Brian Clements was in the middle of a lesson when it clicked.
His students at Wheeler High School in Cobb County were building film treatments, blocking out story beats, arguing through structure. What they did not realize, Clements thought, was that they were doing exactly what years of English instruction had aimed for by synthesizing literature, craft and research at once, but most importantly, they were doing it because they wanted to.
“They’re having in-depth conversations,” he said. “Not just tossing out ideas, but putting together all of these things, synthesizing what they’ve learned through our entire course without really realizing that’s what they’re doing. That is everything we always want students to do.”
Clements teaches Dramatic Writing for Film, TV & Theatre 1, a course grounded in the idea that the stories students already love, on screens, on stages, in scripts, are legitimate literary texts worth studying and writing. He holds a microcertification through the Georgia Film Academy’s Dramatic Writing Program and recently completed what is believed to be the first published dissertation examining its curriculum and impact.
He will not hold that distinction alone for long. Sandy Williams Quinn, a teacher with 26 years of experience in the classroom, is now writing her own doctoral study focused on the same work.
For more than a decade, she built her own case for a straightforward idea: television is text. She used TV series to teach ninth-grade English, developed her own lesson plans and graphic organizers from scratch and eventually compiled a 350-page curriculum guide she shared with other teachers. The work convinced her she needed a doctorate. Years of coursework followed, but it was a meeting with Aaron Levy at a professional development session that gave her research a home.
Levy was presenting on Dramatic Writing, a course he helped design through the Georgia Film Academy. Quinn introduced herself. When he heard what she had been working on, he told her he had the “laboratory” for her dissertation research.
“The Dramatic Writing course absolutely made a huge difference,” she said. “It immediately makes it easier to find these other teachers, and it creates a grounded context.”
Her dissertation examines teacher experiences using television as text within the Dramatic Writing curriculum. It is a companion to Clements’ work, which focused on students. Where he asked what happens to students who choose this course, she is asking what happens to the teachers who teach it.
The Power of Choice
Clements’ research came back to something straightforward: students who choose a course based on interest engage differently than students who were placed there.
His dissertation followed students and teachers at two high schools, examining whether Dramatic Writing, an English course that students opt into by choice, produced stronger engagement than assigned courses. The answer was yes.
“For many of them, it was the first time they were in a class based on what they wanted, not grouped by ability scores from years past,” Clements said. “That’s what made me say, ‘We should do more of this, more studies into curricula based on student choice.'”
That engagement shows up in places Clements did not expect. He said he deals with fewer problems around the use of artificial intelligence than many colleagues, and he connects that directly to the nature of the work.
“Students want to tell their stories,” he said. “They’re motivated by something other than just the grade. We work really hard on the concept of audience; they’re not writing to please me or check off a rubric. They’re sharing their work.”
The course also reaches students who struggle to find traction in traditional English classes. Clements has watched students with no honors experience do well in Dramatic Writing, not because standards are lower, but because the material finally speaks to them.
“I have students who have never taken an honors class before but do really well here,” he said, “maybe because the content finally speaks to them, or because someone is finally saying, ‘Hey, your story, your experience matters.'”
Becoming the Audience
For both Quinn and Clements, the course is about more than career preparation. Some students go on to pursue screenwriting or theater. But the students who do not matter just as much.
Quinn frames the stakes in terms of literacy. When students learn to read a television script as they would a novel, the screen shifts from distraction to subject, a shift she believes strengthens how students engage with the world around them.
Clements said that even if students do not pursue the field professionally, they gain a deeper appreciation for the work, whether that means buying season tickets at a local theater or simply recognizing quality.
“That matters,” he said. “Students who leave this program become aware consumers of media. They go to the theater because they understand what goes into it. In that way, we succeeded.”
And the media students consume changes frequently, so the course needs to keep pace with the industry. Streaming deals, network shifts, changes in how television gets made, Clements treats all of it as material.
“Television has changed, so this course is always changing with it,” he said. “Those organic conversations come out of the students, because I value their perspective.”
He has taught Dramatic Writing for seven years and says he plans to spend the rest of his career doing it.
“I feel incredibly fortunate,” he said. “I will always be grateful for that.”
The Program Behind the Work
Dramatic Writing for Film, Television and Theatre 1 is an accredited high school English course in Georgia that takes students through the full arc of professional storytelling, from personal narrative to playwriting, screenwriting and TV writing. Students develop real work for real audiences, learning to pitch and workshop their scripts the way working writers do. Teachers must complete a specialized microcertification through Georgia Film Academy to lead the course, and once in the classroom, they participate in the writing process right alongside their students.
“This class has typically more writing rigor than other English classes, but students don’t seem to mind because they are writing from the heart and writing real. The teacher is just another writer in the room, sharing the same struggles and going through the same process as everyone else,” said Levy, who developed the course for GFA and is a professor of Creative Writing and English Education. He also serves as the Director for the Master of Arts in Professional Writing (MAPW) program at Kennesaw State University.
He developed the Georgia Film Academy’s Dramatic Writing Program in 2018, in part because Georgia had become a center of film and television production and needed to build a pipeline of homegrown writers. The course can satisfy an English graduation requirement and is built around four areas: genre and multi-modality, playwriting, film writing and television writing. Teachers earn a microcertification through the state’s in-service system or through a week-long intensive at the Georgia Film Academy, where they work alongside professional playwrights, screenwriters and practitioners.
Both Clements and Quinn completed that intensive. Both credit it as a turning point in how they teach.
