Music Credit: "NY" composed and performed by Kosta T, from the album Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, This is Art Works. I’m Josephine Reed.

As students across the country head back to school, it's the perfect time to discuss the vital role that arts education plays in their development. And so I welcome Dr. Thalia Goldstein, a distinguished expert in developmental psychology and theater education. Dr. Goldstein is an Associate Professor at George Mason University, where her research focuses on how theater and the arts can enhance children's social and emotional skills, including empathy, emotional regulation, and creativity. She also directs the University’s Play, Learning, Arts, and Youth Lab or the PLAY Lab, and co-directs the National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab at Mason’s Arts Research Center. Her recent book, Why Theatre Education Matters, is based on a six-year research project and unpacks the profound impact of theater education on students' overall development. As we gear up for a new academic year, we'll discuss why integrating arts into the school curriculum can help students thrive both in and out of the classroom.

Dr. Thalia Goldstein, welcome thank you for joining me.

Thalia Goldstein: Thanks so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

Jo Reed: Can you start by sharing what initially drew you to research in theater education to begin with?

Thalia Goldstein: Absolutely. So, I, like many young people, did acting classes and theater during elementary school, middle school, and high school growing up. It was really my home. I was just in love with it. When I finished college, I actually double majored in psychology and theater and then moved to New York to try and make my way as a dancer and actor. After a few years, I decided that I was interested in getting a PhD in psychology to try and figure out, from a scientific perspective, what was happening when we engaged in imagination and play and theater and the arts. So, when I went to go get my PhD in developmental psychology, theater education was just the most obvious fit for my interests, my background, and it was really uncharted territory. I was super excited by the possibilities of asking all the different questions I possibly could in theater education and its benefits.

Jo Reed: Well, you explore these questions in many different areas and I want to begin with PLAY Lab at George Mason University which you direct. PLAY lab focuses on play, learning, arts, and youth.  Tell us a little bit more about the mission of PLAY Lab and the types of research projects you do there.

Thalia Goldstein: Absolutely. PLAY Lab is myself as well as my PhD and my master's students in the program in developmental psychology at George Mason. We are really interested in the arts writ large. Children engage in artistic play in all sorts of ways. They draw, they dance, they make music, they move their bodies, they pretend play and engage in theater. We think there's a whole host of psychological, cognitive, brain, social benefits to engaging in all these different kinds of art forms. The way that we think about it is we try to look at one art form specifically, so one kind of engagement, say the marching arts or dance or musical theater or, in my case, theater and acting and performing. Then we look at one aspect of social emotional development or cognitive development-- so, creativity or empathy and compassion. We look at under what circumstances, for what kinds of kids, with what kinds of lessons do we find associations and hopefully, eventually, causal threads where participation in a particular kind of art form may lead to benefits in a particular kind of psychosocial outcome.

Jo Reed: Tell me about the children who you work with. What's the age range? How long are they with you? Just give me a sense of how you collect this research.

Thalia Goldstein: Sure. So, the wonderful thing about research in psychology of the arts is you can participate in the arts at any age and I think it has different benefits for different kids at different age groups. We've worked with kids down in preschool classrooms, looking at how drama games and improv games for the youngest learners are helping them with their emotional control. We've found in some really well-controlled experiments that participating in eight weeks of drama classes helps you able to deal with distress and negative emotions a little bit better in that preschool age range. All the way up through middle school and high school, looking into how playing video games and engaging in the creative action that's available in some of the more artistic video games may be helping your creative thought processes and creative behaviors. We really look across the wide range of ages. I think of myself as being very question driven and curiosity driven. So, I try not to get too singularly focused on any age group, but rather try to think about "Well, what's the age group where this art form may have the strongest benefits?"

Jo Reed: Or different aspects of the same art form, for example.

