, I digress, so let me take you to the heart of my recent work and share with you a few strategies I have been implementing which may be of interest to you.

Teaching A-Level in any subject is an absolute pleasure and, for me in Drama, my aim is to consistently provide students with opportunities to co-construct their schema of the subject in a deep and meaningful way.

When introducing a new A-Level (or GCSE) playtext to students, my natural wish is for them to get a grounding in the context, the playwright and the “why is this text in our world?” type of knowledge before proceeding to exploration. In the past, finding, synthesising and sharing knowledge about the play would be a learning task in itself. In the name of “flipped learning”, “go and find some information about X, collate it and share it with the class” might be a feature of a lesson. But with collated knowledge being at everyone’s fingertips in seconds, that kind of task is pretty worthless.

This brings me to a few things that I have been building in over the past five years but have ramped up the use of in 2026 in my Drama lessons and beyond:

Oracy strategies; i.e. using talk for learning

Enquiry-Based Learning blended with Direct Instruction

Mantle of the Expert and experiential learning

I truly believe that, as teachers, we are the true “architects” of dialogic space and are responsible for constructing tasks that maximise opportunities to learn for all students. In that case, simple research tasks (where AI will inevitably be used) are obsolete. We must use tools to allow students to synthesise and co-construct their knowledge through debate and discussion. We must also make these experiences motivating and exciting.

In light of these thoughts, I rolled up my sleeves and began to alter my context lessons for both Y12 and Y13 playtext exploration lessons and have seen some impressive results.

Let me give you an example. Introducing the play Woyzeck to my Y13 students requires them to delve into the writer, the time of writing, and the original performance conditions for the play. Blending some of the strategies above, I have set up some activities that have improved students’ retention of the knowledge, but also added to their depth of knowledge of the subject and, as a bonus, continued to build and refine their acting skills.

If you have read this far, I’m sure you want an example, so…

Instead of teaching students explicitly or using flipped learning for them to get the 1836-1838 context of Georg Büchner’s Germany, we set up a live simulation of a theatre company (Mantle of the Expert). Students were each given a character to play, such as theatre manager, newspaper critic, investor, Büchner, etc. They then had to sit at a table and decide whether the play was to be performed or not. Borrowing techniques from recent oracy research, students were given thinking time independently to construct their arguments. They were then asked to share their thoughts with a partner first, and then it opened out to the theatre company meeting.

As a teacher, you really do need to put the structure in place and know what you want the discussion to centre on, but with this architecture in place, students have a space where they can begin to co-construct knowledge through talk, whilst also immersing themselves in a character.

Some other strategies used in the first few lessons have been hot-seating members of society from the time of the play, hot-seating characters from the play, and asking students to create elevator pitches in character for why they are not responsible for the breakdown of the family (That Face, Polly Stenham).

If our aim, which it should be, is to ensure that 100% of learners are actively involved in learning at all times, then we must place more focus on the design and implementation of these activities to ensure students’ thinking is where you want it to be.

A common question in Drama education right now is how much direct instruction there should be versus enquiry-based learning. Again, not something to debate in this post, but what I will say is that I find that the “direct” side of things does need to be present for maximum effect. Once students have been in a simulation, we come out of role and present them with the key knowledge they need and then, in a low-stakes fashion, students can align their thinking with the facts and take these into the next activity (we spiral, so nothing is left behind).

I have recently found that, through participation in this potent blend of pedagogy, students are more fluent in the key facts and knowledge because they have had to retrieve and use them in multiple real-time scenarios. Deeper understanding is showing up in written work and their discernment is sharpening. All very useful for accessing the deeper thinking required at the top band of essay writing.

This academic year I am co-leading a working party for oracy development within my context and also continuing to re-think learning activities to ensure that I create the conditions for deep enquiry and thinking in my students.

My next few posts will likely be written with this in mind.

My thinking is partially synthesised from my knowledge of Heathcote’s Mantle of the Expert, my experience, and readings from the following sources: