Studying Shakespeare Now

BARABA BOGAEV: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Barbara Bogaev.

[Music plays]

Most Shakespeare fans can remember the high school English teacher who lit them up and made the plays come alive. Honestly, I wish I had had someone like that! I didn’t truly fall for Shakespeare until much later in life.

But this is where the Folger’s Shakespeare teaching guides come in. Starting in the 1990s, the Folger published a series for classroom teachers called Shakespeare Set Free. Those guides were built on two basic principles. First, Shakespeare is for everyone; all students, at all ability levels, can get something out of the plays. And second, students learn Shakespeare best by doing Shakespeare. Now, three decades later, the Folger has revamped its teaching guides for a new generation of teachers and students, and for a completely different education landscape.

Joining me to talk about this new series of teaching guides is Peggy O’Brien, the Folger’s outgoing director of education and general editor of the Shakespeare teaching guide series.

Also Debbie Gascon, who teaches English in Columbia, South Carolina and who co-wrote the lesson plans for the new guide to Romeo and Juliet.

And Mark Miazga, who teaches English at Baltimore City College High School and who co-wrote the lesson plans for the new Macbeth guide.

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BOGAEV: Peggy, Debbie, and Mark, welcome. I’m so glad you could join us.

MARK MIAZGA: Thank you.

DEBBIE GASCON: Thanks for having us.

PEGGY O’BRIEN: Glad to be here.

BOGAEV: Peggy, why don’t we start with you? You have been with this project from the start, and maybe you could take us back to the beginning. What was the original impetus for these guides?

O’BRIEN: The original—the overarching impetus was that the Folger Shakespeare Library has a deep investment in the importance of teachers. So the overarching question is always, “What have we got? What can we do that would be really useful to people in classrooms teaching this stuff?”

We have a whole panoply of courses and institutes and all kinds of materials that we make available to teachers online and in person and all over the country and we had a series of books a long time ago that we did, those came out in the mid-90s. So, about eight years ago or more, we said, “Oh, we need to do this again because schools are different, kids are different, scholarship about Shakespeare has broadened. And we have a way of teaching Shakespeare, not just Shakespeare, but all kinds of literature that is really successful with all kinds of kids, and we’ve gotten better at articulating that.” So we thought it was time to do it again—and then after we got started, we had a pandemic and we had construction at the Folger and all kinds of stuff.

BOGAEV: It sounds really organic, though. And as you mentioned, you know, so  much has changed. Maybe you could play that out for us. What specifically has changed? Some of it’s obvious, I’m thinking technology. But what did you think, “Oh, hey, we need a revamp, a complete revamp of these guides.”

O’BRIEN: You know, I can talk about some of that, but also Debbie and Mark can talk about how students have changed.

But I can say in terms of what the Folger has to offer, scholarship has expanded a lot—and teachers are really interested in scholarship. They don’t get a chance to read it a lot, and it is always very enlightening and enlivening to teachers. For a long, long time, Shakespeare scholarship in general was kind of the purview of white people, mostly white men. I would say, starting about 30 years ago, young scholars of color and young women who were Shakespeare scholars said, “Wait a minute, like, what does this have to do with me?” There’s been a lot of discovery in that time about, you know, how race is represented in Shakespeare’s plays and how gender is represented in Shakespeare’s plays, and also performance too, has brought up a lot of questions that we wanted to deal with. Because obviously the Folger is the sort of heartbeat of Shakespeare scholarship in the world so we want to represent what’s really out there and make it accessible to teachers, so the teachers can make it accessible to kids.

Also present in these books all the way through are images of things from the Folger Collection. For example, images of prompt books from famous performances and so forth. So that students and teachers both will have some intro—not just to what happens in a classroom, which is incredibly important. But also some things, other, more things that the Folger has to offer. Because we want teachers who use these books to be friends of ours forever.

BOGAEV: Good. Mark, tell me about your own experience. I read about it. You shared a personal note in the lesson plans for Macbeth that you wrote along with a colleague of yours in Indiana about your experience with teaching and Macbeth. So tell us about that and what made you think, “Okay, we need help.”

MIAZGA: Well, when I first started teaching in 2001, a veteran teacher here at the high school where I still teach 24 years later, he handed me a Shakespeare Set Free guide—that was the guides that Peggy was referencing earlier, the ones that were published in the mid-1990s. I did not have any idea how to teach Shakespeare when I started teaching. I had no methodology courses about that in college. My own experience in high school was basically sitting in rows, reading out loud, not really understanding it, and answering questions the best I could afterwards. So getting the Shakespeare Set Free guide early in my career, it kind of really, like, changed the way I approached teaching. At that time it was Romeo and Juliet.

Then I did the Teaching Shakespeare Institute in 2008, which is at the Folger Shakespeare Library. At that time it was a four-week intensive study and what it is, is you learn how to teach Shakespeare by embodying it yourself and performance, as well as learning about scholarship as well as classroom practice.

The Folger method is using a lot of performance to teach rigorous texts, and the rigorous texts include, of course, Shakespeare. I teach at a school where all of our students take AP literature and all of our students take IB literature, so we’re AP for all in the 10th grade, we’re IB for all in the 12th grade.

BOGAEV: Wow.

MIAZGA: Yeah. And so that means—

BOGAEV: Motivated students.

MIAZGA: Well, they are motivated students. They’re definitely good kids, but they’re regular kids too. I teach in a large public high school in Baltimore, So, you know, I’m a teacher that has a lot of the challenges and obstacles that other public high school teachers have, right? And my students are, you know, we’re trying to get them to do really rigorous things.

One of those rigorous things, for example, we have them do is we have them write essays about extracts. One thing that I’ve sort of realized after I was at the Folger Shakespeare Library, is that if a kid has an extract from Shakespeare or a, you know, monologue or a soliloquy or a scene, and they are learning to embody it and make choices with that language, like, “Oh, I’m going to do a gesture at this line,” or, “I’m going to do a movement with this line,” they’re understanding it and they’re going to do better on these rigorous tests that they have to take at the end of my course.

BOGAEV: So that gets to the core of the Folger method too, this emphasis on performance. I notice one of the things you do is have your kids make videos of them performing their scene. In fact, here’s a clip of one from Richard III.

[CLIP from Richard III, Act 1, Scene 4]

CLARENCE:
Take not the quarrel from His powerful arm;
He needs no indirect or lawless course
To cut off those that have offended Him.

FIRST MURDERER:
Who made thee then a bloody minister
When gallant-springing, brave Plantagenet,
That princely novice, was struck dead by thee?

CLARENCE:
My brother’s love, the devil, and my rage.

FIRST MURDERER:
Thy brother’s love, our duty, and thy faults
Provoke us hither now to slaughter thee.

CLARENCE:
If you do love my brother, hate not me.
I am his brother, and I love him well.
If you are hired for meed, go back again,
And I will send you to my brother Gloucester,
Who shall reward you better for my life
Than Edward will for tidings of my death.

SECOND MURDERER:
You are deceived. Your brother Gloucester hates you.

BOGAEV: Mark, what do your students get out of making a video of their performance?

MIAZGA: They basically take ownership over it. You know, a lot of times with Shakespeare, kids might feel like they’re intimidated by him. “Gosh, he’s so hard. He’s so distant.” You know, “He’s so highfalutin.” Letting the kids make a bunch of choices with it, with the language, figure out, “What do you think he’s trying to do here? Or what idea is this conveying?” Like having them ask questions about the language, about the words, doing it at like a word level, and then a line level, and then a scene level. Having them create a video, it makes them understand the scene because they are making choices with it and taking ownership for it and kind of knocking him off his pedestal.

BOGAEV: I love that because when you make a film you’re the director and Shakespeare just becomes another writer that you have to deal with, right?

MIAZGA: Right.

BOGAEV: Debbie, let’s bring you in here. You worked on the Romeo and Juliet lesson plans. I understand you taught the play right at the beginning of your career as a newly minted teacher.