Thalia Goldstein: That's exactly right because, of course, making visual art and learning how to draw when you're five and six years old is likely to have very different outcomes than when you're taking an intensive painting class when you're in high school. We try to account for that as well. My specialty is really theater and the kinds of drama games and sociodramatic play that kids are engaging in when they're four, five, six years old has a throughline to improv games when you're in middle school, but it's a lot more complex as you start to get older.

Jo Reed: You're also involved in the George Mason University Arts Research Center, which is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of its Research Labs program and that focuses on arts engagement, child development, and education. Can you tell us about the specific projects you're currently leading within this center? 

Thalia Goldstein: Yes. The Mason Arts Research Center has been such a great home for a wide variety of arts-based research over the last six years. I'm very lucky to have two co-directors at Mason, Dr. Adam Winsler and Dr. Kimberly Sheridan, and each of us have our own specialties within the world of arts education and child development. We do a wide range of projects there. We have projects that are more qualitative in nature, really looking at children's lived experience in visual arts classrooms, for example, and looking at how teachers may promote student autonomy and self-directed learning within those arts classrooms through rich descriptive analyses. We also have a large-scale data set that comes from Miami-Dade County, which followed kids from pre-K all the way through high school and looked at all of their different academic classes, all of their different academic outcomes, as well as their enrollment in arts classes through middle school and high school. Then we also have the work that I've been doing over the last few years, which is all about trying to pull apart what we call the mechanisms or the parts of theater education that might be causally related to different kinds of theater outcomes because that's really what I'm interested in is what is happening within the theater classroom that may be specifically leading to the kinds of outcomes that teachers have been seeing and talking about for a really long time. So, we have these big keystone projects that are multi-year projects. Without the support of the National Endowment for the Arts, we wouldn't be able to keep going on for several years because these are complex questions that take a long time to answer. Then we also have a public-facing website and we hold meetings every few years to get the group of researchers in the United States and around the world that are interested in questions in arts education, generally, together to be in one place and talk about it.

Jo Reed: Well, you've also conducted a six-year long study on 21st century skill development through theater education and that resulted in your book, "Why Theater Education Matters." So, let's talk about that. What are some of the key skills that theater education does help develop in students?

Thalia Goldstein: Yeah. I was really excited about conducting this study because I wanted to go back to the classrooms to look at theater education as it was happening in the real world, on the ground, what teachers were actually teaching. I read, obviously, a lot of theory and there's a lot of discussion about how theater could be taught or should be taught, but I wanted to get back to how it was actually happening in classrooms with real kids. So, what I looked for was a set of psychological skills and abilities called the habits of mind. 

Jo Reed: Can you define habits of mind—what do you mean by that term

Thalia Goldstein: So, habits of mind are a way of approaching problems and solving tasks that are put before you as a student in the classroom and the concept of habits of mind has been around in education in general for about 30 years at this point and it's been previously applied to a number of different specific domains, including in the visual arts in a series of books called "Studio Thinking," but then also for mathematics, for science, and even for legal theory and legal thought. So, that was the approach that I took to these theater classrooms, which is "What are the habits of mind that are being taught in these classes?" What I found was across a nationally representative set of five different school districts, the same habits of mind are coming up over and over again for these students, what the teachers are asking the students to do. So, one of these is body awareness and control. So, in an acting class and for theater, the body is really the instrument of the actor, right? In the same way the violin is an instrument in a music class or the paintbrush might be considered the instrument in a painting class, for actors, to be able to control and understand what your body is doing, why it's doing it, and how you can best present your story or your emotion to an audience so it can be read by an audience. So, there were many, many different kinds of exercises within theater classrooms that were meant to present students with an opportunity to engage their body awareness and their body control in order to then solve those problems or answer those exercises. 

Jo Reed: I was going to say, in fact, so many theater classes actually start with body exercises.

