I regularly wonder about the value of what I’m doing as a teacher. Of convening meetings with teenagers where said teenagers are required to take time to slow down and read books they otherwise would not. There is something deeply conservative about this social role that I am playing, especially at this moment in history, as more and more technologies promise to free up more and more time for us humans to do what we “really” want to be doing. One thing I know for sure: A good number of the teenagers I teach do not “really” want to be reading books, let alone books written by others long since dead.
So one strategy as a teacher is to “sell” the books students are reading in class. To connect them constantly to our own world through video, social media, and the way I talk about and approach the text we are reading. Pushing, for instance, as I did in a recent unit on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the potential resonances between the oppression at play in that novel and the oppression within our own community as a result of the ICE occupation where we live, in Minneapolis.
I don’t have any problem with these kinds of moves. And so long as I make them within a context where a critical mass of the young people discussing these connections have done the work of reading the text, there is the possibility of generative disagreement, even debate. Which is, for instance, why I was so delighted when a student responded to my question about Their Eyes Were Watching God’s relevance to the ICE occupation of our city with these words: “Mister, I think that’s a stretch.”
This student made this judgement based on evidence both from the text of Hurston’s novel (he referenced specifically the kind of “silencing” Janie was experiencing and Black folks more generally in the novel as a whole) and from the experience and data that we were seeing all around us with the ICE occupation (surveillance, intimidation, and violence) and judged that the situations were not similar enough to make a comparison between the two very valuable.
I should note that this student made this distinction in a class meeting where he was in his own home, attending class online because of that very occupation. He first typed his thinking into a chatbox, then “turned on his camera” (as many of his classmates were reticent to do), and finally spoke his truth. It sparked some good conversation. But the conversation happened slowly, and even more slowly because of delays caused by the fact that more than half of the 25 students were, like this student, online, and the other half gathered in a semi-circle around my lap-top and our Smartboard at the front of the classroom. Nevertheless, I was encouraged by the discussion in those trying times, and encouraged even moreso by how much students were referencing the text we were reading.
After this discussion, we popcorned our way through an out loud class reading of chapter eight of the novel, Janie’s truth-telling confrontation with Joe Starks on his deathbed, with some students reading from home, their voices projected through our Smartboard system, others sidling up close to my laptop to read aloud from the classroom semicircle. A weird class, a weird time—one I won’t soon forget.
In many ways this experience was a good preparation for our next unit, which I’m in the midst of right now: Shakespeare’s Macbeth. For the first time in my career, I’ve been intentionally using “The Folger Method,” a way of instruction I’ve heard touted enough times by enough English teachers I trust that I figured I’d give it a go myself. Part of my rationale for going for it: I don’t know if I’ve ever felt, at the end of a Shakespeare unit, that I’d done justice to the Bard; why not, I wondered, try something new?
“Shakespeare’s language is not a barrier but a portal.”—Corrinne Viglietta and Peggy O’Brien, The Folger Guide to Teaching Macbeth
The subtitle of the essay which I just quoted from above is as provocative as it is grand and sweeping: “The Folger Method: You Will Never Teach Literature the Same Way Again.” (Never? Woah. That’s bold.) But I have to admit that after a month of trying to embody this principle day after day in the classroom—Shakespeare’s language is not a barrier but a portal—the effects have been very positive. None of the nine “essential practices” proposed by Viglietta and O’Brien are brand new to me (or probably to you, reader, if you’ve got classroom experience as a teacher) but taken together and practiced consistently, they have made me feel more connected to what we are reading (in this case, Macbeth), made me feel more connected to the students I’m teaching, and, perhaps most importantly, made me more aware of how the students are understanding and connecting with the text. Four of the “practices” Viglietta and O’Brien sketched were especially helpful and I’ll offer a brief word on each of them below.
