Scaffolded Reading Experience

Scaffolded Reading Experience—A Study in Shakespeare’s Hamlet—Kindle Edition!

Andrew Chilton

Introduction

Text: The text we will be reading is the famous soliloquy from Act III of Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet—we will be reading Act III, Scene I, lines 57-91. In total this is 34 lines of iambic pentameter text, consisting of 276 words, which have been rated on the Flesch Reading Ease scale at 72.0 (which should be easily understandable to an eleven year old), and a Flesch-Kincaide grade level of 8.6 (appropriate for students in the eighth grade)—To be quite honest, I find these statistics extremely misleading, but I wanted to include this data that I collected and will certainly “take it with a grain of salt” as I implement the study. This will be roughly the seventh or eighth day on Shakespeare, so students will be familiar with the style of language and hopefully will have “bought into” the joys of reading it (I’m an idealist, what can I say?). We will also be using the Kindle software on our laptops to view and manipulate this text; therefore, students will be able to highlight (vital to the overall lesson plan), collect notes, and quickly cross-reference words or ideas throughout the full body of the text (also crucial to the overall lesson plan).

Another “text” that students will be bringing to the discussion is their own narrative and the dialogue they have with each other. There will be prereading journaling that will ask them to bring the “text” of their life into the reading and therefore I must include it under the broad definition of “literacy”.

Setting and Students: For this lesson plan, I will be addressing the reading experience of twenty-four young students, ranging in age from seventeen to eighteen years with a multitude of cultural backgrounds as they struggle to interact with the inherent difficulties of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an English IV class at Surry Early College High School. The class demographics are fairly homogeneous, with 60% female, 40% male, roughly 85% Caucasian, 7% Latino, 5% Hmong, and 3% African American. The economic background of the students is a little less obvious, with a median family income in the town of the school of $29,000—so I would characterize this as moderately poor, and the geographical location of the school district is in a predominately rural, agriculturally-based (at least formally) economy. The school is an Early College High School that focuses on choosing students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and choosing students that will be “first-generation” college students for their family. With these factors in mind, the high school is on the campus of very successful community college, with a beautiful campus and state-of-the-art facilities, including my own classroom which was built just two years ago. There is abundant technology available in the classroom, including a SMART board, enough laptops (1 year old) for every child, access to flip cameras, iPod touches, and printers. Some of the intangibles about the school that are difficult to quantify are the positive environment that the administration has nurtured amongst the faculty and their level of education and training. Seventy-five percent of the faculty or staff have advanced degrees and we participate (or lead) in monthly trainings in pedagogy, technology, or skills. Because of the small size of the school (approx. 350 students), the principal is able to be a very visible leader in our classrooms and helps influence the culture at the school.

Theoretical Rationale: I have chosen this text because it is a “required” text of the NCSCOS for English IV. I have chosen to implement the study in the fashion that I did because of my inherent beliefs about literacy and the power of literature. I will be using electronic texts, collaborative groups, and embodied performance because I believe that these three “progressive” techniques are powerful tools towards creating meaningful learning. Literacy is an umbrella term that includes the myriad interactions that learners have with all forms of “texts”. Therefore, I believe that their own narrative (explicitly brought through journals/interviews, or implicitly brought through their SES and cultural background) is a text and I believe that I must help facilitate the construction of a powerful and meaningful social interaction with the given text.

Question Labels:

Throughout the lesson, students are engaged in questions in all levels of Bloom’s taxonomy (they will be labeled as they are asked in the lesson plans) with the bulk of the assignment revolving around Creating and Evaluating.

Lesson Plan Overview

I.               Review of graphic timeline of previous action and predictions discussion (5 mins.)

II.             Group viewing of different film version of the soliloquy and completion of short graphic organizer (10-15 mins)

III.           Handout of assignment prompt and two group readings of text—in round robin format (10 mins)

IV.           Complete highlighting, vocabulary-building, and notes part of assignment (20-30 mins)

V.             Highlighted, alternating reading “performance” of the text by group members 1 / 2 and then members 3 / 4  (10 mins)

VI.           Reflect on step V and create visual representations to assist in step VII performance (15-20 mins)

VII.         Group performances with post-discussion about how groups differed, what were their visual and acting strengths, how it relates to film versions, etc. (20-30 mins)

VIII.       Turn in vocabulary words and review homework journal prompt (5 mins)  

Learning Target: After this experience, students will be able to comprehend the divided nature of Hamlet’s mind, its relation to past events, and recreate in collaborative groups an embodied performance of this inner soliloquy.

Materials:

·      25 laptops

·      Kindle software

·      Free download of the text of Hamlet, found here.

·      Room arranged in collaborative (3-4 person) groups

·      Construction paper

·      Markers/Colored Pencils

·      Makeshift props (cardboard, anything lying around the room)

·      Links to various Hamlet performances via Youtube: Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, Ethan Hawke, David Tenant, or Mel Gibson.

Pre-Reading

Students are placed in six groups of four students each. Students will be asked to look over their collaborative group timeline that they have been working on. The group timeline is a long sheet of bulletin-board paper that is divided horizontally into four distinct sections: brief summary of action, visual representation of summary, analysis in your team’s own words, and a powerful quote that is meaningful to your team. As students look over this timeline, they will be reminded  of the past action and the facilitator will lead a short discussion about what they can infer will happen in today’s scene. I think it’s very important at this crossroads of the play for the instructor to not make value judgments about Hamlet’s “sanity” or condition and leave it wide open for interpretation from the students.

