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When a school brings a group of students on a field trip to see a professional theater event such as to a Broadway show, they always do everything right, and I've seen it hundreds of times from the point of view of a Broadway performer: The teachers and chaperones spread themselves out throughout the group of students so that they are sitting in the audience with the students and able to reach many of the students with a touch of the hand in case there is any misbehavior. Those adult role models become a part of the audience as much as any other audience member. They are focused on the show and enjoying it as much as any of the students, modeling enthusiasm and appropriate response by laughing or clapping along with the audience.
What the students' adult leadership never does at the Broadway theater includes: staying as a group of adults at the back of the room apart from the students, standing in the aisle with their arms crossed and ignoring the show while staring at the students, standing at the front of the audience or on the stage while staring at the audience as a kind of challenge to avoid misbehavior (much like prison guards patrolling the aisles of a prison show), grading papers or reading, talking to their colleagues throughout the show from the very beginning as if the show does not exist, walking in and out of the room and using the front doors close to the stage if those are most convenient to get wherever they want to get, and refusing to laugh or participate or even fake enjoyment of a show that they expect the students to enjoy. Why don't they do these things in the theater? Because to do any of these things would be an embarrassment: a rude distraction to the entire audience that would interfere with the magic of the theatrical experience that many have worked hard to create.
So why do the teachers and administrators of so many schools do these destructive things when that theatrical or cultural or educational event comes to their school?
My school assembly presentation uses a number of routines that I first performed when I was in the original cast of a Broadway show. Now that I have appeared thousands of times in various professional performance venues and thousands of schools I can easily state that my biggest obstacle for creating a magical experience for my audiences has been the behavior of teachers and administrators in a percentage of the schools that hire me. My job is to provide a presentation that creates excitement about writing for the students in middle schools and high schools. It is much more difficult to create that excitement if the adults in the room are modeling indifference and doing the same things that they would punish their students for doing such as talking and openly reading or grading papers. From my experience it is the students who are under the supervision of these teachers that are most prone to misbehavior themselves.
Middle school students are at an age where they think that they are now adults. If they laugh at something they really enjoy during a school presentation, they usually look to the teacher at the same time to see how the teacher is reacting because they care about how their teacher thinks and reacts and because it is these adult role models that give them the information they need to know how they should be reacting themselves (as the adults they are starting to think of themselves to be). If the teachers and administrators from the very first moments of the show act as if it is a painful thing to be in the room (without even giving the performance a chance to prove itself) then the students hold back their own enthusiasm. That middle school students often start to act as if everything is boring or stupid in order to gain status is not a natural result of aging: it is an imitation of the adults in their lives who never smile or act enthusiastic for the lighter moments they witness in their days (except, perhaps, when they are drinking on the weekends as is so often the case as witnessed by some students at home). If you want to help the problem with students using drugs and alcohol, don't give them another drug or self-esteem presentation but give them examples of adults being exciting and engaged doing other things of value.
The biggest factor for the success of my program is whether or not teachers will let themselves forget their students for the hour that I am performing, and laugh openly at the material that is intended for the adults' benefit. I intentionally try to entertain the adults in the room because I know that the students love to see their teachers laugh (sometimes the first time they have ever seen certain teachers laugh in any situation). When the teachers are having fun the students open up to enjoy the program much more and it is much more possible to create the feeling that a magical experience is being created in the room.
In the professional theater there is much more that helps to create the magic: a beautiful room for the audience, a beautiful stage set, wonderful lighting and a full orchestra. In the typical school situation with a performance being created in a gym or cafeteria with kitchen workers shouting and banging pans within earshot or hundreds of other kids loudly passing through the hall outside the doors or kindergarten children having to walk through the front of the performance to get milk out of the machine or a delivery of school supplies being brought through the room on hand trucks... under these difficult situations it is even more critical that everything possible be done to help create a focused environment for the entertainment than it is important in the professional theater where the audience has an easier time losing themselves in the show.
In most cases, I find it much easier to deal with disruptive students myself as I perform than to try to bring the audience into my performance if the principal is standing at the front of the room as a challenge against bad behavior. Another person standing at the front is just a distraction. If the students are looking at that surrogate policeman (policewoman) then they are not looking at my presentation.
In many of the schools where I appear, the teachers will be talking or grading papers during the first twenty minutes or so of my show and then stop when they realize that what I am doing is fun, but the first minutes of every show is the most fragile time when the guest who is trying to engage the students has to prove the value of his/her product as a stranger in the building. (The performer who is not compelling enough to get those teachers to stop what they are doing, and watch, needs the teachers' modeling of correct behavior even more than I do at the beginning of the presentation.) Teachers who find distracting activities to do at the beginning of any presentation have not given that presentation a chance and have interfered with the success of that program to a great degree. If the first few minutes of my program are destroyed by loud talking or some other distraction that interferes with my timing or the audience's attention, then it takes a lot more effort with diminished results to regain the momentum of the performance.
Remove any competing sounds in the room for better acoustics. If possible, turn off buzzing lights or loud blowers in the room. Unplug any coke machines or refrigerated water fountains in the room. (Don't unplug the milk machines as milk is more sensitive to spoilage, but many of those machines can be easily rolled out of the room during the assembly.) Studies have shown that one loudly buzzing helium lamp or refrigeration device means ten kids talking in the room who would otherwise be focused. (Distracting noises have a much greater effect on kids with ADD/ADHD or autism.)
Open curtains for natural light instead of using fluorescent lighting if that is an option. (Natural light calms students and diminishes the tendency of some kids to talk with one another.) Make efforts to use stage lighting if that is an option.
If students are seated on the floor, avoid having an aisle straight up the middle of the group. If an aisle is thought necessary, try putting in two aisles by putting down lines of tape to create aisles that go from close to the center of the back of the crowd to the far right and left of the front of the crowd. No professional theater has an aisle straight down the middle because that destroys the “sweet spot” of the stage - the center - for the performer. A performer trying to engage an audience with eye contact (thus creating better focus) does not want to be looking down an aisle as an aisle lets the audience feel that only one side or the other side is being engaged. Strangely, in school programs and professional theater, if the performer is looking at audience on one side of the aisle, the other side does not feel engaged by the performer and drifts away, but if that psychological boundary is removed there are fewer audience members being distracted as more people feel that they are being observed by the performer.
Avoid having the oldest students all at the back of the room. The oldest students tend to have their feet out the door psychologically (partly because they are more prone to imitation of the teachers who also withdraw from the program) and having these students at the back of the room makes that problem worse. I find that it is very helpful to arrange the students so that the oldest grade is seated at the front of the room on one side and the youngest students are seated at the front of the room on the other side. This way the performer is able to work the extremes of the ages in the room in different ways (by, for instance, walking to the side with the older students when the youngest students become too enthusiastic). When the youngest students are spread across the entire front of the audience, they tend to take over the program by doing all of the hand raising, etc. which leads to a greater chance that older students will automatically withdraw from the program as being “too childish.” The youngest grades also behave in a more mature manner if they have an easier time seeing the way the oldest students behave in the assembly if those older students are also seated in the front. It is a nice tradition to always have the oldest grade someplace in front (there are a variety of ways to do this and still have good sightlines for the other students) so that they are taught that it is an honor and a mature thing to be close to the action and willingly participating.
Eliminate obvious distractions. I have been in situations where my verbal presentation had to compete with a gym class in the same room or loud jazz band practice on the other side of a curtain. (Yes, amazing as it sounds, some schools are this careless and unconcerned about creating a focused environment in the room for the performance.) Try to turn off the intercom speakers in the room if the office is often in the habit of using the all-call button to make announcements throughout the school. (Some usually very nice moments of my program have been ruined by a loud intercom announcement of the school lunch menu or such.)
Bring your students to the assembly on time. Sometimes it seems that there is always one teacher who brings his/her students to the assembly ten or fifteen minutes after every other class. The longer those students who got there on time become bored waiting for things to begin, the worse they tend to behave, and there is nothing worse for distracting an audience than to have a teacher and thirty kids file into the room right after the performer has been introduced. I've witnessed schools that take 30 minutes to assemble 300 students in a room and schools that take 3 minutes to orderly assemble the same number of students into an audience.
If using an auditorium, bring the entire audience as far forward toward the stage as possible. Nobody should be sitting in the back row if there are empty seats in rows closer to the stage. Big gaps of empty seats in the audience can destroy the feeling of the audience being a unified unit.
In multi-purpose rooms, cafetoriums, gyms and such - try arranging the audience so that the distracting activity in that room (kitchen preparation, school personnel or children moving in and out of the room, etc.) is happening behind that audience rather than the front. School architects often design these rooms so that the stage is right next to the doors where everyone is moving in and out. In such cases it might be best to face the audience toward the back of the room (if the performance does not need an elevated platform). This also avoids the embarrassment for the middle school child who might otherwise need to walk in and out of the room in front of the entire audience to go to the bathroom (especially if the sound of flushing can be heard by the audience).
If the performer asks for a certain amount of setup time alone where the assembly will appear, try to make it happen. Most performers don't require more time than they need to arrange their sets or props and create the theatrical experience as they often have other places to go the same day. If they have to rush to carry and set props (and move furniture such as band chairs and stands from the stage) because the band or some other class is using the stage during the requested setup time, then the performer might have a difficult time appearing strong as a performer because of being winded and sweating from frantically struggling to set things up as the students are arriving for the presentation.
Honor the agreements with the performer about such things as audience size or appropriate ages. The performer who does more assembly shows in a week than the typical school hosts in a year has the best understanding of what it takes to best serve the school and how to provide the best product. If the performer states a limit to the size of an audience or says that the program is not intended for a particular age group, then the program could be damaged for everyone if too many kids or if kids too young or too old are brought to the assembly anyway. (The schools that break these agreements also do damage to the reputation of the performers. Occasionally, on evaluation forms, I've been blamed by teachers for the immature behavior or confusion of the students when those students were younger than the minimum age of the design of my program, and were brought to my program in numbers greater than the limit according to our agreement. It is unfair to blame the performer when the fault lies with the school, but this sort of thing happens anyway.)
Be honest about the nature of your own school environment when making plans. If the students in your school are less mature than the average, bring in a somewhat older group. The difficult urban school population of students with a lot of behavior problems should probably adjust the numbers to smaller groups for some presentations. (Conversely, some school populations are always extremely well-behaved and can get away with large numbers of students in the same room at the same time without audience control problems.) Unfortunately, it is often the toughest of the schools that exceeds the numbers of students beyond the limits because of budget problems. They think they are getting more for their dollar that way but they are not. There is no value in making a presentation fail for everyone in the room because of an excessive number of unruly students when a smaller group could collectively get much more out of the experience. The accoustics of the room for assemblies is another factor to consider: if it is difficult for two people standing five feet apart to understand each other's words in conversation, then it is best to reduce the maximum size of the audience in such a room.
There are many wonderful educational presentations to choose from throughout the country. With your help, these cultural offerings could be the spark to create a fire of enthusiasm for learning in your students for many days after those performers have gone.
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Copyright © 1997-2008
steven michael harris
Lexington, virginia, usa