Word Spark

About

Have a passion for communicating - or educating - or creating? Come and explore with Word Spark!

Story

COMMUNICATE - WORDS AT WORK

This service is designed for leaders and managers in schools and business.

We live in a time of rapid change. Globalisation has resulted in the increasing diversity of teams in the same companies, businesses. Many leaders face the challenge of managing and developing these teams so that creativity, innovation and productivity can be sustained, particularly where pressure to agree and resolve quickly seems paramount.

Word Spark can add value to your current facilitation skills and help you to create open, safe places for courageous conversations to take place in your teams.

Workshops and webinars include:

Dialogue for leadership – productive conversations, courageous conversations
Identifying and resolving team tensions and dynamics – restorative conversations, privileging everyone’s voice
Leading Change – managing wicked problems

EDUCATE - BRIGHT SPARKS

This service is for Arts and English teachers and literacy programme developers in secondary schools. With a focus on processes, this service aims to empower teachers to deliver the New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) utilising strategies for effective pedagogy (p.34-35) including inquiry based approaches to teaching and learning.

Word Spark’s skilled and experienced consultants can also help you develop, write and implement schemes of work in junior and senior contexts, NCEA courses and NZQA Scholarship programmes in Drama and English.

We can support you individually, or work with you in your faculty team.

Practical workshops and webinars enable you to explore through productive dialogue:

Formative Assessment approaches, exploring the key competencies
Integrated and Inquiry Based projects
Teacher repositioning for shared learning
Writing for NCEA- exemplars, assessment schedules, moderation reports

CREATE - WORDPLAY

Wordspark’s own theatre ensemble ~ WordPlay ~ offers group workshops in performance theory and practice for text based and devised theatre forms, applied drama methods used in process drama, and inquiry based drama pedagogies such as Mantle of the Expert (Heathcote, 1995) Applied theatre workshops are available which utilise a range of participatory, experiential approaches - Image Theatre, Forum Theatre (Boal, 1995) and Newspaper Theatre, designed to explore various perspectives of relationships and events. We can tailor workshops for an exploration of key theatre practitioners and theorists too, Stanislavski, Laban, Brecht, Artaud, Lecoq and Chekhov.

Individual coaching sessions are available for voice and speech examinations, and public speaking.

We can also support the development of your creative ideas. Talk to WordPlay for advice regarding your directorial concepts.

Need some ideas for your group’s preparation for University of Otago Sheilah Winn Festival of Shakespeare in Schools? Get in touch. We have several years’ worth of successful participation and experience in this regional and national event.