Teaching Strategies
This unit will focus on student centered, active learning that will encourage each child to be investigative and think critically about the changing world he or she lives in through the lens of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and this objective will be attained by providing numerous and varied strategies, to be implemented throughout the nine week time frame.
Reading Journals: Daily Reflective Writing
Reflective writing will provide students an outlet to release their thoughts on the information presented, assigned readings, and classroom discourse as it occurs without rigid guideline or prompt. Especially since this content is in many aspects controversial, there will be rich opportunities for students to make sense of it on their own first while also making tangible connections to their own lives. The only restrictions will involve length of writing and the requirement that the given prompt is followed. These writings will be housed in their classroom journals. The routine for this exercise is already established from previous units. This preliminary writing may be a rich source for them when they transition to writing their formal reflective academic essay at the end of the unit.
Literature Circles
Given the challenging task of covering a text in its entirety, strategies for classroom discussion must be varied and time conscious so that students are efficiently moving ahead while creating an environment that is not reliant on teacher-centered instruction. Therefore, literature circles will be used to do thematic close studies in which student groups will all be covering an overarching theme but will have separate passages to analyze. As in most classroom reading circles, each part will join back with the whole and synthesize their group’s findings and discussion points, with one person appointed to report to the class. Literature or reading circles give students an opportunity to dialogue with their peers and refine their ideas before sharing to a larger party. Further, since the entire effort (aside from the actual reading, which will likely be as a homework assignment) is carried out collectively, there is less risk felt that one may be wrong.
Investigative Study
Throughout this unit, a heavy emphasis is placed on critically looking at their own lives in relation to The Merchant of Venice, so students will be required on many occasions to perform real world application based tasks that will allow them to work with content such as credit card interest rates, current legal strategies that result in unjust justice, and the effects of cyber-bullying and name calling. If the content in a unit such as this isn’t consistently being utilized in the context of the student’s own life, then it is not proving effective. The goal is that students find ‘take-home’ information in each lesson over the course of the unit’s nine weeks.
Socratic Seminar
Using Socratic seminar as a strategy in this unit will allow for a space to discuss the essential questions raised by the text and unit, organized as a discussion that is student led. Students will share, refute, and redefine their ideas of identity, stereotypes, prejudice, systematic oppression, revenge, mercy, and justice. Since Socratic seminars are clearly defined in their perimeters, the students will know that they should prepare for the discussion ahead of time and have salient opinions with sound evidence to support them ready. As with all Socratic seminars, participation is key!
Dramatic and Visual Comparative Analysis
There are numerous visual representations of The Merchant of Venice that can provide a rich resource for comparison in character study, theme, and other literary elements. Take, for example, the characterization of Shylock. If, as a class, we take several film and stage adaptations as well as illustrations of just Shylock and study them individually and collectively, we can examine what character features are being pushed to the forefront and how that affects our perception of the scenes as a whole. We can investigate questions like: Is Shylock being portrayed more as a cruel villain or as a sympathetic outsider? Additionally beneficial for continual buy-in and basic comprehension of plot, clips of selected readings help to catch students up and provide clarification as needed. Lastly, there are several strategies whereby film proves to be a fantastic medium for teaching students to watch clips with no sound and discuss perceived tone and point of view. The reality is that today’s student is a fast-fact consumer who is often highly adept at visual learning, so the use of film as a comparative tool is extraordinarily productive.
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