Teaching Shakespeare
The Folger Method: First Principles, Now Practices for Teaching ALL Literature
Check out our latest Bard Notes! If you want to get these notes straight to your inbox, SUBSCRIBE! Teaching Colleagues, Last week, we shared with you the Folger Method’s Eight Foundational Principles—the taproot of this entirely accessible and effective way to…
Pre-reading Reyna Grande's The Distance Between Us: Tossing Words and Lines
Lesson of the Month Do you want to make reading active, collaborative, and daring? Do you want to teach in a way that sets students on fire with excitement about literature and learning? Do you want to get out of…
Three Ways to Have Fun with Shakespeare
Listening to students speaking Shakespeare is certainly my favorite part of teaching Shakespeare, but I also love watching them play games. We’ve often ended a semester with Shakespeare-based games. (Perfect for this sunny time of year!) Student favorites have been…
The (Love and) Hate U Give: Teaching Angie Thomas and William Shakespeare
I teach high school English in St. Louis, Missouri, just miles from Ferguson, Missouri. Three years ago, after the Black Lives Matter movement started, I tried to bring the conversation about power and injustice into my classroom with the classics.…
Lincoln & Macbeth: A Surprising Tale Told Through Primary Sources
Martyr of Liberty Broadside. Folger Shakespeare Library. Last year, as part of the Wonder of Will exhibition extravaganza to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Folger presented America’s Shakespeare. This exhibition took a look at the Bard’s influence…
Hamlet Remix: A Teaching Idea, with Student Work Samples
Last week, my classes were right in the middle of two tragedies–Othello and Hamlet. My Senior English class had just finished Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech and my Junior Dual Enrollment class had just read the temptation…
Words, Words, Words: Teaching Frankenstein with My Shakespeare Experience in Mind
The longer I teach English, the more interested I become in etymology. I find that learning and then teaching the roots of English words has a way of illuminating texts both for myself, as a lifelong learner, and for the…
What My Students Really Think About Studying Shakespeare
At the start of our Romeo and Juliet unit, I had my students begin a Digital Shakespeare Portfolio: a blog account that would house all of their annotations, as well as a place to discuss their thoughts on the interactive…
Using Two-Lines Scenes for Pre-Reading and Post-Reading, from Shakespeare to Kate Chopin
The anticipation and excitement of beginning a new text always invigorates me in my classroom. It feels like a fresh start, a chance to really create some magic in my classroom. I always think, is this going to be the…
A Scale of Morality in Measure for Measure
The juniors and seniors in my Shakespeare elective are exploring the flawed characters and twisted plot of Measure for Measure. By the end of Act 4, Angelo has offered an indecent proposal to Isabella, the Duke has countered by orchestrating…
Five Strategies for Teaching Shakespeare to Students with Learning Differences
Act 1 Scene 2 from “Twelfth Night”. (Photo: Folger Education) I work at a college preparatory school for students with language based learning differences, and I teach a yearlong course on the works of Shakespeare. My students’ learning profiles are…
An Invitation from a Black Shakespearean
Note from Folger Education: Now more than ever we need to ask the big questions, confront the issues that both unite and divide us. Today we share an essay written for the CrossTalk: DC Reflects on Identity and Difference project…