GASCON: When I was student teaching, it was the first thing I planned all on my own. I wrote in the letter how I was so excited to teach something and plan it all by myself and I worked so hard to pull together what I thought was the best way to teach Romeo and Juliet. And when I finished teaching, I realized I had done all the work and my students were obedient recipients of information that I had given them. I explained everything—

BOGAEV: So you had downloaded Romeo and Juliet analysis to them.

GASCON: Basically, yes, and they sat and I thought, “Wow, they’re getting it. They’re so quiet and they’re attentive.” They were not! And then today I taught Macbeth and it was loud and messy. Everyone spoke the lines of the text. No one sat quietly. No, I didn’t explain a single thing and they probably remember it. Those other kids that I taught before, they don’t remember, they don’t remember anything.

O’BRIEN: I want to jump in for one second about the Folger method, Barbara, which is, it’s about performance but before the performance, it’s all about language. It’s all about putting kids right together with language, and kids figuring out a lot of things for themselves. Figuring out about performance is a way that helps kids figure that out. But it’s not—it doesn’t really start with performance, and it doesn’t have anything to do with acting and kids needing to be good at acting or anything. It’s nothing like that. But it’s the idea that they can take on this language and learn about what to do with it and…

BOGAEV: Make it their own?

O’BRIEN: Yeah, actually, make it their own. Figuring out how to perform something is a way to do that.

BOGAEV: Mark, I was particularly interested in how you have a guiding question about fear in your lesson plan for Macbeth, and maybe Debbie, you do this too. You have the class read—at least for Macbeth—Mark, you have the class read the opening scene with the witches all together out loud, choral reading. That sounds interesting. Why do that? What does it do for comprehension and getting into Shakespeare’s language that reading, I don’t know, singly or silently doesn’t?

MIAZGA: Well, right away, it makes students, puts the language in their mouths, right? So, like, that’s a very simple way that we can do that. But also, we don’t just do it once. Well, we’ll read it chorally, and we will stop at each period and have an extended pause. Or, we will whisper it together. Or we will shout it together, and we’ll have like different ways to, like, take the language and put it into our minds and our mouths. That’s our first time that we’re really like owning the language, that’s how we’re sort of sort of taking control, making some choices with it. And eventually I’ll start asking students, “Okay, why do you think this witch says this line here, this way? Is there another way that we could do that?” And that’s the, kind of, the first step in tackling one of these plays.

BOGAEV: It can be so embarrassing if you’re a first time—the first time you start reading Shakespeare, most kids—I know, I was— embarrassed. I didn’t know how to pronounce things.

MIAZGA: Safety. It provides safety.

BOGAEV: Safety in numbers.

GASCON: That’s what—I was going to add, that no student is reading alone when you’re doing choral reading. And they’re not afraid to mispronounce words, or if they do, they laugh about it. They’re not embarrassed. And this includes the entire class, not just the three kids who always raise their hands, but the student who sits in the back corner quietly.

But this includes everyone and everyone says the words. And when you say it together, it’s low stakes because I mispronounce words and I make mistakes so we just do them together and it’s a lot less stressful.

BOGAEV:  I think creativity and sensory exercises like this must be a big part of using the Folger method. Peggy, you can speak to this. I guess, especially for English as a second language learners and also neurodivergent learners.

O’BRIEN: Yes, it’s powerful, it’s powerful and it’s inclusive and the stakes are lower. But that doesn’t mean that anything is dumbed down here at all. We’re all onto the real language and we’re onto letting kids, you know, cut their teeth on that. But it gives all kinds of students a different way to get into this and that’s what we want to do.

Actually, you know, students who are learning English have a tremendous facility in language, more than some of us, like myself who just know one language. Also—about pronunciation—the Folger has said for a long time, we don’t really know how people pronounced words in the Globe Theatre in 1600.

BOGAEV: So freeing.

O’BRIEN:  “Take a shot,” you know, and then almost everybody always ends up pronouncing things the way you should, you know, the way we’re used to. So, it’s like, what we’re paying attention to is students really owning the language. A lot of this involves teachers getting out of the way so that students and the language can get busy with each other.

