Elizabeth A. Johnson
To address the need for social and emotional development, the unit incorporates performance and writing centered around character voice and the impact of decisions and actions on other characters. Then, students will look at their own goals, motivations, obstacles, and actions. Students will read Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The final products, or summative assessments, will be the performance of a scene from this tragedy and a polished journal response to a student's own decisions and actions.
Students will have already read Romeo and Juliet. The play can be taught with an emphasis on anything before embarking on this unit. It could center on literary elements, character development, the historical aspects of the Renaissance, or anything else. It must be emphasized that this unit could follow any study of this play.
There are three major steps, which are discussed below. These are: 1) Interpreting the literal meaning of the chosen lines and the context of these lines. 2) Improvising to infer from voice and relationships (Inference is integral to the New Haven English Language Arts Curriculum.) 3) Performing and evaluating character and self.
This sequence can be easily used with a data-driven approach that assesses and tracks skills during the unit. Data-driven instruction requires frequent tests that assess specific skills, then the re-teaching of any unlearned skills. Also, these tests are given across classrooms so that best practices can be shared among teachers. With this unit as an example, students would be assessed daily and weekly on skills related to interpretation of Shakespeare. Then, if that skill is mastered, and when it is mastered, students will be able to build upon this to infer relationships between characters. If any skill is not mastered, it must be re-taught until it is. Then, when students are able to infer, they will be able to think about character decisions and their own decisions. This unit recognizes the importance of building on prior knowledge and practicing of already-learned skills. Ideally, students will have many experiences with interpretation and inference by the time they finish reading Romeo and Juliet. The interpretation and inference in this unit focus those skills thinking about decisions they make each day.
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1) Interpreting the literal meaning of the chosen lines and the context of these lines
Teachers must take care to match students with lines that are appropriate for the reader both in length and content. For students with poor attendance, monologues work best because if the student is often absent, his or her absence will not harm the whole acting company. Examples of these include Romeo's monologue in the Balcony Scene, Juliet's musings after the death of Tybalt, and Prince's closing monologue at the very end of the play. For all other students, they will work together in short scenes.
A list of appropriate scenes is below. When students are grouped around various reading and comprehension levels, they can help each other with the context and content of the lines. These include Tybalt's sighting of Romeo at the Capulet Ball, or Juliet and Capulet's falling out. Remember, this unit is geared toward challenging the struggling learner and enabling him or her to perform lines in front of classmates.
The author of this unit tried various pairings with two classes of low-level learners in an urban district. The best performances were done by mixed-ability groupings of students with two or more students in a scene. Monologues were well performed by several learners, but they clearly did not understand their lines as well, probably because they did not have to react to other characters. In this way, though they had greater memorization of lines, they had less knowledge of character motivation and voice. The following scenes are suggested.
The literal meaning of lines may be achieved through multiple methods. This may be a focus of the initial unit for Romeo and Juliet, and there are interpretations offered side-by-side with the original text both online and in printed resources. The context of these lines must also be established. Students should be able to answer the following questions which ask about goals (1) , motivations (2) , obstacles (3) , and actions (4) : 1) What does your character want in this scene? 2) Why does he or she want this? 3) Who is getting in the way of the character achieving this? 4) What does your character do to overcome this obstacle?
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2) Inferring from voice and relationships; Improvisation
Improvisation should happen before diving into the words the characters say. This is because social development precedes cognitive development, as discussed in the Rationale. There are role-playing games involving scenes from Romeo and Juliet that will get students thinking about the right thing to do. See the Resources for teachers for websites with hundreds of improvisation games. Do these before diving into the Romeo and Juliet games in order to get students more comfortable with movement. Then, without reminding students that it is part of the play, or, ideally, before you begin to study the play, have students play several roles from Lesson Plan 1.
Please see Lesson Plan 1: Improvisation with Romeo and Juliet.
Before the performance, students will be furnished with a reflection sheet to complete for each performance to be given to those performers, as well as a reflection on their own behavior. The page is included in Appendix A. It is entitled "Romeo and Juliet Performance Evaluation Page".
Next, to assess tone in writing, students will evaluate tone in contemporary publications.
Please see Lesson Plan 2: Evaluating Tone
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3) Performing and evaluating character and self
The performance has four steps: I. Scene selection and Rehearsal. II. Thinking about Character and Motivation. III. Performance. IV. Written journal reflection.
I. Scene selection and Rehearsal
The scenes given above are not necessarily the most famous of the play, though they are likely to be in any stage or film production of it. The most famous parts of these scenes were not chosen because they are more likely to be studied during class and the interpretation of them will already have been done. For example, the Balcony Scene is often taught because of its imagery, symbolism, opposites, and so forth. These lines are likely to have been thoroughly examined. Also, Romeo and Juliet each have numerous lines at once in the Balcony Scene, which is prohibitively daunting to new performers. By using later lines when Romeo and Juliet are parting from each other, the actors will have to rely on each other more because the lines are shorter, and they will be able to apply their interpretation skills practiced in an earlier lesson.
To prepare and rehearse, students will set up individual Company Houses where they will come each day to work on their projects. These could be desks arranged in twos and threes or clustered together. Students working individually will be in their own Company House with the rationale that students who miss class often or are unable to cooperate in a group would be further discouraged and ostracized by being placed in complete separation. *Note: Struggling learners have a difficult time completing work when not directly addressed. However, the best method of ensuring that students are on task is to be sure that all materials are provided and organized, that there are clear models for all levels of the process, and that realistic goals are set. The Company House arrangements are meant to foster unity in a group and to lessen the amount of time used to move during class.
II. Thinking about Character and Motivation
Prior to rehearsals, each student will need to respond to the following questions provided by the model in Lesson Plan 3: Thinking About Character. Provide students with the model answers on one sheet and the questions with space for answers on another sheet. In a pilot of this lesson, students said that they would have used the model more if the pages had been next to each other and not front-and-back. Students reported that the models were helpful.
III. Performance
For the performance, have students set up the desks in "a round" as the Globe Theatre is assembled. Show students an image of the layout of the Globe and have them decide where the seats will be, directing them towards an arc.
Prior to the performance, students need to know how to behave when their peers are performing. Ideally, invite administrators and other adults into the room to help model. How will they know how to behave? Begin by asking students what they think a "good" audience looks like. They are likely to come up with all the right answers. These could include "sits quietly," "sits up," "cell phones off," "stay seated," and "follow action with eyes." Write these on a large piece of poster paper and post it in front of the room so that students know what their expectations are. Write check marks in the spaces for the class when they behave correctly. These can be typed, printed and passed out to the class. Have each student monitor the behavior of another student, knowing that their audience grade, which should be graded because it is a skill, will be partly determined by this chart. A model is provided below.
IV. Written journal reflection
After the performances, have a leader of each company compile and distribute the slips to the other groups. Have those groups discuss the reflections from their peers using the questions that follow. Have them answer questions 1 and 3 before looking at slips from their peers. 1) What did we do well as a group? 2) What did other people think we did well as a group? 3) What could we do better? 4) What do others think we could do better? 5) What message did we convey to the other groups? 6) How is this like or different from what we wanted people to know? 7) How did the audience's reactions impact how we performed? Each student must answer this question individually and on a group/Company page.
Journal Reflection Prompt for Students: (Journals are integral to the Freshman Curriculum and STEAL is an acronym used to analyze character.) Explain your character using STEAL (Speech, Tone, Effect on other characters, Actions, Looks). Based on what you know of your character from STEAL, why did the character handle the situation the way he/she did? What speech, tone, effects on others, actions, and looks could change to make the outcome better? If your character were your friend, what would you advise him or her to do in his or her situation? First, explain the situation in your own words. Next, write the exact words you would say to your character. Finally, explain to the character why he or she should do this. Now, write about yourself using STEAL. How do your actions and tone influence the conflicts you face? What could you change to change the outcome of a particular situation? Minimum _______ words.
Strategy note: With such a stratified field of learners, I find it useful to give different students different word goals. Sometimes it is a minimum, while other times I use a grading scale, like 200 words = B, 250 words = A. When they say, "But what if I only have 199 words? I reply, "If you can say 199 quality words, you can say 200." The reasoning behind word goals for struggling learners is that it forces them to say more. Many times these learners are inhibited because they think that we teachers understand everything they are saying and therefore they do not explain themselves. Or, they write about a fact without going into why that supports their idea. Overall, their idea of "quality" is low. Furthermore, they are typically not concise, so they cannot say as much in 100 words as a more advanced student could. As you might notice with their writing, the best parts come out at the end of their pages! If you ask them to write "one page," the most insightful, original ideas come out at the very bottom, and they stop because they have written a page! By giving word goals, they constantly have to come up with more to say, and will practice expanding upon one of the ideas they have written in that original page. Finally, this allows you to tailor the assignment to different learners, asking appropriate lengths for learners. The further problem of "write one page" is that handwriting sizes vary so widely that the space is unfairly judged.