Theatre Educator Pro (now 'EdTA Learning Center')

Starting in March 2020, theatre teachers found themselves facing a major challenge: How do I teach students remotely without any warning or preparation?

EdTA responded quickly by curating and creating new teacher resources for its nascent professional learning portal, Theatre Educator Pro (now ‘EdTA Learning Center’). The site launched in September 2019 with a variety of webinars, lesson plans, curricula, and assessments. Over the course of 2020, resource development shifted to meet teachers’ rapidly changing needs — including materials on cultural inclusivity and social and emotional learning. New resources included:

• Webinars and curated resource pages for creating virtual theatre productions
• Webinars and curated resource pages for remote and hybrid classroom instruction
• More than 30 interactive Click to Teach online lessons for use in all types of class settings
• 300 new lesson plans covering all grade and skill levels, designed for use during the pandemic and beyond
• DEI and Theatre for Social Justice, a collection of resources and ongoing webinar series on topics including color conscious casting, culturally inclusive teaching, and anti-racist theatre
• Social and Emotional Learning, a collection of lesson plans and student work illustrating the connection between SEL and theatre instruction

Selected resources were made accessible for free as a service to the field during the pandemic. Teachers showed their appreciation through their engagement with the content: Theatre Educator Pro traffic spiked to more than 37,000 users and 180,000 page views.

“I love that EdTA is doing things like the TE Pro Lesson Plan Library, so we all become better at what we’re doing and continue to improve theatre educationally,” noted one member. “Because that’s what we need to do in order to stay viable as a subject in this country.”