Thalia Goldstein: Yes. This was the thing that I was really, actually a little surprised about. Even though I've taken many acting classes over the course of my life and development, I was surprised by just how much physical engagement the students were being asked to do over the course of a warm up. So, a lot of these warm-up exercises that teachers presented to students wouldn't have been out of place in a physical education class or in a dance class. They're doing sit-ups and push-ups. They're doing yoga and mindfulness. They're jogging around the room, really getting their bodies engaged and ready to go for the work of putting character and story and emotion on top. That was just fascinating because a lot of education, a lot of traditional education is sitting still, being mindfully focused on a task, but bodily disengaged almost because you have to concentrate. But acting class is the opposite. It really asks students to bring the body into the room and to engage with their physicality and the way in which they're engaging with other people or engaging with their own sense of self as they're in that room together. I just thought that was so cool because it's connected to a bunch of psychological skills that are so important, like emotion regulation.

Jo Reed: When I think of theater too, it's probably one of the most collaborative art forms. You have to constantly be working with others, both on the stage and behind the stage.

Thalia Goldstein: Yeah, absolutely. That was another one of the acting habits of mind that we saw over and over again in the theater classrooms. We saw teachers constantly asking students to work together to solve a problem or to collaboratively come up with a way to solve an improvisation prompt or to work with a large group in order to do a fun exercise like keep a balloon in the air for a hundred bounces without moving their feet. It was really fun, actually, because the students had to both actively move the balloon around and communicate while they were moving the balloon around. So, teaching that skill of collaborative communication through giving the group of students a collaborative goal is one of the ways that the teachers really get students to understand and practice their collaborative skills. Of course, collaboration is one of the critical 21st century skills for student education and learning that'll last them no matter what career or what activities they engage in the long term. Teachers were also really often presenting students with the chance and with the opportunity to integrate really thinking deeply about their classmates and thinking deeply about the characters that they had to play. That was another habit of mind that we saw quite often called consider others. This is where students had to think about "Well, what is my character thinking or feeling? What do they want? Then what are the other people on stage, my other fellow classmates, what are they thinking and feeling and what do they want?" Because you have to have that understanding of the other person to then be able to collaborate with them. It was sort of all of a piece as the teachers presented these different exercises to the students.

Jo Reed: I would also think-- maybe this is a subset-- but theater demands being present at the moment. You can't be thinking about "Okay, this is what I'm making for dinner later."

Thalia Goldstein: Absolutely. There's a theater theory called the 80-20 rule, which is you need to be 80% in the moment at all times, and then 20% aware of whether what you're doing is working or not. You have to be sort of 20% aware that it's going well or not going well while you're 80% in the moment. That requires a lot of concentration. You can't be thinking about what you make for dinner. You can't be thinking about whether or not you finished your homework for the next class because then you're not closely paying attention to the people around you. This sort of ability to keep in mind your goal while actively engaging in the behaviors, again, that's something that the teachers really asked the students to integrate and use as they were engaged in their theater exercises.

Jo Reed: Now, one of the key things in your book is that theater education helps develop these skills and they transfer to other contexts. Can you talk about that a little bit and provide examples of how these skills benefit students in non-theater settings?

