Caitria Jade Cunningham

Professor Keeley
Education 302/303
10/23/14
Professional Literature
The first piece of literature I used while designing my unit is a part of The Folger Library, entitled
Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching Twelfth Night and Othello, edited by Peggy OBrien. The book is divided
into two sections, one on Othello and one on Twelfth Night. This resource has been wonderful. It has a
calendar for the unit plan, which helps me keep in mind how much time students may need to master
different aspects, and it includes many helpful tools for teaching Shakespeare. The most useful section
for me was the one entitled Teaching Shakespeare through Performance, where the authors argue
that there is a right and a wrong way to use performance in the classroom. Oftentimes, Shakespeare is
taught one of two ways: the mind-numbingly boring way, where the students just turn page after page
of nearly incomprehensible text, write down some literary terms, and learn some vocabulary. If they are
lucky, they will get to do read aloud. The second way is exclusively through performance. The students
watch the videos, perform the acts, constantly read aloud, and there is little if any room left over for
discussion of vocabulary and/or literary terms, or, in fact, discussion at all. The authors argue that
neither of these theories work very well. Balance, in most things, is key, and this is no exception.
The intended audience here is teachers of English at the secondary level, fairly clearly. For me it
has been extremely useful. While I have thrown much of it out the window, as I have designed my unit
somewhat differently, I have also used it in determining what is too much and what is too little in terms
of performance, vocabulary, read aloud, and silent reading. It has been a very good guide to varied
activities, and it has given me the ability to try to develop a more student-led classroom. One thing that
specific chapter emphasizes is putting the role of director on the students rather than on me as a
teacher. The director is the one seeing how the play comes together, figuring out what works and what
does not, understanding how the different actions of the characters create their onstage relationships,

and reading the body-language of all the characters as they develop. The director is interacting with the
play the most, so the students ought to be the directors. This is one of the most useful ideas and
concepts I have come across while developing my research, and I referenced it again and again while
developing the final project for the students, which is a musical scene. For information on Twelfth Night
itself and how to teach it, this resource was invaluable.
A second article I used is entitled How Helpful Are Shakespeare Recordings? by Walter
Ginsberg from The English Journal. Although this article does not exclusively deal with Twelfth Night,
Ginsberg does consider the helpfulness of one aspect of teaching Shakespearian plays, Twelfth Night
among them. He is very concerned that although the purpose of most teachers is to get their students
to enjoy Shakespeare, it seems that they rarely find ways to succeed. Because my teacher has
introduced the idea of audio-recordings to me and to the students as ways of helping them better
understand Shakespeare, and because we heard one very good and one very bad recording in class, this
article was hugely interesting to me. The data on which the article is based was gathered through a
study performed in twenty-five different schools. What was difficult was that the article did not seem to
reach a concrete conclusion. For several pages, he gives reports in which students and teachers rave
about the helpfulness of the recordings, claiming that the recordings made the characters come alive
and exist in the real world. Then, this section ends with the conclusion that in actuality, the recordings
were too difficult and too wieldy for younger or less able students.
Ultimately, however, he declares, most of the schools were in favor of the recordings. There
may be some issues to iron out, but there were fewer people who were strongly opposed to their use
than those strongly in favor. One issue he mentioned was particularly interesting to me: listening to the
recordings, especially listening repeatedly, can promote memorization voluntary and/or involuntary
and/or assigned of various passages. Having seen my students struggle through memorization of short
poems and often despise the process, I am extremely intrigued. I think being able to perform and/or

recite a poem or, in this case, a Shakespearian speech is a good skill to have because it causes students
to think about words in a different way than they otherwise would have.
This article helped me reconcile myself to the use of audio recordings in my unit. I think they can
be very useful, and this is not something I realized before. I jumped from silent reading to watching the
video to performance, and I may have skipped a medium that jump-starts the students creation of the
characters while leaving room for the imagination. Although not included in my five lesson plans, there
is definitely room for audio recordings in this unit, and in the future, I think I will also utilize them more.

References
Ginsberg, W. (1940, April). How helpful are Shakespeare recordings? The English Journal, 29(4), 289-300.
doi:10.2307/805934
O'Brien, P. (Ed.). (1995). Shakespeare set free: Teaching Twelfth Night and Othello (pp. 41-131). New
York City, NY: Washington Square Press.