Strategies
The strategies that I use in this lesson are not that far removed from most strategies that teachers use in an English classroom. I will use a discussion model and note taking skills. These are not unusual strategies for any English teacher. However, we each have our own approach to these things, so I will lay out my expectations for these activities. The only slightly new strategy I will use in this unit that may be outside the realm of a regular English class is the creation of a story board.
First my students will need to learn to take notes properly. There will be two types of notes used in this unit. There are the notes on the films and the notes on the text of the play itself. The notes they take while reading the play will not be a new experience for my students. Throughout the year I ask my students to keep a double entry journal while reading any text for the class. To do this they take a regular notebook with lined paper and divide each page into two vertical columns. In the left hand column they are expected to write down lines from the text that are of some importance. These lines might reveal something about a character, demonstrate a literary technique, raise a question, etc. On the right column directly across from the quotation they are to write some comment about that quotation. I also encourage my students to leave a little extra room around their comment in the right hand column. This way, if some interesting ideas come up in class discussion about the quotation, they will have space to add more. The students will also have to take notes on the films. This is something I am fairly new to myself, but it can be extremely overwhelming. When I first started taking notes on film I wanted to write everything down, and I ended up missing the action because I was concentrating on my notebook rather than the scene. Film critics and writers have a version of shorthand they use when taking notes, but I find this a bit confusing. It is really only useful to learn if you are going to take notes on many, many films. However, teachers may want to teach students to use the short hand for a few important things. If you choose to do this Tim Corrigan's A Short Guide to Writing about Film has a useful section on the shorthand. This is the approach I will take with my students. I want them to pay attention to the scenery, music, images, and camera angles in the film. To help them do this I plan to teach them the short hand for a few of the notes on camera angles. For example students can write "cu Gertrude" for a close up of Gertrude or "la of Hamlet" to show that Hamlet was film from a low angle. Just giving my students a few of these short hand tips for things that I know will show up in the clips may help them handle the pressure of writing down what they see. In addition, it is important for students to see the clips multiple times. Few of us can write about or discuss anything in detail that we have only seen once, and it would be unfair to expect our students to do the same.
The activities set up throughout this unit require students to be familiar with a discussion model. My classroom is set up so that the desks sit in a U shaped formation. This provides the students with a clear view of each other and encourages discussion among students rather than discussion between a student and the teacher. Often on discussion days I will pull the chairs into a large circle to encourage more exchanges between the students. In my AP English class I usually have animated participation, but that is not the case in all classrooms. In classes with reluctant participants you may choose to develop a class participation chart. This can be created with a simple class list. Every time a student speaks put a mark next to their name on the chart. Before beginning discussion, inform the class that number of times each student is expected to participate. This number should changes depending on the class size. This is an effective and simple technique, but it does create expectations for points every time there is a class discussion. I recommend only using this strategy as a last resort.
The final strategy that I will use is a story board. One of things I would like my students to examine in this unit is the deleting or moving of the first scene of Shakespeare's play. After viewing and discussing the scenes my students will create storyboards of the opening scene for a Hamlet film of their own creation. A storyboard is essentially a visual representation of what a director plans to film. Each box shows what we would see through the lens of the camera. Below the boxes there is usually instruction or text to explain what is occurring during that shot. Many people relate comic books or comic strips to storyboards. It might be helpful to look at comic books or show your students a page or two of a comic book to get some ideas of what a storyboard could look like. For this storyboard students can choose to use Shakespeare's original scene, use a scene from another place in the play, or create their own scene. They will sketch out their scene on 11 x 14 paper. The paper should be divided into blocks so that they can sketch out the shots with room for textual explanations of the shots underneath. These storyboards will be presented to the class, so you could also have the storyboards placed on overhead transparencies. A student's images could be scanned into a computer and printed or Xeroxed as transparencies. This way the student could project his/her images on a larger screen and make it easier for the whole class to see their vision. In addition to the storyboard the students would have to include a typewritten explanation of what kind of film version of Hamlet this opening scene would produce. What would their film look like? What ideas, themes, or images would they bring out in the film? How does their vision of the opening scene support this?
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