Thalia Goldstein: Sure. Yeah. This is one of the big questions whenever we talk about the psychology of arts education. There's sort of a long history of talking about transfer, right? Because I want to make sure we always give weight to theater and theater education as being important in its own right and being part of a holistic and worthwhile education for all students. I also think that there are opportunities that theater education provides that really can't be found in other classrooms and in other kinds of subjects. Transfer takes two forms. One is called near transfer and that's when you're learning a skill in the theater classroom that is easily applied outside of the theater classroom. For example, learning how to say a speech out loud within the theater classroom probably makes it a little bit easier to then learn how to give a presentation no matter what topic it is that you're presenting on, right? Because you're learning how to enunciate, you're learning how to read with fluency, you're learning how to pronounce words. That seems like a pretty clean near transfer example. But then there's also these examples of what we think of as far transfer and that's when the skills that you're learning within a theater classroom transfer to experiences and opportunities outside of that theater classroom that are maybe not so much a one-to-one correspondence and this is where I think the large amount of practice within the safe space of the theater classroom that the students are getting can really sort of bolster their ability to use these skills outside of the theater classroom. So, if we take another habit of mind-- so, one of the habits of mind that we saw over and over again was reflect and think metacognitively and that means that the students are being taught to take a step back from their own work and take a step back from the work of their classmates and give helpful critique both to themselves and to their colleagues about whether what they're doing is working for the audience, whether it's working for the character, why did they make the choices they could make, what additional choices could they have made in the moment and this ability to take a step back from your work is really key to learning. You have to engage in a sort of self-evaluation. "Do I quite understand that yet? Do I need to maybe study a little bit more? Would it be helpful for me to have a conversation with a partner in order to figure out how to best move forward?" So, this is one of the examples of something that they're being taught and given the opportunity to use within the classroom that I would hypothesize we would see gains in outside of the classroom, but we haven't actually done that research yet. So, that's my next step. That's the work we're doing now is looking at whether these habits of mind that are being taught in the classroom are actually transferring to outside.

Jo Reed: And what about building emotional skills in the students that transfer outside? 

Thalia Goldstein: Yes, absolutely. So, emotional skills are really the key to performance, right? You have to be able to understand the emotions of the character. You have to be able to regulate your own emotions to then portray that character and then you have to be able to understand the sort of physical and vocal messages you are giving as a performer in order to know whether or not it's working for the audience. And all of these are very clearly emotional skills that we see in everyday life, right? The ability to know what you're feeling, know whether or not you want to or need to change or regulate your emotions, and then also know what it is that the people around you are feeling and how to engage with them based on what it is that they're feeling. So, these are the skills of knowing what somebody else is thinking or feeling, empathy, feeling what somebody else is feeling, and then of course, compassion and sympathy, right? Feeling bad or sorry for somebody else and then trying to help them out. There's actually some really interesting evidence from both my lab group and other lab groups that being involved in theater classes is associated with higher levels of empathy and higher levels of understanding other people's emotions. But we haven't been really clear to this point as to why that might be happening or under what circumstances we might be able to promote that kind of learning. So I think the acting habits of mind that come into play are body awareness and control, because of course, knowing what you're feeling is all about tapping into your body and your mind and understanding what it is that you're thinking and feeling in any particular moment, and then also paying close attention to other people and considering others and thinking about why they might be experiencing or thinking or feeling in any particular moment the things that they're portraying on stage. So, theater is really a social and emotional art form, right? Drama deals with heavy emotions and big situations and boring plays without emotions aren't any fun to watch. 

Jo Reed: Or be in.

Thalia Goldstein: Yeah. It's really a training ground for looking at the extremes of emotion and looking at the different kinds of things that come up in different situations and I really think the safety of the theater space allows students to maybe try on some uncomfortable emotions that they might not be able to try on in real life and see how they might react to it within the safety of the theater classroom.

Jo Reed: I would think improvisation also plays a significant role, not just in fostering creativity, but also fostering flexibility.

Thalia Goldstein: Absolutely. We saw about 20% of the class time across all of the different school districts is being spent in improvisation and what I call generation exercises, where the students have to create material in the moment. They don't have a script, they might have a specific prompt, but nothing sort of is known ahead of time. So, they have to go ahead and create things while they're in that moment and that really is the brainstorming part of the creative process and when you're brainstorming, there's lots of research out there on the creative process that says you don't want to limit yourself, right? You don't want to throw away an idea just because you think it might not be the best idea yet. You want to take all the ideas you can possibly have in the moment and then sort of sift and sort through them after you've gone through that brainstorming process. So, the improvisation moments in those classrooms, students are encouraged to trust themselves, right? To be playful, to try things out and if something doesn't work, try something new and if something doesn't work, try something new and this really applies to every kind of creative process across different fields, where you have to just keep brainstorming, trying new things, testing them out, and keep going until something really clicks. If you throw away your very first idea and refuse to try anything new, you're not going to make very much creative process. So, the theater space really invites that sort of trial and error pretty much on every different kind of activity that the students could be presented with.

