Happy New Year to you all. I hope you had a good Christmas break. I’ve had a fantastic break away from work. As a young family, we have a pretty full on Christmas, so it is a good time to take a break from work and relax. Which is fine, of course, but getting back into work mode takes a little longer every year!

I’m going to start 2020 with an exciting announcement. I’m going to be presenting at the Music and Drama Education Expo again. I’m super excited to be going back. It is a great day out with wonderful opportunities for great CPD and networking.

This year I’ve been invited to talk on a subject that I know has been a hot topic: Knowledge Rich Drama Curriculum.
Recently we have all been asked to create an academically challenging, knowledge-rich, broad and balanced, progressive, responsive and ambitious curriculum. But what on earth is it? What does it look like? What does it feel like to teach? What does it need to do, want to achieve and how do you get there? Where do you even start creating it?

This is a huge and, often, contentious issue. There are so many other questions associated with it. In the 45 minutes I’ve got, I will attempt to answer as many as I can. I will try to give you workable ideas for implementing a greater depth of knowledge in the drama studio. And I will attempt to give you an understanding of how that can be seen and assessed in written and practical work.

As the focus of the new Ofsted framework is now on Curriculum this session will provide an overview that new framework, including how to evaluate your own curriculum in light of it. You will also hopefully go home with ideas and tasks for lessons that you can immediately implement in your drama studio. And enrich your curriculum with greater knowledge and consider the signs for how that will develop your students.

Hopefully you will be able to attend the session, which is on Thursday 5th March at 1pm in the Seminar Theatre. As I said, there is loads taking place that day and it is a wonderful opportunity to get some free CPD in your life.

There are many highlights for me on the Thursday. The first is ‘Raising the profile of your Drama department’, led by Annabel Thomas and Holly Barradell. The session will explore what makes a successful Drama department. And how you can build a thriving drama culture if you’re a small department, or even a department of one.

There are some excellent and valuable practical workshops to help add to what you are already doing in your Drama Studios. Expert Drama teacher Zeena Rasheed is putting on two workshops: ‘Using Drama to explore cultural diversity’ and ‘Starting with scripts’. Two sessions that are well worth looking at. Another practical workshop that looks exciting is Adam Milfords ‘Stage Combat: the foundation of communication and storytelling’. And David Farmer’s session on ‘using music to create physical theatre with text’ will be well worth a visit.

There are also some interesting discussions and debates taking place around Drama and collaboration. Collaborating in Drama projects across schools and across different subjects.

It is a day packed with awesome Drama CPD that should be well worth a visit. Sign up for you free ticket here.