In Natalie Wexler’s book The Knowledge Gap, she observes the classroom of a teacher, Ms. Masi. In one assignment, Ms. Masi asks groups of students to
Retell your favorite Greek myth in your own words, list at least three reasons why it’s your favorite, and then change the ending.
As groups plan and rehearse their scenes, Wexler notices the engagement of the students. They have text in hand—they are wrestling with unfamiliar words, figuring out the plot, and discussing deeper concepts and themes. Wexler writes, “Practicing their lines—and learning to say them with appropriate pronunciation and expression—is not only helping these kids acquire vocabulary but also developing their fluency.”1
I chose to use an example from this book, rather than from the countless theater and arts education books I have, for the reason that Wexler’s book is generally about the importance of “knowledge-based” curriculums, and she makes a compelling argument for why we actually do need to get kids out of their seats working with texts.
Kinesthetic learning isn’t the antithesis of practices often associated with the “science of learning” movement—such as knowledge acquisition and phonics instruction—it complements them. In order to reach this balance, the key is to focus on what Paul Kirschner refers to as cognitive engagement.
In a recent conversation on The Bell Ringer, he explains:
Engagement is necessary, but it's about cognitive engagement, being engaged in your head with what you're learning, not with your hands. It's not making a paper mache volcano, and having Mentos mints put into Coca-Cola and having it foam out, and think that in three or four weeks’ work that you've learned something about volcanoes. You've learned about making paper mache volcanoes, but you've learned nothing probably about magma and plate tectonics and things like that. So, engagement is incredibly important, but it's about cognitive engagement.
Although I like the term cognitive engagement and agree with Kirschner’s overall argument, I disagree that cognitive engagement necessarily happens separately from our experience with our hands and bodies. A growing body of recent research on embodied cognition suggests that purposeful movement and gesture can actually enhance thinking and learning processes.2 In Wexler’s example above, we see students deeply engaged with a text while they are getting the text up on its feet.
This is one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to performance as a way of engaging with text. When students perform a text, they have to do more than simply read it. They must understand all the vocabulary and be able to read the words with correct pronunciation (at least if they care enough not to be embarrassed in front of their peers!) They have to have an overall sense of the plot structure in order to figure out character motivation and movement. Most importantly, they need to be able to identify the “big ideas” or central concepts of a text.
When I began teaching, I used more of a traditional method of asking the class “discussion questions” about the text we were reading. This worked fairly well in a private school. Classroom sizes were small. Students were fairly intrinsically motivated.
Then later, as a public school teacher in a large, comprehensive high school, this approach of asking the students questions and trying to engage them simply didn’t work for many students. One of my students would actually pull his hoody over his head and lay down on his desk at the beginning of our 8 a.m. class. I felt like much of my energy was to try to capture his attention in any way I could. When I began putting text in their hands, asking them to perform pieces of it, suddenly I could see they were visibly and concretely engaged with the text—it’s that sense of “immediate experience” I wrote about last week. Students were on their feet, they were talking to each other. I knew in those first few years of teaching this was what I wanted for my students—visible engagement with text.
Layered Performances
There is a certain level of craftsmanship that is involved in creating a performance. Near the beginning of the process we might start with a rough idea, a script, an ensemble of actors. Over (usually) several weeks, we work together on the stage—putting all the pieces together to create a powerful and professional theatrical work.
When we bring performance work to our classrooms, in situations like the opening example of this article, the challenge is achieving work that is at least good, if not excellent. I think we’ve all witnessed school presentations and performances that are, let’s be honest, downright awful.
The question then becomes, as teachers, how do we facilitate a performative experience in our classrooms so that students can feel a sense of accomplishment when they share their work?
This week we’ll take a look at an approach I’ve developed over decades: layered performances. Rather than jumping straight to a finished product, students build a performance gradually, adding new elements piece by piece.
Layered Performances: The Process
The layered performance process begins with the storyboard activity I describe here. Students have already worked together to identify the key narrative events in a text. Now they will use these events as the anchor for building a performance.
Step 1: Introduce Models of Stage Pictures
Begin by introducing students to the concept of a stage picture, or tableau. A tableau is a frozen image that captures a particular moment in a story. I begin by showing students a series of stage images of professional productions (here is access to my slide deck). Since stage director Julie Taymor was originally a visual artist, images from her productions—The Lion King and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance—demonstrate compelling stage pictures. I show these images and ask: “What makes a powerful stage picture?” I collect the students’ answers and create what I call a Criteria of Possibility, which is a list of ideas they might take for their own stage pictures. It’s not a rubric. It isn’t a list of everything they need to include—instead it points out possible creative directions they might take.
Often these criteria will include:
Levels and Space: How are they using the space vertically and in three dimensions?