Each collaborative group will then view a different film version (as linked in the materials section) of this famous speech. Students will complete a very short graphic organizer (three part graph) with the following questions involved(in ascending Bloom’s order):

1.     What did you observe?

2.     In five different words, can you summarize the feeling/mood of the scene?

3.     How is this different/similar than what you expected and why?

I wavered between having this as a pre- or post-reading activity, but ultimately decided to let this stand as a pre-reading activity in order that it inspire their own interpretations instead of having the film clips as the capstone of the lesson, hence making them feel as though their interpretations are inferior. By keeping it as a pre-reading experience they can have it as a “dialogue partner” in their subsequent discussions about constructing the text for themselves and can also critique it in their post-reading performance assessment.

Reading

The question students are guided by during their reading is: What textual evidence can you find to justify Hamlet’s stance on continuing life or ending existence? Students will track, in reading through the text, highlight line by line, word by word the subtle changes in Hamlet’s attitude towards life and death. Their goal is in the end to understand his inner struggle and embody that division by a performative reading of the differing highlighted sections, aided by visual representations and theatrical skills. In their collaborative groups, students will read through the text using the Kindle software. They will be able to look up any unknown words simply by putting their cursor over it—which will help immensely with the estimated 30 words (out of 276, quite substantive) I predict they will be unfamiliar with. The assignment revolves around the teams highlighting the different sides of Hamlet’s inner fight (To be or not to be…); therefore the highlighting function of the Kindle will be very important for the students to have and they can add explanatory notes or questions alongside the highlights. The reading will be done in round robin format, switching readers at the end of every “hard stop” (period, question mark, exclamation mark).

Post-reading

After our first reading, students will revisit the text and begin work on dissecting the differing sides with different highlighters. Facilitator may model by demonstrating the technique as follows:

Green = Hamlet wants to be, to exist, to live

Yellow = Hamlet wants not to be, annihilation, to die

57   To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
60    Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

Hopefully this model will help assist the students as they work on highlighting and parsing out the text. Since there are no “right” answers to this exercise, the teacher will simply need to briskly monitor throughout the room and assist with questions. Remind students that we will discuss differences between highlighted interpretations during our class performance post-discussion. Also, remind students that a list of at least five new words and their definitions will be due at the end of the lesson.

After students have completed the highlighting, vocabulary look-up, and note-taking, team members 1 and 2 will read aloud the green highlights while team members 3 and 4 will read the green highlights while facing each other.

Students will then prepare visual representations of what they read on construction paper and collect makeshift props for their assessment performance. This does not have to be necessarily elaborate, for example, one student may mimic snapping their watch like a whip when Hamlet says “the whips and scorns of time” (line 71).

Assessment

To clarify our differing assignments and to make it truly meaningful, students will perform their readings with other groups. Before they can do that, the six groups of four will be combined into three groups. Once in a larger group students will compare highlights, discuss differences, and work to construct one unified text. After this has been accomplished the groups will practice performing their divided and highlighted text in different portions of the classroom. After a five minute practice, we will circle up and watch the different performances. The facilitator will lead a discussion (based on the identical questions of the youtube video graphic organizer) after each performance, hopefully going more in-depth after each one because of the deepening layers of conversation because of more performances to compare to.

As a homework assignment, students would journal on their personal reactions to the speech today. They would have three options for the journal:

Personal: Have you ever experienced something like this? Tell about how you dealt with the conflict and how your experience is similar or different to Hamlet’s response. How has this changed your view point of both Hamlet and yourself?(Bloom’s: Applying and Creating level questions)

Literary: How does this speech function in relation to the rest of the play? What significant themes or symbols do you see explored in this soliloquy? (Bloom’s: Analyzing level questions)

Philosophical: Evaluate the merits of Hamlet’s logical (or illogical) propositions. Is he right or wrong and why? In true Hamlet fashion, you could argue positively for both (haha)! (Bloom’s: Evaluating level questions)

Evaluation

For this lesson plan, I modified an existing one to reflect a more textually based and scaffolded approach. These are the new elements that I added to this lesson plan:

·      Graphic timeline for review purposes

·      Pre-reading youtube videos and graphic organizer

·      The use of Kindle software for highlighting and dictionary usage

·      Smaller group performances, instead of whole class being divided into two

·      Three-tier journal assignment for further post-reading evaluation

I believe the timeline will really help with putting this speech (as decontextualized as it already is) in context to the rest of the play. I hope that the youtube video will further contextualize the speech and assist with student’s comprehension of the text by seeing it embodied by a living actor, instead of simply being “viewed” through the spoken word of their classmates.

The most improved function of this may possibly be the use of the Kindle. Last time I ran this lesson, students were absolutely bogged down in the unfamiliar language—and I was frantically running from one group to the next answering language questions (instead of helping with evaluative ones). Groups took a lot of time looking up words in the dictionary and it really interrupted the “flow” of the speech and reinforced their disdain for Shakespeare. With the Kindle, students will simply move their cursor over the word, learn the definition, and move on.

Overall, I believe this lesson is well scaffolded. I am still concerned with the numerous transitions and directions that are necessary to accomplish the various tasks they are given. However, I would prefer this active, transitional style of teaching (almost to the point of “over-assign”) to the boredom tedium that is traditional modes of learning. I enjoyed re-thinking this lesson plan, adding valuable scaffolding to assist learners to the heights I call them to, and I look forward to your suggestions on how to improve it. Thank you very much.