Curriculum
On demand professional development and comprehensive lesson plans for educators looking to engage students with the Bard’s text through a modern and arts-based lens.
Sonnet Curriculum
Shakespeare’s sonnets are challenging and sometimes mysterious texts. They capture a “whole” within a brief 14 lines. Each lesson in this collection focuses on one sonnet and offers activities and teaching strategies that teachers can adapt to their classroom context and schedule - from one session to many. The social connections are largely framed as explorations of human relationships: how we see one another (and don’t) and how we treat one another. For instance, lessons are designed so that students can recognize that status and influence (including what comes from being admired or attractive) gives people power - power to judge one another, to choose who gets what favors or opportunities, and to make decisions that impact other lives.
Sonnets include #23, #30, #94, and the Prologue and Act 1 Scene 5 dialogue in Romeo and Juliet.
Romeo & Juliet Curriculum
The Shakespeare in American Classrooms curriculum for this most famous of Shakespeare plays engages students in questions about obedience and loyalty, rebellion and compliance, the forces of love and law, and decisions made on bad if well-intentioned advice. Students are encouraged to investigate the characters surrounding the titular lovers, noting the levels of power and status that influence how friends and advisors act and react within the Capulet family and on the streets of Verona.
Julius Caesar Curriculum
Who gets to tell others how to behave? How do they do that with words and actions? What does that reveal about status and power? In studying Julius Caesar we want students not only to recognize power and status but to think about where power and status are deployed unfairly or in a biased manner. And ultimately we want them to consider what they can do about that. This leads to discussing leadership with students: What does leadership look like in your school, in your family or neighborhood or other organization? How do you know when someone is a leader? What does it mean to be a follower? Why do people follow other people?
How It Works
Lesson plans for Shakespeare sonnets and plays are designed to engage students with arts-based activities and encourage them to see the Bard’s text through the lens of arts-based principles.
Lesson plans can be incorporated into larger units of study for a Shakespeare play or combined with companion literary or historical texts.
Teachers and students are encouraged to concentrate on selected passages and scenes.
Each lesson incorporates the potent combination of English language arts (literature and literacy), dramatic arts, and other activities.
Each lesson reinforces the classroom as a community that cares about its members and learns to make meaning together.
Lessons offer ways for students to recognize the many interpretive possibilities of a Shakespeare speech, scene, or excerpt, so that some of the burden of explanation can be eased from teachers’ shoulders.
Lessons are structured into four broad stages:
Activate connections
Notice meanings
Paraphrase together
Make art
Teachers do not have to be expert art-makers and can learn along with and from their students as they create together.
Please note: this curriculum creation is a five-year iterative process. Each year we test our materials and activities with teachers and youth, and we continue to revise. We welcome feedback from educators and students!