A detailed account of how a high school playwriting course was developed, with a list of 20 exercises. (RL)

After presenting a series of assumptions about the teaching of playwriting (for example, that students can be taught the craft, if not the art, of playwriting; students must be kept to a strict deadline if they are to develop into disciplined writers; and playwriting should never be discussed outside the context of production possibilities), this…

A summer English class for gifted fifth- through eighth-grade students was designed to allow students to interact with literature by adapting short-stories into plays that the students then produced, performed, and filmed. During the prewriting phase, students discussed qualities most essential to a story or film, and compared a short story with…

A technique adopted for a course in advanced conversation in English as a second language used a combination of writing, acting, and self-monitoring activities to teach a variety of culturally valuable skills: narration, expression of opinion, and discussion of common issues in culturally sensitive ways. Students write plays as a group about…