1. 20-Minute Play
This is the practice of performing what the authors call an “express tour” of Macbeth on Day 1 of the unit. As directed by the guide, I scissored up 25 key lines culled from the different parts of the play into little strips (“Out, damned spot!” “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…” etc.). Then students drew those lines at random and practice reading them with different tone and intonation. And THEN, we all stood up in a circle as I dramatically read the “express tour” plot of the play, and every few sentences or so, cued up one of the students to “come to the middle” and read, with feeling, their banger Shakespeare line. It was a great way for everyone in the class to “know the story” in an embodied way. And also made clear that ALL of us in the class would be embodying this story throughout the unit with our words and action. I’d definitely do it again, no matter the Shakespeare play we’re studying.
2. Choral Reading
I hadn’t thought before about, especially for shy or not super confident readers, how freeing it could be to be saying Shakespearean language out loud simultaneously with other people. We started this practice, as the guide suggests, with those famous opening lines from the 3 witches, and kept up with it in other places as well, paying attention to tone and stress as we did so. It was a great way in to reading the text (and frankly, to increasing volume in some of those more timid students.)
3. Cutting a Scene
This was probably my favorite of the nine practices. As O’Brien and Viglietta note, cutting Shakespeare’s text is what directors have always done to make his work come alive—it’s just part of the work of good theater. What was illuminating to me as a teacher was how the sequence of making progressively bigger and bigger cuts of scenes the guide proposed (from 60 to 30 to 8 lines, for instance) forced students to think about how they wanted to interpret the scenes they were presenting to their classmates. Because, the guide (and I) required them, on a number of occasions throughout this unit to then perform their “cut scenes” for the whole class.
4. Group Scenes
Again, there isn’t anything revolutionary about this practice. Readers of this post surely have their own memories of performing some scene of Shakespeare’s for an English class. (And I’ve definitely given a version of the “group scene” assignment myself.) But having this assignment come as a culmination of practice where students have to “cut,” close read, interpret, and present throughout the unit (and not just in the final project) makes this group scene—which I acknowledge students are in the midst of completing right now as of the writing of this post—much more meaningful. Students “drafted” their scenes from the “menu of options” last week; I can’t wait to see what they’ll be creating and filming this week in class.
My own extra-class additions to the unit (through homework assignments) were primarily to reinforce the work this method of instruction does around tone and stress—and how tone and stress reveal varying interpretations of key scenes in the play. So I assigned students for homework to close read a short section of Macbeth and then look up at least two YouTube clips with actors performing the same lines that they close-read. They were required to take notes on what they observed in the video clips and then needed to record their own 30-second to a minute dramatic video performance of these lines, with an explanation of why they performed the lines the way they did.
As so much of the Folger method work does, my idea with this assignment was to help free students from the assumption of one “authoritative” way of performing Shakespeare, or from thinking that the film version we’d been watching together in class, the Coen Brothers’ 2021 Tragedy of Macbeth, was the “only” way to play the scenes. In addition, it provided regular, non-public opportunities for them to practice “going for it” themselves with real choices in tone and stress, imitating actors playing with the text, and trying some of those moves themselves. These assignments were a delight to read and watch: honest, creative and playful inquiries. I would definitely do them again as a way to add to the class experience, and to provide some accountability to students to get into the text themselves outside of class.
A final note: Macbeth just finished a run this past March at our local world-class theater in Minneapolis, the Guthrie. I would have loved to have taken both sections I taught to the show but I’d already exhausted my departmental allotment taking them to see a terrific contemporary play in the fall, Primary Trust, by Eboni Booth. But the Guthrie did give me a generous discount for a small group to see Macbeth at an evening performance. And even more exciting, the actress playing Lady Macbeth, Meghan Kreidler, also a local rock and roll musician, was kind enough to come into the class to talk with the students about her experience. The timing of the visit was fortuitous, too: students had just finished reading and watching the play, had “drafted” the scene they’d be working on as small groups. A conversation with Meghan about their work—more on that momentarily—was a gift to them as they worked on bringing those scenes to life.
