Gallagher, K. (n.d.). Article of the Week. Retrieved December 2, 2015, from

http://www.kellygallagher.org/article-of-the-week/

Styslinger, M. (n.d.). Workshopping The Canon.

Workshopping The Crucible

For my unit and resource collection I have chosen to work with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. This workshop unit is designed for Honors English III classes, but can be modified to fit others. First and foremost, as I explain how I would choose to workshop The Crucible, it’s important to realize the motives behind my teachings and why I’m choosing a workshop structure. “In a workshop, students take responsibility for making sense of texts. Teachers support the processes of individual readers and are concerned with how readers make meaning from their experiences with text” (Systlinger 7). I believe meaning making of text to be crucial. A successful (workshop) classroom should be a learner-centric environment where direct instruction is only a supplemental tools to enable the students’ drive.

Like each day of class, let’s go ahead and knock out (how we’re going to teach) grammar. For the first 3-10 minutes of each class each day, students will work on a mentor sentence from which they will learn from a sentence from either their class texts or a popular, real-world example. On Monday students will analyze the author’s craft in order to determine what makes this week’s sentence unique. On the following days students will rearrange, add, and subtract from the sentence, focusing on the specific grammar tool or idea. This gives students a chance to play and work with language in context instead of just having to memorize and cold apply learned rules to their writing without having worked with them before; it builds confidence and scaffolds understanding of different language conventions (whether it be colon usage, point of view, etc.).

Before getting to the actual reading of any texts, I would conduct of discussion where the class would visually write and record anything they (think they) know about Salem, the Witch Trials, or the surrounding events or culture. As with everything, having this projected or displayed is important. This process can be slightly modified depending on classroom personalities, though I find a tame Question & Answer forum works well enough to determine the class’s background knowledge about the subject. Whatever modified KWL chart you choose to adapt can be saved and referenced later, either (virtually) by you, or the students. Every activity should build upon the previous one, so activating any background knowledge before introducing new material is important for receiving the most critical responses.

This would be a great time to break out The Ol’ Youtube and show some of the hundred of book reviews for the next portion of the workshop: Bookclubs! The titles I recommend having available are any of the following: Conversion, The Physick book of Deliverance Dane, The Loud Silence of Francine Greene, The Fever, The Heretic’s Daughter, Beyond the Burning Time by Kathryn Lasky, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, or Witches' Children. Showing video reviews before giving complete choice will help spur motivation for reading, which is important as these texts will be read outside of class. Seeing as how valuable it is that students have the best book club experience, it’s important to spend adequate time on the choice and start of the book club process (this more than likely resembles an entire class period).

So ideally, the students should choose their books and be assigned to their respective clubs within the span of a class period or two (as this will more than likely require explanations and video modeling of what a successful book club look like). As the teacher, you may have to make some executive choices regarding struggling readers or volatile personalities. The schedule for book clubs can be flexible, but I would shoot to have the students meet in-between Acts of The Crucible (this can be sped up or extended depending on the flow of the unit. SSR time is a non-negotiable time for CP classes and majority struggling reading classes in my opinion. If you implement this with a class other than Honors students, I would recommend time in-class to spend on their book club novels.

Starting anything is the hardest part. So I plan to make it as easy for the students and teacher as it can be--with picture books! Jane Yolden and Heidi Stemple’s The Salem Witch Trials: An Unsolved Mystery from History is an easy 32 page read that I would recommend for this. Other acceptable titles for this portion I recommend are Alice Ray and the Salem Witch Trials, and Witches!: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem. The picture book portion can take 1-3 class periods depending on time and variables. The most important thing about the picture-book lessons should be the fact that they are read aloud, this is done to model proficient reading for you students (They may want to read along and assist you, but assure them they will have plenty of time for other reading). The read-aloud process can be done a variety a ways. I have personally done it to success with the aid of a document camera being projected on a SmartBoard. In addition to this, there will be a book pass preceding the videos, and students will get a chance to handle and peruse the choices.

While the verbal aspect of this lesson is crucial, allowing students to respond is just as important. In order to motivate participation and help students pay attention, a handout chart with Reader Response questions should be given to the students. This can be graded for completion. I would recommend having multiple places for response to the story as it progresses both in standard writing and perhaps with images. As you read the story aloud, make sure that you follow standard read-aloud procedure and stop at appropriate time for students to collect their thoughts and record them.

Now that one of the fun frontloading lessons is done, you can jump right into The Crucible. The majority of classroom time for this unit will be spent reading and performing reading.There are four acts to the play, and each act will look much differently within the class. For the first act, I think it’s important to perform a read-aloud, much like that of the picture book. This will be done by the teacher with enthusiasm. Depending on class time, this may take multiple days.

In order to keep students from complete boredom, and to help with holding their attention, roughly every other day should include a small portion of class time for students to work on their Article of the Week. Article of the Week is an idea from Kelly Gallagher that is assigned every Monday and collected every Friday; it is ideally the only homework I would like to assign. Article of the Week recognizes that “part of the reason his students struggle with reading is because they lack prior knowledge and background. They can decode the words, but the words remain meaningless without a foundation of knowledge” (Gallagher). This assignment allows students to learn about current events in the world outside of the content area and allows students to get weekly practice writing something more than one paragraph in length. For students to learn writing, they must write. This is the major way that informational texts will be introduced and integrated. Additionally, the informational articles and essays on the related resource list is a great way to make this assignment even more relevant.

For the second act of The Crucible, readers in the class will be assigned roles for the different characters in the play and we will read it aloud as a class. Students will have their texts in advance and be recommended to look over their parts. This is not expected to go spectacularly, or be a broadway status reading, but it will scaffold some reading aloud in front of classmates and help progress through the plot.

As students continue through The Crucible, I’m a fan of short, formative, reading assessments like reading quizzes, but unlike traditional reading quizzes. Quizzes like, “Tell me 5 Important things from the reading” are the types of assessment that help and highlight reading for meaning. Regardless of your assessment-giving philosophies, you should be consistent. The Article of the Week and Mentor Sentence add to this stability. Having a predictable schedule in your unit and classroom are important community aspects, and will make student’s products stronger.

I can’t tell you exactly where to fit certain mini-lessons, perhaps as the connected issues arise from the story, or maybe you would prefer to use all of them as frontloading tools, but they need to go somewhere. Explaining and working through different ideas of  “what is a text” and alternative mediums are very beneficial to student’s ability to understand the meaning and necessary information of the core text. Additionally, to be able to apply and identify these themes outside of the classroom. Some songs that I recommend are We Didn’t Start the Fire, The Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues. Poetry is just as important as the canonical text or the songs. Poetry mini lessons should be dispersed throughout the unit as well. Perhaps this means simply reading a poem to them in between assignments with a quick discussion. This can also mean taking a day to assign and analyze “Half-Hanged Mary”. The resource list mentions a few poems

Now that it’s been at least a week or so, you’ve been building grammar skills using sentences from The Crucible occasionally, interweaving informational texts with the Article of the week, and performing proficient reading while giving students a platform to practice and build their reading confidence, it’s time to fast forward. Act 3 will be done in official Reader’s Theatre style. The students can have 4 minutes to choose their own groups so long as no single person in the class in unaccounted for. Each group will be assigned a certain number of pages and will have the rest of the class to practice and determine who is who. A list of rules regarding what Reader’s Theatre is and is not should be discussed. It should be noted that the group performances should be vocal performances and that what was done for Act 2 is in no way Reader’s Theatre, nor (more than likely) acceptable enough enthusiasm or delivery effort.

For the final Act, I like to have the same groups (given nothing went awry) be assigned to create short videos (at least 2 minutes) of a set of scenes from Act 4--the twist is that they have to put a creative modern spin on it. The dialogue doesn’t have to match the source text, but it must be able to be understood by the teacher and classmates. They are given in-class time to read Act 4; they may choose how they split up the reading within their group in order to have understanding. The 4th Act assignment will require each group to storyboard their shots and assign (more than likely multiple) roles to each group member with an explanation for why.

Before the traditional summative test you may choose to have, the option to watch the film Easy A is recommended. A film guide would make the most sense, but you could add an option to write about the the very original movie vs. the play argument if you were to give a multi-genre option instead of a test.