BOGAEV: Debbie, on just a slightly different tack, all of you were paired with another teacher from a different region for these guides. Your partner was Amber Phelps from Baltimore. As you said, you’re from Columbia, South Carolina, so very different regional cultures. How did you collaborate on your lesson plans for Romeo and Juliet? And how did that pairing change your thinking about teaching style and also content?

GASCON: What Amber brings is a knowledge of literature that I have not been taught. When I was at my high school experience, my college experience, and my teaching experience, we still teach predominantly old dead white guys until probably their senior year in high school. Amber has a much more diverse curriculum that she teaches. So she could lend paired texts—like, she’s a huge Toni Morrison fan, and she brought in some texts that I wasn’t familiar with—and also some strategies and techniques that she uses in her class to get her students engaged that I hadn’t thought about.

BOGAEV: Like what? Like what kind of techniques did she bring to the table?

GASCON: Amber, she’s aware of cultural things that we don’t discuss in the South as often. I’m not quite sure how to put that. I’m not allowed to discuss things like CRT or race or gender really in my classroom. My students can talk about it, but I’m not allowed to facilitate a conversation. Amber can and so she talks about some things and I think about how can my students benefit from what she’s teaching me.

BOGAEV: Well, I can hear it. Obviously, you’re being very careful with your language and it’s such a polarized time.

GASCON: It’s so difficult.

BOGAEV: Yeah. Peggy, maybe I should ask you this. Have you heard from teachers in your role as education director for the Folger that they get blowback on teaching issues of race or other sensitive subjects and Shakespeare?

O’BRIEN: We have not heard that they get blowback specifically about Shakespeare. But we know that lots of teachers have to walk a very, very careful line. We also know that teachers know that race is something that we need as human beings to pay attention to, all of us do.

If there is blowback from some of the lessons in this book, because they’re, you know, in the Folger Guide to Teaching Hamlet, there’s a lesson that takes a piece of Hamlet and a piece of Frederick Douglass’ Narrative and has them sort of talking to each other. So this is something that we think is a great way to teach literature and a great way to teach Shakespeare.

We don’t know what the blowback will be from the stuff in these books. But we do feel very strongly that this is the Folger’s responsibility to put this out there. Also, this aspect of these books—and all of these books—are in response to teachers asking us questions about this stuff all the time, you know? So, we said, “Okay, we’re going to put some material together that will be helpful to you.”

GASCON: Can I add to that? When we started Macbeth, we did some line tossing. One of my students got the line, “How now you secret black midnight hags.” We go around the room and you say your lines, and everyone says them to each other. I tell him to pick a word to stress, and the student stressed the word “black.” After he said it—I was standing near him—and after he said it, he went, “Huh.” I looked at him and I said, “What are you thinking?” He, my students, are thinking about it. They know that race is there. They know it means something. So he continued to talk about it and we had a discussion about the darkness and the lightness in the play. He took it there. I didn’t really need to do anything, but doing the Folger Method with the core reading, him standing up, him saying the words really loudly, stressing different ones, that brought him to that word to pay closer attention to it, whereas I think if he had just been sitting at his desk alone reading it, he would have skimmed over it and not noticed it.

BOGAEV: Interesting.

MIAZGA: I’d love to share an anecdote too, if I could.

BOGAEV: I was just going to ask you, Mark. Well, go ahead, yeah, go ahead.

MIAZGA: Oh, thank you. We have lessons in the Folger Guides about looking at the word “black,” just like what Debbie was saying. That line about, “Secret black and midnight hags,” but also, “Black Macbeth will seem as pure as snow.” Like we discuss how does… like, where did this idea that blackness and evil are the same—

BOGAEV: Are the same?

MIAZGA: Yeah, are the same. So we look at—like, this text was written centuries ago and here Shakespeare’s—the idea of race was completely different back then, of course—but Shakespeare is equating these two things together. And then we look at it.

There’s a scene in the Malcolm X movie—the dictionary scene, which is a pretty famous scene—where Malcolm X is learning that the word “black”  what it means, it’s like “unpure” and he’s looking at the Webster’s Dictionary. We show that scene and then we say, “Okay, where did that come from? That Webster’s Dictionary definition?”