I titled this essay “I Don’t Teach Like a Champion,” a deliberate dig at a very influential book by Doug Lemov, originally published in 2010. The influence of this text and the techniques Lemov observes and promotes have been most keenly felt at urban high schools like the one where I teach. I want to be clear in this writing: Many of these techniques are very helpful—“backward planned instruction,” “wait time,” “positive framing,” “no opt outs.” It is valuable to “begin with the end in mind” in planning lessons and units. It is vitally important to make the classroom a warm and positive space for students—and I completely agree with Lemov that warmth does not preclude “strictness” and clear boundaries. How beautiful to have in our repertoire as teachers that simple two-word phrase, “wait time” as a common language to pause impatient teachers (we’ve all been there, haven’t we?) champing at the bit to move on with the lesson, before students have actually understood what we’re saying. These moves are incredibly useful. I myself have used these techniques (and any others in the book) and will continue to use them in the future. They’ve been part of my formation as an educator and have helped me survive and grow in the profession. So thank you, Doug Lemov, for your work in popularizing these helpful techniques. And thank you to the administrators and teachers who worked to make these techniques come alive through their example.
But—and there’s a big but—as in all things, context matters. As mentioned earlier, Lemov’s book of techniques was published in the midst of a heyday of technique-centered cultural revolution, one occurring not only in American education, but in America more broadly. And if we take seriously the criticism of folks like Jacques Ellul, author of The Technological Society, published in 1954, maybe that heyday started much, much earlier. To adapt Neil Postman’s phrase from, I think, The End of Education, published in 1995, techne, is more than a tool; it’s a god we sacrifice to, and is right up there at the top of our American Mount Olympus, probably sitting right next to its good pal, Efficiency.
To be clear: I have no problem with good technique, for teaching or chopping onions or strumming a guitar. But when these techniques crowd out—as they have in education—substantive conversations about the ends or purposes (Postman again) of what we are doing as educators in our school communities or our classrooms, then I do object.
Teach Like a Champion, first published in 2010, is now in its third edition. It’s not just a “teacher’s bag of tricks.” (If it was ever that, and if administrators and officials looked at it that way, I’d be less critical of it.) No, at this point, the book is not really a book at all, but a brand. A way of justifying a particular vision of education—especially targeted at reaching ‘underserved youth’—that emphasizes individual teacher moves and techniques (the number of these has gone up from 49 to 62) at the expense of bigger conversations around systemic issues plaguing those schools and communities. Conversations, incidentally, that neither the teachers or students, have much voice in addressing. We, collectively, are the labor that powers the schools, but we do not have a seat at the table in arranging the conditions of our own labor. You might object with something along the lines of, “But Doug Lemov isn’t writing that kind of book!” To which I’d reply, “Exactly.”
I’m tempted to climb the to another level of my soapbox (are there other levels to this thing, Zach?) and write about what teacher and student agency and voice might look like in terms of crafting, as others have spoken about in a higher ed context, a “student data bill of rights,” or at the very least, coherent policies around AI use that incorporates multiple points of view on the technology. But I risk losing my own thread. After all, we were talking about Macbeth. The connection, though, isn’t, to use my student’s phrasing, that much of a stretch. Not only does the total embrace, and now re-embrace of technique-centered resources like Teach Like a Champion obscure systemic issues everyone must face, it also diverts energy and focus from discipline-specific study and preparation for educators.
Part of Teach Like a Champion’s allure for administrators is that it is a one-size-fits-all resource: perfect for all-faculty professional development. Surely there was (and perhaps still is) some benefit for an early career teacher to get training in these tools in the early days and years of work in the classroom. But what about those who have “survived” that time, and are looking to grow and deepen as educators in a particular content area? (Say English literature?) The “one size fits all” nature of the resource starts to feel like an essential piece of the Champion brand, especially in the urban school setting: Because so many teachers here either burn out or move into administrative roles, there is an ever-present pool of early-career teachers to learn how to be the “champion” Lemov encourages them to be. But for teachers like me, who have stayed in the classroom, and who don’t want to burn out or become an admin, that word “champion” starts to feel less and less like the right word for what we are trying to do. “Professional” is more than adequate. (Less catchy, though. Teach Like a Professional just doesn’t have the same giddyup.) Instead of watching a carefully curated video clip of a champion teacher demonstrating “cold call,” or “no opt out,” I’d really like to use what little PD time I have available to me to learn from folks in my discipline, who could care less about educational branding but who are thinking deeply about teaching literature to young people. Hence, my interest in this post in Folger’s Shakespeare resources.
