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Othello and Storytelling: Who Gets to Speak?

Folger Education Professional Development for Teachers

Folger Education Professional Development

Booking and details

Reserve Your Spot

Dates Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 8pm ET

Venue Virtual - Zoom

Tickets Free; registration required

Duration 1 hour

Who gets to tell the story in Othello? 

In this play, authority does not rest only in title or reputation. It is constructed through language. Characters narrate, interrupt one another, persuade, and reframe events in real time. This free, interactive virtual session uses Folger Method Essential Practices to help teachers explore how Shakespeare stages competition over narrative control and how students can track that struggle through performance-based strategies. 

Participants will experience classroom practices that invite students to explore how language builds credibility, shapes perception, and manipulates meaning without lectures or a focus on themes. 

In this one-hour workshop, we’ll move through three classroom-ready activities: 

  • Surface competing perspectives through Tossing Lines: 
    Using the Essential Practice of Tossing Lines, a quick activity in which participants read short lines aloud and pass them rapidly from one voice to another, participants will track how characters interrupt, redirect, and influence one another. This active, low-stakes practice helps students notice moments when narrative control shifts and how seemingly small lines carry significant persuasive force. 
  • Build authority through Choral Reading
    Participants will layer voices in a collective reading of Othello’s speech before the Venetian Senate through the Essential Practice of Choral Reading. By adjusting pace, grouping, and emphasis as a collective voice, teachers will explore how Othello constructs his own narrative and invites belief through rhetoric. 
  • Interrogate manipulation through Cutting the Text 
    Participants will cut and shape one of Iago’s speeches, making deliberate decisions about what to keep and what to remove. This rehearsal-room strategy reveals the mechanics of persuasion and helps students see how rhetoric operates beneath the surface of the plot. 

The Takeaway 

Teachers will leave with adaptable strategies for helping students analyze voice and narrative authority in the play, while building confidence, agency, and interpretive independence in their classrooms.