Showing Growth

By mid-course, your Drama Journal stops being only a diary and becomes something rarer: evidence. The person who wrote your earliest entries no longer quite exists — and because that person wrote honestly, you can prove it. Showing growth means putting your starting self and your most recent self side by side and letting the difference speak.

Growth is a claim plus evidence

“I got more confident” is a claim. On its own it is worth what any claim is worth: nothing yet. Growth writing pairs every claim with evidence from your own record — and the strongest evidence is the gap between two entries:

At the start of the course I wrote: “I laugh whenever everyone can see me. I wrecked our first tableau twice.” Last week I held a fifteen-second freeze as the focus of the whole image, and my journal entry that day was about Priya’s exit, not about being looked at. Being watched has stopped being the thing I notice.

The claim is being watched has stopped being the thing I notice. The evidence is two moments, months apart, both on the record. Nobody can argue with that — including the part of you that suspects you have not changed. This is the same standard How Marks Work applies everywhere: what can you point to?

How to cite yourself

Treat your earlier entries the way an essay treats sources:

• Date it — “In my entry from the third week…” — so the distance is visible.
• Quote a phrase, not a page. Your own words from the time carry more truth than your summary of them now. “I kind of want to be able to” says more than “I used to lack confidence.”
• Then show the now. A recent moment, just as specific, that the earlier self could not have managed — or would not have noticed.

Growth is not always improvement at the same thing

Some growth is a fear that shrank. Some is a skill that appeared. But some is subtler: a thing you now notice that was invisible in the first weeks — status in a hallway conversation, where the focus of a scene sits. New noticing is growth, and your early entries prove it was not always there.

Curriculum connection

B3.2

identify specific social skills and personal characteristics they have acquired or strengthened through drama work that can help them succeed in other areas of life (e.g., describe their personal development in areas such as risk taking, self-confidence, self-awareness, listening, questioning, negotiating, consensus building)

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