There are those who might object to my opposing a discipline-specific resource like Folger’s with a one-size-fits-all resource like Teach Like a Champion. “Isn’t that apples to oranges?” And, “Can’t we just have both, Zach?” To the first question: yes, but we never seem to have time to communally eat the “oranges” (oranges would be the discipline-specific resources in my version of the metaphor.) To the second, I say simply: there’s limited time in the day. My two cents is that when administrators gather the entire faculty (or student body) together, rather than throwing one-size-fits-all tools at them, they offer opportunities for input and voice on pressing systemic issues affecting the school, and offer a democratic way forward that honors the consensus view of your school community, parents, students and faculty alike. That’s messy work, especially in our times, but immensely valuable, and gets at the question of vision, in a positive way. (Vision is an important and neglected ‘god’ in our educational Olympus. It is up there, though!) See Teacher-Powered Schools and their network for examples of what this democratic model of education looks like.
To repeat in a different paragraph what I wrote earlier: Rather than being lionized as champions, many teachers simply want to be treated like professionals. One basic aspect of this professional treatment is having the time and resources to confer with your colleagues in the larger scholarly community within your discipline. To the administrators who prioritize this kind of professional development, I salute you. This kind of attitude keeps many a mid-career educator (like me, for instance) in the game.
For instance, one of the striking things about the Folger Guide to Macbeth is that it was created by a collection of both secondary teachers and university professors who have long experience teaching Shakespeare’s work. Their essays appear, as they should, alongside each other. And the unit plan, which I’ve referenced above, is not in any way “dumbed down” for the high school level, and in my opinion could be adapted for middle school, or college use.
I mentioned earlier in this essay that as part of this unit, I invited in to our classroom Meghan Kreidler, who played Lady Macbeth in the Minneapolis-based Guthrie Theater’s recent production of the play. As Meghan’s visit is fresh in my mind—she just came in to our class last week, and I wrote up the notes from the visit the next day—I thought I would conclude this essay with some reflections on the gift of that visit, and how I see that conversation in relationship to the technique/vision themes I’ve been riffing on here.
Meghan Kreidler was, to put it simply, a delight to be in conversation with. As a way of introduction, students introduced themselves to her with a favorite song or musical artist. (I thought that would be a fun way to start, since in addition to being an actress, Meghan is also the lead singer for the band Kiss the Tiger, based out of the Twin Cities.) After these introductions and after Meghan shared her own story of coming to theater, performance, and Shakespeare (which included extensive high school experience on the stage at Eagan High School and a classic-focused theater BFA at the University of Minnesota), students jumped in with questions: “What music are you listening to right now?” “How do you balance playing a particular role and keeping your own authentic voice as a person?” “What was your favorite part of playing Lady Macbeth?” “What was the hardest part of playing Lady Macbeth?”
I was deeply impressed by the way Meghan took her time in responding to these excellent questions, especially to the Macbeth-specific questions. Her way of proceeding opened the door for all of us in the room to a deeper interpretation of the play, and the way she spoke of her work on the production with others at the Guthrie invited the students to think in a like manner about the scenes they had chosen, and were preparing to rehearse and then film. It was beautiful and moving for me to witness the back and forth between Meghan and the students.