Jo Reed: And that would also have a great impact on a student's confidence.

Thalia Goldstein: That would be my hypothesis as well and again, there's a lovely study that an undergraduate student and I did together a few years ago, where we did find gains in self-confidence as a result of being involved in improvisational theater classes for 10-year-olds and 11-year-olds. We only found those gains in the students that had started with lower levels of self-confidence. So, there's still more to unpack there. But I think that the key is in acting classes and in improvisational exercises, students are told to just trust themselves and trust the people around them and just try something new. They're asked to be playful and to do things that might be silly or absurd, and they're celebrated for that and that's where the playfulness and the creative outputs can come from.

Jo Reed: Now, did you find any differences between how theater education impacts students in specialized art schools compared to those in a general education setting?

Thalia Goldstein: It's such a great question and the thing that was super surprising to me was I didn't. I was expecting to. So, we went to five different school districts, two of which were conservatory styles. So, one of whom was a public magnet school and then we also went to a private theater conservatory. In both of these schools, students were doing upwards of 5, 10, 15 hours of theater per week and we were also in school districts where students were taking theater classes as part of their general education curriculum. So, they were maybe getting a few hours of theater every week and it might be the only theater class they ever took, and they didn't have to audition to get in. And it was actually quite surprising to me that what I found was students were being taught and given the opportunity to use the same acting habits of mind regardless of whether they were in these conservatory audition programs or whether they were in the public sort of open to all programs. 

Jo Reed: I find it so interesting that was no difference.

Thalia Goldstein: There was a difference in the content and a difference in the depth. So, perhaps in the conservatory schools, students were being given slightly more challenging, more mature material, longer scripts, more complex improvisational exercises because they had the previous experience that allowed them to go into more depth in those cases and in the public schools, often the students were just getting their first taste of improv or their first chance to deal with a Shakespearean script. But the psychological habits of mind, the social and emotional skills at play were equivalent across the different classrooms and that was really exciting and surprising to us.

Jo Reed: I'd like you to speak a little bit, sort of connect the dots between the pretend play that you observed and researched with the younger children and the more established arts education classes that happen within schools.

Thalia Goldstein: It's such a great question. In fact, it's one of the questions that I want to spend more time researching in the future is: How does that throughline work?”  I think there are a lot of similarities. Obviously, the sense of play, this sense of containment, which is "When I'm in the play, everything is accessible to me and mistakes can't really be made and I'm allowed to try things out without real world consequences." That's true whether you have a group of preschoolers pretending to be firemen or chefs or whether you have a group of high schoolers putting on a play and working through a scene for the first time. I think the big difference is that children's pretend play when they're very young is: number one, self-driven. So, rarely are children told "You are going to play chef today," or "You are going to play doctor today," and very young children's pretend play is highly reflective of the culture that they're in. So, children who are growing up in a culture in which you go to the dentist will pretend play dentist and pretend play getting in the chair and looking in each other's mouths, and children who are growing up in cultures where there is spear fishing will pretend to go spear fishing and they'll get a long stick and they'll look for the fish and they'll throw the stick into the ground to try and catch that fish. So, in pretend play, the children are inventing their own games and coming up with their own topics in order to try and figure out the world and the culture that they're being invited into and that they're growing up into. We do the same thing for teenagers, just with a lot more structure. They're given the structure of the warm-up. They're given the structure of improv games in order to practice different ways of trying on emotions or actions or scenarios or different concepts and then we give teens scripts to start to enact and often, hopefully, we then let them create their own work and devise their own work to explore the issues that are important to them. So, the scaffolding is a little bit different between what we expect from our very young people and what we expect from our more sort of established scholars in high school and middle school and college. But the sense of sort of freedom and trying things out and trying to figure out the world around maybe has a bit of a through line from when you're three until you're professional.

