Shake Up Your Classroom with the Folger Method

Start the new year by trying something different with Shakespeare. This free interactive virtual session uses Folger Method Essential Practices to explore three flexible strategies that get students speaking Shakespeare’s language, making connections across texts, and making interpretive choices of their own.

Moving across Shakespeare’s history play Richard III, American poet Robert Hayden’s famous short poem “Those Winter Sundays,” and Shakespeare’s problem comedy The Merchant of Venice, we’ll try out approaches that can be adapted to almost any Shakespeare text you teach.

In this session, you’ll experience, and leave ready to use, three ways to shake up your classroom:

• Build meaning through choral reading. Take up the opening soliloquy of Richard III, “Now is the winter of our discontent,” as a group and experiment with shared voices, repetition, emphasis, pace, and arrangement. We’ll explore how choral reading helps students hear patterns and contrasts in Shakespeare’s language while turning a challenging speech into something communal, active, and fun.
• Read two texts side by side. Put Richard’s opening speech in conversation with Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” and explore what happens when two very different speakers reach for the language of winter, cold, and warmth. Participants will read the texts alongside one another, making connections and noticing differences that open up new questions about imagery, perspective, and the meanings writers build through metaphor.
• Cut the text to discover tone. Make deliberate choices about what stays and what goes in Portia’s “The quality of mercy is not strained” speech from The Merchant of Venice. Consider how different cuts can produce different tones and interpretations, and what those choices reveal about the complicated dynamics of power and mercy in the trial scene. We’ll explore how cutting asks students to read closely while making tone and interpretation something they can actively shape, question, and defend.

Come ready to read aloud, experiment, make choices, and start the year with a few new moves for getting Shakespeare into students’ hands and voices.

This session will be led by Liam Dempsey, Associate Director of Education.