To a question a student asked about how she prepared for the role of Lady Macbeth, Meghan responded that the way she prepared was to immerse herself in scholarship and criticism written about Macbeth so as to better understand not only the many nuances of her character but also how that character fit into the play as a whole. With regard to the “hardest scene to prepare for” question mentioned above, Meghan noted that, for whatever reason, the scene before the banquet, after they have killed Duncan, when she wants Macbeth (and her) to be able to “enjoy the fruits of their labor” (murder) was very difficult to get into and understand at first. But as she worked to see this scene more and more through the lens of love for her spouse in the scene, she was able to find a good angle of entry. Along these lines—the “love” lines, I mean—Meghan mentioned in the conversation with us that in the opinion of one scholar (I think she was referencing Harold Bloom) Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have the “happiest marriage” of any of the couples in Shakespeare’s many plays!
I’d shared with Meghan before her visit what I’ve shared in this post, that students would be cutting, preparing, and then ultimately filming their own scenes from Macbeth. Would she be willing to observe some early-stages reading and rehearsal on this assignment-in-process? Maybe offer some notes? She was delighted to.
One of the groups performed the opening part of that crucial early scene in Act 1 where Banquo and Macbeth first encounter the weird sisters and hear the prophecies of the future. I invited the students to run the opening lines for Meghan and our class and then share what they saw as the “heart” of the scene from their character’s point of view. Then Meghan jumped in with her thinking and response. For instance, Meghan was able to share with this group who had yet to “cut” their scene that in the fast-paced version the Guthrie had just finished producing, the director had actually chosen to cut the majority of the lines students had just finished reading aloud from the three weird sisters.
In addition, Meghan noted that one way the actors playing the weird sisters got into their respective roles was to identify different core motivations for action (one saw their role as purely a conduit of a message, another as an instrument of chaos and evil.) And the student-actor playing Macbeth was very interested to learn about Meghan’s translation of the prophecies of the weird sisters, regarding Macbeth’s elevation to the Throne of Cawdor: “It’s like they’re telling Macbeth he’s going from soldier to Vice President.” And she further noted that one of the things that informed her preparation for the Lady Macbeth role was a discussion with cast members about to what degree Lady Macbeth had already discussed this elevation in status and role with her husband. So that their decision to murder Duncan could seen as the fruition, the execution of prior conversations and plans.
I hope these notes I’ve offered above capture the excitement I had in those conversations—yes, reader, it is a very nerdy deep dive, I realize that—as well as the excitement I have for students as they continue to dive back into the text of the play (“reading is re-reading” I’m often saying to them) to create their own filmic interpretations of these scenes. I’m profoundly grateful to Meghan, a working artist generous enough to share her own processes with students, so they can see their own schoolwork in relationship to the real work of theater-makers.
As I’ve been reading and revising this essay for posting, I’ve also been reading and listening to scholar Alexander Manshel, who has written extensively on the subject of “high school English” in a recently published article, and has a full-length treatment on the subject coming out soon. “The high school English classroom is the most influential literary institution in the United States, and the most overlooked by literary scholars,” Manshel begins. And he moves on to argue for more robust conversation and collaboration between and among high school English teachers and their English professor colleagues who teach in universities. Another thrust of Manshel’s argument is his insistence on understanding the history of high school English. Interestingly enough, one of the key dates he notes on his timeline of the modern era is 2010, which in addition to being the year Teach Like a Champion was published, is also the same year when the Common Core Standards began to be implemented in states across the country.
It should come as no surprise that a book like Teach Like a Champion, one laser-focused on de-contextualized and non-discipline specific “teacher moves and skills” became immensely popular (more than a million copies sold) at the same time that the now chopped-up and discretely identified skills or standards of the Common Core were being disseminated into schools. And for those of us who teach Advanced Placement (AP) courses, it is also no surprise that the skill-emphasis baked into the Common Core has now been embedded into the curricula of these courses as well. David Coleman, formerly chief architect of the Common Core, took over as CEO of College Board and has worked in that capacity since 2012.