Focus: Where is the focus of the action? What are students gesturing toward and what are they looking at?
Expression: What are they communicating with their expressions (are they unintentionally smiling?)
Composition: Similar to a painting, how are the actors arranged on a stage?
Clarity: Is the story that’s being told clear and readable by the audience?
Step 2: Moving from Storyboards to Stage Pictures
In small groups, students return to their storyboards and come to a consensus about the key moments they want to represent. Each image in the storyboard will become a stage picture.
They then create the stage pictures for each storyboard, keeping in mind the Criteria of Possibility we developed in the previous step. I also ask them to keep the same person playing the same character throughout for clarity of storytelling—e.g. the character Xolo should be played by the same student. All students in the group should be present in every stage picture (students can also play aspects of the environments—trees, buildings, etc.).
Step 3: Rehearse
After they’ve had time to prepare their stage pictures, we then rehearse all the groups at the same time. I’ll count down from 10 and explain that by 1 they should be in their first stage picture. We hold that picture for a couple of seconds. Then count down again and they transition to the second stage image. We continue until they’ve practiced all of them. If I notice that some of the groups seem confused or some groups seem like they haven’t rehearsed enough, we pause the process and give them time to polish their stage pictures. We then rehearse all the groups at the same time again, informally checking to see if groups have a clear sense of their performances. If so, we move to the next step. If not, more time to practice.
Step 4: Bring the Stage Pictures to Life
We now begin the “layered” part of the performance process. They will now add movement to tell the entire story. They might also add transitions between the stage pictures moving from one part of the story to the next. The stage pictures then serve as “narrative anchors” for the overall story. We’re still working without text—so the goal is to show the story, not tell it.
As they rehearse, the sequence of still images gradually becomes a series of connected scenes. Students should keep the movement relatively minimal, making deliberate choices about which actions are necessary to tell the story clearly.
Step 5: Add Essential Dialogue or Narration
After the students have created their silent performance showing the story, they will now return to the text to select the words that will accompany their performances.
Rather than writing a complete script, the students return to their storyboards and add perhaps narration or a few lines of dialogue to each scene as they see fit. There should be few enough lines that they don’t need to hold a paper in their hand—they should be simple enough to quickly memorize.
The challenge is to communicate as much as possible with as few words as necessary.
Step 6: Add Sound and Other Theatrical Elements
Depending on the time available, students can continue building the performance by adding additional layers. They might:
create a soundscape using voices or simple objects.
add props or pieces of fabric to suggest different settings or characters.
add lighting effects using the lighting elements they have available to them.
Each new element should serve a purpose. Ask students to consider what the addition contributes to the story they are telling. Does the sound create an atmosphere? Does a prop clarify an action?
Step 7: Rehearse, Revise, and Perform
Throughout the process, provide opportunities for students to share their work and receive feedback. I often pair groups together and ask them to offer kind, helpful, and specific feedback to each other (a process I learned from my colleagues at High Tech High).
Return to the Criteria of Possibility developed at the beginning of the process, and add new criteria or revise the list as new theatrical elements are introduced. Encourage students to offer specific observations and suggestions rather than simply saying whether they liked a performance.
Finally, students share their completed layered performances with the class. Following the performances, invite students to reflect on the choices they made, the revisions they undertook, and how the process changed or deepened their understanding of the text.
Why Layer the Performance?
One of the challenges of asking students to perform a text is that we often give them too much to do at once. When we hand a group of students a text and say, “in groups create a performance,” they have to figure out the characters, the action, the dialogue, and movement all at the same time (and often they get obsessed with making small props).
A layered approach scaffolds the process. We start with a small goal, and then, over time, add layers while revising our previous work. With each new layer, students return to what they have already created, refining and adjusting it as the performance takes shape. Ron Berger’s ideas on craftsmanship and revision have influenced how I think about this process. We can’t simply tell students to “make it better” and expect them to know what that means. By giving students a new challenge, they return to their previous work with something specific to focus on and improve. With each revision, they return to the text. This is the kind of cognitive engagement we should be striving for in our classrooms—not simply getting students out of their seats, but engaging them in meaningful work that deepens their understanding of a text.
Layered Performance In Action
For the culminating event of our Habla Chicago Teacher Institute, teachers worked in groups to storyboard the main event of the book Xolo by Donna Barba Higuera. After a soundscape workshop with Darío Bernal Villegas, they created layered performances combining text, movement, and sound to represent Xolo’s journey to the Underworld.
Wexler, Natalie. The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System—And How To Fix It, p. 102-3
See Liu et al. (2025), “The Effect of Embodied Learning on Students’ Learning Performance”; Lyu & Deng (2024), “Effectiveness of Embodied Learning on Learning Performance”; and Guo et al. (2025), “How Gesture Benefits Learning.”