Teaching Strategies
Establishing a Moral Framework
It is important to choose some guiding “moral dilemma” questions to guide the choice of evidence and discussions used in the unit. For the purposes of this narrative I focused on the idea of loyalty and then wrote about the questions that might arise when we think about whether we should stop being loyal to someone, and if so when. You might use this question and develop some other questions that follow from it but do not necessarily match the ones above. In order for students to think consciously about what beliefs and potential biases they bring to the table, it’s imperative to start the unit with discussion of at least one of these questions. There is a specific activity below to open the unit, but students should return to these questions throughout the unit and at some point ask the questions themselves.
Evidence Collection
Students should keep a record of text evidence that could go toward judging characters against the questions above. Assign each student a character and create a place for them to collect evidence as they read that might help them make a judgment about that character. Be sure to ask students to note the act, scene and line numbers in which their evidence appears, so that they can refer to it later and cite it properly.
Students should focus on the character that they will eventually use for the culminating project (below). Character assignments can be used to group students for this project as well.
Shared-inquiry discussion
Shared-inquiry discussion is student-centered; as much as possible, the teacher should not enter the discussion and should avoid communicating “answers” that might be interpreted by students as the only right answer. This discussion structure allows students to build a community of learners who listen to and acknowledge each other’s answers rather than waiting for the approval of an “authority.”
Students should be sure to build on each other’s responses, listening and agreeing with added evidence for another viewpoint or disagreeing with conflicting evidence. Students new to this style of discussion will be tempted to “share” rather than converse. If your students need support, give them a pre-prepared list of sentence starters to help them learn to build on the previous response rather than merely read their own.
To give students more control, assign roles to students to help manage the discussion. These could include a facilitator who keeps the discussion on task and elicits contributors if there are no volunteers, a tracker who maintains a list of participants, a timer and a note taker. As an observer, you can take notes and interject if the discussion becomes unruly or needs to be redirected.
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