Well, we can go back centuries and look at where this idea of blackness means lack of purity and evil. We see those ideas manifested, of course, today. We look at like the OJ Simpson cover of Time magazine where they darkened his skin and things like that, which we’re doing that while we’re teaching Shakespeare. I think that makes it relevant and that makes it important as we look to see how some of the issues we have today were first formed and how language is part of that. It’s become really important to me to make sure that we’re talking about these issues while we’re teaching Shakespeare as well.

GASCON: Can I add on to the race discussion? Gender—we talk a lot about gender. Again, I didn’t introduce it, but we talked about Lady Macbeth’s “Unsex me.” and even in Hamlet with my seniors, on manly grief. The students talk about gender norms and that this is 400 years later and these are things we’re still talking about and things they worry about. It’s important we discuss them and connect them to their lives, so Shakespeare doesn’t seem so distant from them.

BOGAEV: Absolutely. Debbie, we haven’t talked specifically about technology, so let me ask you about that because that is another reason to update these Folger Guides, I imagine. I assume we’re talking about computers, and the internet, and phones, and AI. How does all that change how you teach, and how is that reflected in your Romeo and Juliet guide?

GASCON: I don’t think there’s any technology in the Romeo and Juliet guide. The only technology is their brain and the books.

I was in a Summer Academy and we had given them, the teachers, we were talking about teaching Shakespeare and one of the assignments is to cut a text in half and then to give it a purpose. Someone in the room just tried to do that with AI. They dropped the assignment into ChatGPT and they couldn’t get it to do what they wanted it to do. Every teacher in the room was elated because this was an assignment that AI could not do for our students.

I love my phone and I love technology. It’s done a lot of really great things for my classroom. But the number one difficulty in my classroom is engagement, and I think I blame… well, I think one of the problems is social media, 30-second clips of life.

BOGAEV: Tiktok. Go ahead, just call it out: TikTok.

GASCON: Yes, thank you.

BOGAEV: I blame TikTok for everything.

GASCON: Yes. If you walked into my classroom between classes—we have six minutes—if you walk into the room, it will be totally silent and they will all be on their phones and they’re not talking to each other, they’re not looking up. They’re communicating with someone, I’m not quite sure who, but they’re not talking to each other. 15 years ago, you would come in and say, “Okay, everybody settle down, have a seat,” because they’d be milling about talking to each other. But now they’re just in their own little bubbles.

This is where the Folger method is so fabulous because they have to be engaged. A lot of times we’re standing. A lot of times they have to work in pairs. They’re moving about, they’re not using their phones. It’s increased engagement tremendously

BOGAEV: Mark, I can only imagine teaching is different with all of this technology at kids’ fingertips. But also since COVID. Can you speak to that and how the Folger Method or the methods you use to teach Shakespeare—you adapt them to get around that?

MIAZGA: Yeah, absolutely. Phones are the bane of my existence as a teacher for sure. We don’t really have a phone policy in our district or school even, it’s just sort of on the teachers. So every class period I’m having to ask kids to put their phones away or put their phones down. And then it becomes complicated because a student might not have a working computer, and then they want to do their assignment on their phone, etc. And then they have to ask for a bathroom pass on their phone through an app, and just things like that. Phones are just so centric to our lives, even more so now after the pandemic. I think that those years where we were communicating only on screens for so long has created addiction problems.

The Folger Method though, like, tomorrow my students are performing a monologue from Richard III and they’ve been working on it for about 10 days now. Today was a final rehearsal day. So they’ve already written an essay about their monologue, so they should know it well. Then today I just kind of set up my chair in the corner of the hallway. Half the students are in my classroom, half of them are down one hallway, half of them are down the other, and they’re all just like rehearsing Shakespeare. I’m walking around, I’m asking, “So what tone are you going to use to say that word right there? And where do you think you’re going to speed up your monologue reading?” That’s all them taking ownership of these things, of the language, and the words, and they were not on their phones. The only time they got on their phones was when they wanted to record each other doing Shakespeare. It just brought joy to my heart seeing them like laughing and just having a good time with the language. I mean, Richard III is a pretty fun play to teach, to be honest.

