Find Your Voice: A Methodology for Enhancing Literacy Through Re-Writing and Re-Acting

“This methodology makes kids feel powerful, special, worthwhile. It shows them that they have something to say and teaches them to say it well. Everybody I knew during the years that I studied in the program emerged from the training stronger and more vocal.”
—Robert Lopez
Tony Award winning Composer/Lyricist, The Book of Mormon & Avenue Q
Find Your Voice Alum

“If you care about kids, buy this book. If you want to remember why you became a teacher, buy this book; it will reenergize your passion for educating. Read it, underline it, and dog-ear it, but don’t pass it on, you’ll want to read it again and again. And buy a copy for a friend, it’s as much a self-help book as a guide for good teaching.”
—Lucy Matos
Cofounder, Central Park East Elementary

“The Find Your Voice methodology offers a dynamic intersection of art, language, communication, and personal development. As a result of this training, I now see my one-on-one time with students as the essence, the gift, the moment. Educators need more encounters with finding-your-voice opportunities like this.”

—Dr. Emily White
Leadership Center, Bank Street College

Every school in our country has identified literacy as its number one challenge; now Gail Noppe-Brandon offers a different way of looking at the subject. For the past twenty years she has successfully trained a broad range of teenagers, college students, and teachers of all subjects in her literacy-through-theatre methodology. In Find Your Voice, she clearly describes how everyonecan be helped to communicate more effectively and better receive the communication of others.

Find Your Voice demonstrates Noppe-Brandon’s unique, relationship-based coaching style, an approach which has enabled even the shyest people to conquer their fear of written or oral public sharing. The book presents a specific sequence of exercises and activities that treat reading, writing, speaking, and listening as social skills. And with sample classroom applications for various age levels, Find Your Voice helps those who may never have considered re-acting or re-writing a play, and seasoned artists who have been practicing their craft for years.

To purchase the book, click here: Heinemann.

A gifted, intuitive teacher with a deep understanding of human nature, Gail Noppe-Brandon recounts her own struggles as a learner and her evolution as a teacher and as an artist. The result is “Find Your Voice”, a beautiful account of teaching and learning and the explication of a powerful set of activities designed to assist anyone in writing and speaking clearly. Noppe-Brandon began her journey as a teacher twenty years ago. In this book, she recounts with clarity, humor and wisdom the steps in this journey and they ways she has found to support hundreds of young people to tell their stories through writing and acting. She has thought deeply about her approach and presents it in a straightforward, systematic, and engaging manner.

The opening chapter recounts her first classes at New York University and her subsequent work with teenagers from all around New York City. In subsequent chapters, she describes in detail the ways in which she creates a safe learning environment, motivates non-actors to begin to act; motivates non-writers to begin to write and creates opportunities for her students to perform their work for others. She also shares with us the struggles and triumphs of individual students and teachers.

Young people were profoundly changed in her workshops and performances and teachers found great value in the professional development workshops. Her commitment to her students and the masterful ways she supported them to find their voice were inspiring then. Many of us who watched Gail work and knew her students encouraged her to find a way to share the power of her educational process and insights. In this book, she does just that.

The book is a remarkable combination of specific, clear directions for implementing a teaching methodology and compelling anecdotes that remind us of the power of the student-teacher and student-student relationship. The anecdotes show us the purpose and value of the teaching methodology the author has devised. The teaching methodology is presented with such clarity that the reader feels they could begin to use some of the strategies immediately. I particularly appreciated the way the detailed strategies for engaging reluctant students and motivating them to participate. The book also contains wonderful samples of student writing and writing by teachers who participated in training sessions. There is a terrific appendix, which lists scenes and suggests particular kinds of students who might benefit from dealing with the material in a particular scene.

No English or drama teacher should be without this book, but, in truth, it is such a compelling narrative of a teaching process that any one who cares about teaching and learning should not be without it.

Christine Goodheart
Executive Director, University-Community Partnerships
Educational Partnerships and Learning Technologies
University of Washington

Find Your Voice: A Methodology For Enhancing Literacy Through Re-Writing and Re-Acting by Gail Noppe-Brandon

Reviewed by Joan Baum, PH.D.
for Education Update

Though the title sounds academic, Noppe-Brandon’s own voice is conversational. In a field where jargon and bloat often mask even good advice, Noppe-Brandon shows no fat. Her prose is lean, her tone supremely confident, her rationale and recommendations sharp, practical and to the point. It’s hard to believe that she was once a voiceless, shy student, extremely fearful of speaking or writing in class–and therefore hostile. “It wasn’t until I began to learn the crafts of acting and playwriting, as a young adult, that I found my voice,” she writes, but it’s clear that she feels informed and compassionate instruction should have come much earlier. Belatedly, she discovered how much students could learn to listen by acting and learn to talk by engaging in the processes of playwriting–not the usual way of addressing such skills. And though she committed herself to work with students “of all ages and backgrounds, during and after school, in theatres and social service organizations, in workshops that ran for a full year or for only three weeks, or once a week,” she challenged herself most by taking on those youngsters designated “at risk.” Her mission has remained constant: to show that teachers can overcome communication fears in their students by instilling trust in her and in the other members of the group. Central to this methodology is what she calls an “integrated approach” that embraces “re-acting” and “re-writing,” words that signal emphasis on process and reinforcement.

The goals are clear, the scenario accounts of the slow but steady progress made by the different youngsters impressive. Indeed, if there’s a drawback in this slim overview, it may be the extent to which Noppe-Brandon uses her own experience as rationale: if I could do it, so can you. Her psychological insights, compassion, humor, intellectual focus, and indefatigable patience may prove intimidating to those who do not have the time or analytical wherewithal to keep at it. In short, the author-teacher, who prefers to be called a “coach,” would seem to be a hard act to follow. She would probably demur, pointing out that the theory and examples stand on their own and not on her personality. Well, yes and no. They do talk, don’t they, of “gifted” teachers in the sense of born not made? Throughout, Noppe-Brandon repeatedly notes the twenty years she has spent perfecting her craft, honing guidelines and selecting texts and repeatedly declares that what she presents here work “unfailingly.” She also assumes that her readers may be in part “mute,” which may be a bit off-putting. Still, it’s hard to fault her passion and perceptions. Free writing, for example, which had some bad press in the permissive sixties, is here reclaimed in all its rigor. Drafts and tryouts, which often went unread, are now integral parts of a final product destined for performance. Nothing is given away; everything is earned.

Noppe-Brandon, who says she discovered her methodology by accident, certainly left accident out of the picture when she went on to develop a Teacher Training initiative for teachers of all subjects, not just English, who wanted to help their students become (more) articulate. She has been a college dean, a foundation program director, a playwright/director, and an award-winning teacher. She can now claim to be an educator in the very best sense of the word as one who would invigorate well intentioned but frustrated teachers to help students find their voice and have fun doing so.

Eva Moskowitz (Manhattan City Council Woman):

“I agree with your belief that trust and encouragement are vital to literacy success in children. Students must be made to feel comfortable and safe so that they will want to share their ideas with others…”

M.D. Levine, M.D. (Author The Myth of Laziness)

“I do think we share many ideas in common. I do hope your book is successful and makes a real impact in our thinking about kids…”

Wynn Handman (Artistic Director, American Place Theatre)

“A serious approach to working with teenagers on their communication skills is needed. A challenging task, indeed. The methodology depicted in Find Your Voice will help many people, and can be a catalyst for advance in this important area. I’m pleased to be included as one who encouraged your art-making.