Coleman’s tenure/reign encompasses the 10+ years I’ve taught AP English courses. During that time, I have attended numerous AP institutes and workshops that have been led by and attended by countless brilliant and passionate high school English teachers. In that decade-plus of attendance and engagement with peers, though, I have always been struck by how much of the conversation at these institutes and workshops is dominated by the test that students take at the end of the year. The overriding question of these gatherings, in my experience, is not the question of what literature we teach and how we teach it, but rather “how to help students earn the best possible score” on the end of year exam. (To me, this is profoundly dispiriting.)
In addition, and to the larger point that Manshel makes in his article, at no time in these conventions of hundreds of deeply gifted high school English teachers has there been space and time made to meet with professors of English at neighboring colleges and universities. Which is strange, if you think about it, because part of the College Board’s argument for AP is that students, by taking AP courses, will have the equivalent of a “college experience” in that subject or discipline.
As the reader of this Substack knows, I could rail (and even rage) on this topic for days, and in a very unhelpful manner. In lieu of that (nobody needs it, least of all me), I’d simply recommend Annie Abrams’ brilliant and incisive book on this topic, Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students, which among other things, analyzes the history of the AP, as well as the ways its current iteration has moved drastically away from what its humanities-focused founders originally intended.
And notably for the purposes of this essay, Abrams notes that those founders included a coalition of professors and high school humanities teachers. To bring things back home to Shakespeare, it’s worth noting something striking about the Folger Guide to Macbeth that I’ve been using to guide my work with students the past month: among its twelve contributing writers and editors, six are high school teachers. So the make-up of the authors is both high school teachers or professors and scholars who specialize in Shakespeare and his works. Pretty danged cool.
Yes, Folger, like the AP, is a “brand.” Unlike the AP, though, the Folger’s conventions and workshops are unapologetically discipline- and author-specific, running the range from middle school to college context. In our current educational moment, where public schools are being gutted and discipline-specific alternatives (see the “Classical Schools” movement) are often exclusively coming from the political right wing of our country, I want to celebrate work like this, which doesn’t necessitate the destruction of a public or cooperative vision of education for it to move forward (as the “Classical Schools” movement often does, either implicitly or explicitly). This kind of work is encouraging, even inspiring, to me.
As I’ve shared elsewhere on this platform, one of the key motivators for starting our publishing company, One Subject Press, and the “Teacher/Writer” series within that company, is to give space and esteem to the voices of teachers doing the beautiful and life-giving work that comprises their vocation and profession. Writing a book, entering a larger conversation—that is one way. But there are many others. If this rambler of an essay provoked you to consider ways you might do likewise, reader, then I’m doing my job.
NOTES & CONNECTIONS:
-If you were intrigued by the Alexander Manshel article, I highly recommend Trevor Aleo’s podcast interview with him on Conceptually Speaking. It’s a great conversation, and a great podcast.
-This essay obviously gets pretty ‘punchy’ in spots, and especially as teachers look to productively work with and not against administrators in their buildings, I think it’s important to avoid binary thinking that oversimplifies matters. With that in mind, I highly recommend recent conversation on Marcus Luther’s podcast, Broken Copier, with wise long-time administrator, Ruth Poulsen, on the question “What if we tended the soil of our schools?”
-Huge shout-out to actor and musician Meghan Kreidler for taking the time to talk with the classes I teach! One of the students asked her what was her favorite song that she’d written and performed with her band, Kiss the Tiger? Meghan named “Out of My Mind.” It’s a beauty.
Thank you for the shout out to the podcast! From an admin perspective, you’ve given a great example of my point in that conversation that sometimes our complicated systems (PD time and budget in this case) can blind leaders to the actual complexity of what we’re trying to achieve (teacher professional growth). So we gravitate towards “one size fits all” PD because that’s what’s encouraged by the system, not because that’s what’s best for the purpose— leaving experienced teachers feeling frustrated and even disrespected.
I also really resonate with your point that teachers want to be respected as professionals, not lauded as champions. I rail against the heroics mindset on a regular basis in my substack.
Loved your deep dive into Macbeth—brought back good memories of teaching that play.
Thank you for this thoughtful and reasoned critique.