On Demand Reading Shakespeare with All Our Students

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Presenters: Mary Ellen Dakin and Christina Porter

Reading Shakespeare takes everything we’ve got-–an arsenal of strategies grounded in research for teaching advanced literacy to all our students, and the imagination to adapt those strategies to Shakespeare’s early modern text. This web seminar focuses on the collaborative reading of Shakespeare’s plays. Collaborative as in what we can learn from classroom teachers, adolescents, literacy researchers, Shakespeare scholars, performers, and media specialists; reading as in what we can do with increasing independence to construct meaning from the transaction with challenging content written in early modern English; plays as in what we can apply to thirty-seven because the reading skills and strategies outlined in this seminar are transferable across the collection of Shakespeare’s plays. In this seminar, participants will engage in a progression of strategies that sets the stage for comprehension of a play by William Shakespeare and guides students of all ability levels through the reading of Act One. From pre-reading strategies to focused reading to reading movie posters of Shakespeare’s plays, participants will come away with research-based and classroom-tested ideas for teaching all our students how to read Shakespeare, and why.

Grade Level(s): Middle, Secondary