Macbeth & Risk

“Breathe,” I told myself, “it will be fine. What’s the worst that can happen?” This thought was followed immediately by visions of student silence, public humiliation, and a failed practicum. “Alright, scratch that,” I thought. I scanned the classroom in front of me; students were hastily working in groups; the volume was growing louder.  My Faculty Advisor sat at the back of the class wearing an inscrutable expression, her pen scrawling across the page in front of her. “One minute left,” I announced. The pace of student work intensified noticeably. I called time and students focused their attention at the front of the class.   One by one, I asked groups to present what they had been working on while I set the stopwatch on my phone to clock the length of each performance. Four groups of six students presented—the longest presentation was seventy-seven seconds; the briefest was thirty-seven seconds. “We have a winner,” I declared, “Macbeth performed in thirty-seven seconds!”

It was my first day teaching Grade 11 English during my practicum and I was beginning an eight week study of Macbeth. With the encouragement of my inquiry professor during the winter term, I had planned a performance-based unit of the play—we would use drama pedagogy to guide our study of the play.  The final unit assignment for my Grade 11 English class was the performance of a scene from Macbeth.  In developing this assignment, I was asking the students to participate in a high-risk dramatic activity, so I scaffolded the final assignment throughout the unit:  students began by working on tableaux, then blocking a scene, and then voice and movement, and finally the rehearsal and performance of their selected scene on the stage of the dramatorium. Because I was asking students to take these risks in their learning, I sought to take risks in my pedagogy.  My most vulnerable risk came during the first class on the Macbeth unit, which also happened to be my first class with these students.. For our first class together, I introduced myself and then led a think/pair/share activity as an icebreaker and to help students articulate some of their concerns about studying Shakespeare: each student selected one word to describe Shakespeare, shared that word with a partner, and then reported the partner’s word to the class. Think/pair/share completed, I moved on to describe briefly my philosophy in teaching Shakespeare: I found it helpful, I said, if students knew the plot of the play before reading, allowing students to read for character, motivation, and theme, rather than reading to understand plot. Therefore, I proffered, we would begin by reading the entire plot of Macbeth—in thirty-eight seconds. The students laughed nervously, but gamely followed my lead as I distributed the Folger Shakespeare Library script for a thirty-eight second Macbeth. Bolstered by this first success, I pressed on with a more detailed introduction to the play’s plot using a Macbeth Woosh activity that I had found online.  In this Woosh activity, students would stand in a circle as I read a synopsis of the play; students would choose to step into the centre of the circle to act out what was being read.  When I said ‘woosh,’ students in the centre of the circle would step out, allowing others to take a turn. As the students pushed back tables and chairs and assembled into a circle, my steady voice belied my anxiety. What if no one stepped into the circle, leaving my words hanging in the air? My Faculty Advisor’s facial expressions remained impenetrable, her pen continuing to move rapidly across the page. I took a deep breath, and began…

I was not always willing to engage students in Shakespearean pre-reading activities. Indeed, until recently my pedagogical philosophy had been that students should encounter a play in a linear manner and enjoy the plot as it unfolded—surprised, delighted, and amused by Shakespeare’s genius. After several years of teaching the Bard at the post-secondary level and of witnessing students struggle to eke out meaning(s) from the texts, however, my philosophy changed.  My use of “Thirty-Eight Second Macbeth” and Woosh in my practicum signaled a shift in my pedagogical thinking in which I determined to scaffold Shakespeare as effectively as possible– in essence, I believe that revealing the plot of the play in advance allows students to read the play for character and imagery rather than for plot.  After all my trepidation (and terror!), students, with a bit of prodding, stepped forward into the circle as we did the Woosh activity.

Practicum Overview

I completed my practicum at Sir Charles Tupper Secondary School in Vancouver, British Columbia.

During my practicum, I taught the following grades and units:

Unit Title	Grade	Length (weeks)	Length (classes)
Poetry	8	3.5 (daily)	14
Middle Ages	8	4 (daily)	20
The Outsiders	8	2.5 (daily)	13
Macbeth	11	8	18
Poetry	12 & 12 Mini	4.5	9

In the course of my practicum, I used the following assessment methods:

Formative

• Free writes
• Tableaux (poetry, The Outsiders, and Macbeth)
• Facebook pages and texting conversations for historical characters
• Feudal M&M distribution
• Woosh Macbeth activity & 32 second Macbeth
• Character mind-map (cumulative over the unit) for The Outsiders
• Popcorn poetry, paint chip poetry, etc.
• Jigsaws, think/pair/share
• Reader response poetry groups

Summative

• Final performance and written evaluation for Macbeth
• Quizzes, Tests
• In-class essays
• Poetry song presentation
• Poetry recitation
• Poetry portfolio
• Poetry analysis
• Final unit project
• Journals

Practicum Blog

Here is the link to my practicum blog, including assignments and rubrics.

While on practicum, I participated in several extra-curricular activities, including organizing a poet’s cafe for eight graders, and assisting in a weekly writer’s group.