Educational Mastery

Students engaged and alive, taking responsibility for their own learning. Faculty excited about teaching, using innovative experiential instructional methods, and sharing a deep sense of community with their colleagues. Classrooms functioning as cohesive learning communities, vibrant with inquiry and honoring each persons’ uniqueness.

Classroom Resources

Some topics are virtually impossible to really get across through lecture or reading. Interactive drama, a powerful form of experiential learning, can bring topics alive, especially “sticky” or “messy” topics such as ethics or those involving human interactions.

EffectiveArts provides in-classroom sessions that include drama scenes with embedded specific learning objectives and interwoven facilitated discussions. The sessions are designed to illuminate and integrate key aspects of the core concepts shown in the scenes. We also provide “community development” classroom sessions that research has shown establish a sense of community in class, which enhances learning and increases student retention (retention was increased 15% in a recent Seattle Central Community College Coordinated Studies Program class). Also, since our work is based on the wedding of the arts and social science research methodologies, we embrace assessment!

Faculty Development

EffectiveArts faculty development programs get at the heart of teaching — providing practical skills on how to be learning-centered, how to “be present” and stay comfortable while in front of students, and how to establish community in the classroom (which provides a strong foundation for learning). Click here for example. We also work with faculty to help them develop their own learning-objective –based interactive drama classroom sessions. Additionally, EffectiveArts provides programs on honoring diversity in the classroom. We also offer university TA training.

Conference and Retreat Support

Never again does a conference need to be workshop after workshop of “talking heads.” Never again should attendees walk away with attractive ring-binders that will immediately be put on the shelf. We work with presenters to integrate interactive drama into their workshops, or offer stand-alone workshops on specific relevant skills such as Teaching as Improvisation.

We also create powerful conference-closing performances customized to your conference, woven from poignant moments and powerful images gathered from the conference experience — a tapestry of collected moments that vividly speaks the shared experience, and the vision to move forward.