BOGAEV: That is so great. And then they’re going to put those videos on TikTok so they’re raising the bar everywhere.

GASCON: Full circle.

BOGAEV: Peggy, I keep reading about these 20-minute Shakespeare performances in these lesson plans. Is that part of the Folger Method or is that something that the teachers are writing?

O’BRIEN: The Folger Method has eight principles. There are eight principles that we work from, and then there are some essential practices. A 20-minute play is one of the essential practices.

BOGAEV: And why 20 minutes? What is that all about?

O’BRIEN: It’s probably the only original idea I ever had.

BOGAEV: I doubt that.

O’BRIEN: No, I think that’s probably right!  Well, you know, to be a good teacher you got to know what to steal from other teachers. So, I’m very good at that—like we’re having this conversation with these two teachers that I’ve learned a ton from.

I was working with the Maryland Shakespeare Festival a long time ago, and they would bring their last play of the summer to a big high school in Fairfax County, Virginia. They said, “Peggy, will you do some workshops for these kids in the daytime? Then they’re going to bring their parents back to see the play at night.” This was Romeo and Juliet.

So, I thought, “Well, when people came to the Globe Theatre, a lot of them knew the story of the play already.” Because, you know, Shakespeare only has one original plot, and so they knew the names of some of the characters, because they already knew some of the story. “Well, you know, what can I do that would get these kids even with an Elizabethan audience?”

So I say to the kids, “You know, people have been editing Shakespeare for a long time.” So, for example, in Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet that these guys worked on, I said, “I’ve edited them down to, like, 19 lines. I’ve edited Macbeth down to 19 lines, or I’ve edited Romeo and Juliet down to 20 lines. This is a play that you are going to produce yourself.”

So in class, kids get in groups, and they have a little time to rehearse. Teachers do different things with this, but in my classes I would say, “Everybody has to say this line together, chorally, and you have to figure out an action that goes with the line.” So then the teacher, or some other student reads kind of a narrative and then students shout out—these groups of students, they come and they perform their line—so by the end of the class, students know the plot of the play generally and they also know the names of some of the characters. But they also have said themselves and have heard 20 really juicy lines from a Shakespeare play. That’s a good start for lots of folks.

It started as part of a theater program, but I realized it would be really useful in a classroom.

BOGAEV: Okay, so you—that was your one great idea.

O’BRIEN: My one idea, my sole original idea.

BOGAEV: Now let me ask the other teachers. Debbie, what have you stolen or learned from other, your fellow authors?

GASCON: Everything.

BOGAEV: Anything specific? Any moment you can think of?

GASCON:  My favorite things to steal is a prompt book. You can use it in a lot of different ways, but basically you give the students a chunk of text. For example, just recently, and this has been my obsession lately, the middle of the play when students lose their momentum and their excitement, because the beginning is so exciting because it’s something new, and the end’s exciting because normally with the ones we teach everyone’s dead, but in the middle, when they’re all bored, like a really long scene in Act 4, I break it into parts, groups go off, they figure out how they’re going to perform it. Then we come back, we perform the scene together as one. It makes it go much faster, and they’re all engaged in different parts. There’s a lot of joy. It’s very—it’s communal, it’s social. Okay, and then they also own the text. So there’s lots of purposes with it. But it’s one of my favorite things that I’ve stolen from the Folger, among all the others.

BOGAEV: Oh, that’s great. How about you, Mark? What have you stolen?

MIAZGA: Oh, wow. So, so much. But one of my favorite things to do is using film clips, it’s fun. I think early in my career, I would just show it and like, “Oh, this is interesting, right?”

Now, the Folger has got me doing things like having a third of the kids close their eyes when there’s a clip. And a third of the kids try to, like, try to close their ears as much as possible. Just look at the visuals. Try to ignore all the sound. And then a third of the kids just like watching the whole thing and then we look at how these different choices the filmmakers are making contribute to the meaning of the scene and the effects of the scene.

