Strategies
In order to fulfill my goals and objectives with this unit, I'm planning on employing a number of different strategies with my students. In regards to my objectives for class discussion, I'll use a few different discussion strategies, including small-group and whole-class discussions. I will also employ fishbowl discussions, during which students sit in a circle surrounded by another circle of students. Only students in the center can discuss, and students on the outside take notes on the discussion. Students then switch places. Both group and small-group discussions will be used, to give students an opportunity to share and learn in a whole-class style as well as in small group in order to allow students who generally don't like to talk in front of the whole class an opportunity to share. These small groups will also serve as Literature discussion groups. which give students the opportunity to talk in small groups about what they are reading. Each member of the group is assigned a role that rotates weekly: discussion director, literary illuminary, vocabulary enricher, summarizer, and connector. These roles give students a responsibility within the group they are in and a reason to participate. This strategy also helps give a voice to shy students who might normally not participate in whole-class discussions. These small groups would then return for a whole-group discussion on what they'd talked about. 23
In order to address my objectives for student writing, I will be employing several strategies including timed writes. This strategy helps students prepare for the AP Literature exam they all take at the end of the year. I give students a surprise prompt related to the text we are reading, and they have thirty minutes to construct and write an essay that answers the prompt. Most likely I will give them prompts about the main purpose and message of the chorus; I may also create a prompt that asks them about interpreting the play using both a modern and ancient Greek viewpoint. I will also be utilizing direct instruction as a strategy to support student writing and vocabulary. This will appear as a short lecture or PowerPoint presentation. I will use this strategy to give them specific vocabulary words that they will need throughout the unit, for example, dramatic irony, strophe, antistrophe, tragedy, etc. I will also use this strategy in a power point presentation to show students what a theatre in ancient Greek looked like, and what aspects make up a Greek tragedy. One last strategy involves taking a longer passage and distilling it down to the main message by asking students to restate the passage as a tweet, in no more than twenty-five words. This both engages my students, since many of them are active tweeters, and it requires them to interpret the passage in a clear, concise manner. Tweets will be voted on to decide which tells the message most clearly to add a competitive edge to the activity.
Another objective of this unit is to help students make connections, both with other types of literature and with other types of performance. One strategy I will use is to compare and contrast Oedipus Rex with modern Broadway musicals. Students will look at specific aspects of both and discuss the similarities and differences. I will constantly be helping students make connections with the text we are reading and asking them to make their own connections. These connections will help them more deeply understand the messages in the text and it will also help them write with more expertise in their essays. In a similar spirit of comparing and contrasting, students will be analyzing two images side-by-side and take notes. These notes will aid them in our discussion after the viewing. Depending on the subject and the day, we will have small-group or whole class-discussions. The point of this strategy is to compare and contrast (as with an image from a traditional Greek production and a modern Broadway musical) or to try to discover the theme between the two images (as with two images of Oedipus Rex in two different scenes).
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