Teachers take cue from ‘Hamilton’

contact improv and draw portraits of each other without looking at their paper and without lifting up their markers. Participants danced along with “Hamilton” choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler in a video explaining how he came up with the gestures that accompany “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down),” and then they devised their own gestures to accompany a reading of a letter they’d written to their younger selves.

At open comments toward the end of the workshop, Yolanda Patino, who teaches second- and third-graders at Discovery Charter School, saw the value of incorporating motion into her teaching. “If you give them the opportunity to show or move, kids who don’t normally speak up, you see another side of them,” she said.

Abigale Almerido, an academic technology specialist at the Santa Clara County Office of Education, said, “I’ve been a fan of ‘Hamilton’ for a very long time.” But after the “Rise Up!” workshop, she appreciated anew how the show was very clear and thoughtful about its “intentionality” on a variety of different levels. “That’s what we need to do in our classrooms,” she added — in language, in class design, in policies.

“My narrative got reframed from listening to other people’s narratives,” said Susan Verducci Sandford, an associate professor in Humanities at San Jose State University. The way “Rise Up!” reframes “doesn’t threaten us because it’s art.”

Speaking by phone in advance of the workshop, Moreno says “a lot of teachers ... have got a textbook they’ve got to teach; they’ve got a standard curriculum they’ve got to teach. And ‘Hamilton’ is showing them how they can teach against the text ... how they can use artistry to transform it.”

“Rise Up!” gives teachers license just as it gives students license, says Rankine-Landers. “We’re giving permission to explore in a new way, to teach in a new way.”

Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak