Building Community with the Folger Method

This free interactive virtual session uses Folger Method Essential Practices to make Shakespeare’s language accessible to every student and build a thriving classroom community. Rather than treating community-building as a warm-up that precedes the real work, participants will explore how ensemble, trust, and shared authority are built through the work itself through exploration, ensemble, and play. 

In this session, you’ll experience, and leave ready to use, three adaptable activities that establish classroom community from the very first days of school: 

• Discover how small choices reveal big ideas. Participants will use Tone & Stress, a low-stakes entry, high-stakes discovery practice in which shifting tone of voice, inflection, and emphasis changes meaning. We will explore how inviting students to make and defend these choices distributes authority across the room, signaling from day one that their interpretations matter and that the text belongs to them. 

• Get everyone speaking Shakespeare. Participants will experience Tossing Words and Lines, a collective practice in which fragments of Shakespeare’s language move around the room from voice to voice, lowering the stakes for every student while establishing that this is a classroom where everyone speaks, everyone listens, and no single voice carries the whole text alone. 

• Read together before reading alone. Participants will experience Choral Reading, a collective practice in which voices layer across a text to surface rhythm, pattern, and meaning. We will discuss how reading as an ensemble gives reluctant and hesitant students a way into the work, and how those early collective moments lay the groundwork for a community where every voice matters.