That’s kind of exactly what they’re going to eventually do, they’re going to make choices. So when they do their performances and whatnot, they might want to add a song in the background, or they might want to think about, like, what visually what it will look like on stage or in the video because they’ve seen it. Doing some analysis of how other people are interpreting Shakespeare is something that’s fun—and the Folger got me to do it in a lot of different ways than I used to.

BOGAEV: I love that. These methods sound so versatile. Do you use them in different contexts for different texts?

GASCON: The Folger Method can be used with any text. I use it with poetry. My other love is Charles Dickens and we use it with the opening. We use choral reading with, “The best of times, the worst of times.” And my students love to cut Charles Dickens, when they cut the text.

All of these essential practices can be used with any text; nonfiction, informational texts, it can be used with anything. It’s not just Shakespeare. So it’s pretty much every day in my classroom. Once you learn an essential practice, you can use it with anything. So it really changes your entire classroom practice, not just my two-week Shakespeare lesson

BOGAEV: I love that. Peggy, I’m not a teacher. I was interested as I looked through the Folger Guide materials that the word “community” comes up quite a bit. Maybe that’s very obvious to you, Mark and Debbie, what that’s all about, but how does community fit into the learning landscape, and how does this Folger Method foster it?

O’BRIEN: Oh, that’s such a good question. Because the Folger method works the way it does—it’s inclusive. I mean, one thing we know is that the Folger method is really effective with all kinds of kids, with kids of all ability levels. But what a lot of the essential practices of the Folger Method, they all have students working together.

BOAGEV: Which I would think post pandemic is even harder than it was before.

O’BRIEN: Yes, and actually I learned that from Debbie Gascon, who one day said to me, “Something you should talk about more is how the Folger Method creates community.” Because she said, “Post pandemic, my students, they just have a more difficult time coming together because they have become so unused to it.”

BOGAEV: So they’re unsocialized, Debbie?

GASCON: Well, they’re addicted to their phones. And with COVID, they had masks on. We were socially distanced. They couldn’t really do group work. They were physically and emotionally separate from one another. I would say the year I taught—I guess after we were fully in school, after the pandemic—class was so boring. Then when we started Othello, I said, “Forget it, we’re getting up, we’re doing this.” And it completely shifted my classroom. They were alive and energetic and interacting and talking to each other. Looking in each other’s eyes, listening to each other for, you know, tones of voice, things that they hadn’t been paying attention to because they’d been at home. It made a huge difference in my classroom and continues to do so.

BOGAEV: So that’s recreating community.

O’BRIEN: I had never really thought about that consciously in terms of creation of community until a teacher that we worked with for a bit who said, “Well, Peggy, before a teacher starts all the Folger Method stuff in their classroom, you obviously have to do a lot of work to get kids in community with one another.” And I said, “No, it all happens at the same time. It happens simultaneously.” So educationally, and in terms of learning and teaching, it’s really solid.

The other thing that I have come to think of more and more is, in this world that we live in, knowing how to collaborate, knowing how to get things done with somebody who is not you and not like you, perhaps is a skill that we all can learn. And we ought to keep practicing it.

BOGAEV: I want to go back to school. Peggy, thank you so much.

O’BRIEN: It’s a pleasure.

BOGAEV: And Mark, thank you so much for joining me today, and Debbie as well.

MIAZGA: You’re welcome.

GASCON: Thanks for having us. My pleasure.

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BOGAEV: Peggy O’Brien, instigator and general editor for the Folger Guides, served as the Folger’s director of education from 1983 to 1994 and again from 2013 to 2024. Debbie Gascon co-wrote the lesson plans for The Folger Guide to Teaching Romeo and Juliet, and Mark Miazga co-wrote the lesson plans for The Folger Guide to Teaching Macbeth.

The first titles in the Folger Guide to Teaching Shakespeare series, covering Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet, are out now. Future guides will cover Othello and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Those guides will be published in March 2025.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Katie Marquette in Baltimore, Maryland, Sure Sound Recording in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Clean Cuts in Washington, DC. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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