Theatre - Introduction

Welcome to the 2014 Theatre Standards. These grade-by-grade standards are an effort to articulate the most fundamental elements of theatre, in the hope that by doing so there will be recognition that every student  can and should achieve a level of proficiency or beyond in this ancient and honorable craft. The most widespread theatre education opportunities in the United States have traditionally been in high schools, and the standards included here can readily be employed as a springboard for curriculum design and assessment at that level. The standards in the earlier grades suggest the same rigor and understanding but it’s understood that at each successively earlier grade, there are fewer and fewer theatre programs and trained educators to teach in them. Thus, the PreK through middle grade standards are largely aspirational—what should be in our schools and arts programs.

The 2014 Theatre Standards are written with both drama processes and theatre products in mind. While many secondary theatre programs focus on performance and design in staged productions as evidence of a student’s understanding and achievement in the art, ongoing student engagement in theatre without an end product in mind has not always been defined and valued. These standards address those drama processes as well as traditional theatre. Drama processes encompass envisioned worlds and unscripted activities designed to engage students in a wide range of real and imagined issues; theatre includes the broader and more traditional conventions of the craft that have been developed over the centuries—scripted plays, acting, public performance, and stagecraft.

To address both process and product in theatre, the grade 3 through high school standards of Proficient, Advanced, and Accomplished often include the term “drama/theatre” to clarify the distinct but companion parts of theatre education. The PreK through grade 2 standards, acknowledging the early childhood need for supervision and unfettered play, employ the phraseology “dramatic play” and/or “guided drama experience.”

You will also find Model Cornerstone Assessments (MCAs) intended to show the ways in which standards serve as a foundation for the creation of reliable and authentic measurements of student learning in theatre. These MCAs are not put forth as a definitive assessment of a particular set of skills; rather they presented to inspire teachers to create their own assessments that serve both their pedagogy and the learning needs of their students.

Please see the resources on these two partner organizations websites:

Educational Theatre Association

American Alliance for Theatre and Education

Model Cornerstone Assessments:

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