Jo Reed: And have you found that theater education can positively influence academic performance in other subjects? And if you have, or if you see research going in that direction, have you thought about what mechanisms do you think are at play?

Thalia Goldstein: Yeah, it's a really important question. As I mentioned before, I want to make sure that theater is seen for its own sake always, that it's important to engage with storytelling and narrative and character because that's one of the ways in which we understand our world and it's one of the ways in which we understand each other and understand people who are not immediately like us. There has been a long history of interest in whether being involved in theater classes can positively affect math scores, reading scores, SATs more generally. I'll say from my experience, the research is actually really not there for most academic domains. So being involved in theater is not necessarily going to make you any better at science or math or history. There is a way to use theater to make those subjects really interesting. There's a whole field of drama-based pedagogy in which you can use dramatic techniques and integrate theater into, say, your history and social science curriculum and there's some interesting findings that that may help students' retention over time and their motivation to engage in those subjects. But the only place we have clear causal evidence is in vocabulary scores. So, students who are involved in theater classrooms and who are randomly assigned to do theater in elementary school have higher reading scores than students who aren't and that makes a lot of sense, right? Theater and drama are verbal art forms. You have to use words in order to tell a narrative. You have to learn about narrative causality and narrative comprehension and those are the skills that are usually tested in academic fields such as English language arts and on standardized tests of reading. But outside of those more specific academic domains, teachers have been speaking for many years about the importance of social and emotional skills because it gets you to want to come to school and it gets you to want to collaborate with your classmates and I think that's where theater really shines is in teaching kids how to collaborate with each other and have that sort of social and emotional learning that then makes the school day holistically work a lot smoother.

Jo Reed: And looking ahead, you mentioned some of them, but talk a little more fulsomely about some of the future directions or projects you want to pursue at this intersection.

Thalia Goldstein: Yeah. I'm really excited about the possibilities going forward because I think now that we have these findings about what is really happening on the ground in these theater classrooms, we can begin to look more specifically for, number one, the psychological skills and abilities that students are showing definitive statistical change on as a result of being in a theater classroom, but also which kinds of activities sort of activate which kinds of habits of mind in the classroom that can then be used for specific kinds of goals. So, right now, we are starting a study where we're going to follow a group of elementary school kids over the course of a year and look at whether and how their different habits of mind change as a result of taking their very first theater classes. So, these are students who haven't necessarily chosen to go into a theater class, but their school is offering them a theater class for the first time. So, we're going to be able to track that very first year of theater engagement from kindergartners all the way up to sixth graders. And we're also going to be talking to these students about what they are getting out of the classes, how they're feeling about them both before and after they finish each class, but then also what comes to the front of mind when they're first talking about their acting classes. Are they thinking about collaboration? Are they thinking about emotion regulation? Are they thinking about a sense of containment and a safe space within the classroom? Because I think getting the perspectives both of what the teachers are trying to do and what the students are actually picking up is going to help us develop interventions and have a deeper understanding of theater education. And then I'm also doing the same thing with college students. So, we're getting the very young ones and the students who are in college now taking their first acting classes because it's required as part of a core curriculum, looking at what they're picking up when they're not planning on going into theater professionally.

Jo Reed: And we all look forward to seeing that research. Professor Thalia Goldstein, thank you so much. Thank you for giving me your time.

Thalia Goldstein: Absolutely. This was such a fun conversation and thanks so much for your really insightful questions. I appreciate it so much.

Jo Reed: Not at all. Thank you for all the wonderful work that you do. I truly appreciate it.

That was Doctor Thalia Goldstein. She is associate Professor of Applied Developmental Psychology at George Mason University, where her work focuses on how theater and the arts can enhance children's social and emotional skills. Her recent book, based on a six year long study, is called Why Theatre Education Matters. We’ll have a link in our show notes.

You’ve been listening to Art Works, Produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts—leave us that all-important rating because it does help other people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening