Browsing by Author "Tikkanen, Juhani"

Objectives. The aim of this case study is to find out whether negative climate appears in primary school drama lessons. Previous research has shown that climate has a huge impact on schooling. A positive climate in school gives pupils a better opportunity to learn and provides pupils with more opportunities to be creative. Drama and creativity are strongly linked together because in drama, pupils work in creative way. A negative climate in turn reduces pupils' chances to learn and to be creative. Therefore, studying negative climate in drama lessons is of importance. In this study, I compared negative climate in drama lessons given by graduated classroom teachers' with those given by student teachers. I measured negative climate with The Classroom Assessment Scoring System™ (CLASS). During the study I also evaluated how the CLASS-scoring system worked in measuring the negative climate of the drama lessons. Methods. My study was a qualitative case study and the method was video analysis. I analyzed eight drama lessons with another student, Pauliina Kivi. The lessons were videotaped during the autumn of 2013 and the spring of 2014. Kivi used the same videotapes as material for her study. The level of the pupils in the videos varied from pre-school to third-grade. Four of the teachers in the videos were graduated classroom teachers who all had some kind of qualification for teaching drama. Other four were student teachers who had studied drama education as their minor subject. The videos were analyzed by using the CLASS-scoring system. A negative climate score was given to every exercise of every lesson. Results and conclusions. The results showed that negative climate took place in the observed lessons but the scores were low. One exception aside, the lessons of the teacher students received higher scores in negative climate than the lessons of the graduated teachers. However, none of the scores reached even the middle of the CLASS scale of negative climate. Therefore, according to this study, drama lessons do not have a negative climate in general. CLASS-scoring system turned out to be suitable for observing the negative climate in drama lessons. CLASS-scoring system can also be applied to evaluate how teacher or students create negative climate.