Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
EDSE 786
11-06-17
According to Dr. Styslingers work, the first step to workshopping the cannon is to push
the focus from product to understanding. As a teacher, focus must move away from having
students create, though that is important, and toward making sure students understand the
reading. The focus of an English classroom should be that of fostering a life-long love of, or at
least ability to read. As it stands now, many English teachers attempt to do this, but fall short and
merely teach students that their connection to the text does not matter; all that matters is what the
I am working on a text set for The Crucible. After determining that I want my students to
focus on reading and skills they can gain from the novels we read, the next step is that of finding
a unit focus. My focus is going to be on how to deal with intolerance and discrimination. Those
issues are huge in the world right now, especially in high school to young adults. For them, their
whole world centers on their peers, and if they are being discriminated against, learning how to
deal with that issue will be an important skill for them to possess.
I will begin workshopping The Crucible by introducing the subject. Before we even start
talking about the book, I want to introduce the idea of intolerance and discrimination. I will let
students choose one of the articles I have found that show some form of discrimination in the
world today, and I will then ask them to relate it to their lives. I will tell students that the same
pressures that they are feeling are not new, and read Let Them Play by Margot Theis Raven to
them, which I discovered through Workshopping the Cannon by M. Styslinger. My students
pressures matter, but there are times when discrimination has led to the punishment of innocent
children, or even death. This method of introducing The Crucible would likely pique their
interest, and hopefully get them to join me in reading it. Before jumping into reading the play, I
will have students do a web quest to find background information on the Salem Witch Trials.
Once students have some background knowledge, I will read act one, scene one of The Crucible
with them as a class, then we will discuss any confusions they may have. I will also ask students
to be taking note of any discussion questions they think they could ask, and let them know that
After reading the first scene of the play, I will tell them that we are going to do book
clubs. I will have prepared them beforehand to book clubs with proper scaffolding. We will have
at least three days where that is the main focus of our lessons, and I would start the clubs as the
last unit in the second quarter. I will host a book talk for each of the novels that are available to
be read for book clubs. I would have each student write their top four choices of novels, and
assign them accordingly. Students will meet with their clubs on Mondays and Thursdays, and at
the first meeting, they will create a reading calendar to hold themselves accountable. Every other
day that we meet other than those days, I will read a scene of the play and we will discuss the
The book club books that they can read are Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose, If You
Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, Homeless Bird by Gloria
Whelan, The Raging Quiet by Sherryl Jordan, and Dear Martin by Nic Stone. I chose the first
one because it is a play, the same format as The Crucible. If You Could Be Mine is a novel that
focuses on the lesbian relationship between two Iranian girls. The Hate U Give is a novel that
looks at the relationship of a black girl to her home- both the people and the community.
Homeless Bird is about an Indian girl who is married off at a young age, but almost immediately
becomes a widow who is hated by her deceased husbands family, but still forced to live with
them. The Raging Quiet is also about a girl who is married off and quickly widowed, but she
lives in a coastal village and is accused of witchcraft because she learns to communicate with a
deaf boy. Dear Martin is told from the perspective of a black boy who is on the path to an Ivy
League college when he and a friend are pulled over by an off-duty cop and get into an argument
that ends in gun shots. Each of these works deal with some form of intolerance or discrimination,
and they are all told from very different perspectives. I would definitely use a permission slip
with Homeless Bird and The Raging Quiet, and I would need to do some more research on the
rest of them before knowing if I would need one for them. The works vary in length and
complexity, and I feel that anyone in need of reading instruction would still have a choice, as
Students who need help with their reading comprehension will have an entire group of
readers who will be reading the same novel as them and can help them. I will be reading The
Crucible aloud, and checking for comprehension along the way with chapter questions that they
will be expected to answer either as I am reading, or at home for homework after I have read.
For act one, scene two, I will introduce my students to theoretical lenses. I know that
sometimes teachers assume that critical theory is too advanced for all but AP, IB and upper class
honors level students; I feel that, with proper scaffolding, all students are capable of handling it. I
want my students to have faith in their abilities, and doing something like this with a CP class
would be the perfect thing for them to begin to understand that they have the ability to do higher
level work than they would have ever dreamed. I would start with a lens that seems a little bit
easier than some of the others: feminist theory. Using an online resource that I found to introduce
list all the characters in the play, and we will work together to map out how they fit into the
society around them. After we have the character map made and everyone has copied it down, I
will ask which characters the class thinks hold the most power in the Puritan society. We will
make a list of those who have the least. Every student who suggests a name must have a reason
they think so, or they can phone a friend they think can help them. Using our character list, I will
have students list the names of the accusers, and then the victims. We will look at which
characters who were accused, executed, and released, and what role gender played in each facet.
Would the story would have changed had any of the key players been of the opposite gender?
Would certain characters still have been discriminated against? In order to ensure that students
who are quiet or shy get to share their thoughts, I will have students write the answer to this last
prompt down as an exit slip. At the close of that portion of the lesson and before they pass their
papers to the front of the room, I will tell them that they have just analyzed the play from a
After this lesson, the next class that does not include a book club meeting will be us
focusing on more of the history of Puritan society. I would introduce pieces of The Salem Witch
Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community under Siege by Marilynne Roach and Death in
Salem: The Private Lives Behind the 1692 Witch Hunt by Diane Foulds. The first book is one
chronological order of events. The second book focuses on the personal lives of those involved
in the trials, ordered by the roles they played (i.e. victims, accusers, clergy, etc.). I chose this one
this play. There is a lot to debate about the play, so I think it would be interesting to see how
students perceive it. After getting through the end of Act Two, I will tell students to pull out their
list of discussion questions and read over them; if there are any questions they think will lend
well to a discussion of intolerance in Puritan society. I will then tell them that we are going to
practice a Socratic Seminar about the girls reactions when accused of committing witchcraft. I
will facilitate this discussion, asking the first question: why did they accuse so many innocent
people of witchcraft? For practice session of the seminar there will be five seats in the center of
the circle, with the outer circle focusing on the things that are going well and how we can
improve other things for the real seminar. The inner circle will debate my question and keep
moving forward with as little input from me as possible. There will be a sixth seat, a hot seat,
where students who feel they have something important to add to discussion can have their input.
The next class day that is not devoted to a book club meeting will be the graded Socratic
seminar.
vocabulary they come across. They will jot the words down in the back of their notebooks
(whether a binder or an actual notebook is up to them). By the end of the unit, I expect them to
have at least ten that they have found either in the reading we have done in class, or from their
As a culminating project, I will have students write as if they were being tried as a witch
in the Salem trials, and how they would deal with that intolerance/discrimination. They will write
a narrative or come up with a soundtrack to describe their journey, or they can choose to write an
Act Five, after where The Crucible ended. If they choose to create a soundtrack, they will need to
explain why they chose the songs they did. With either choice they make, they will use two of
their ten new vocabulary words in some manner in this project. I will go over some grammar
rules before beginning this project (proper use of capitalization and punctuation, and anything
else I have noticed students struggling with in their writing over the unit).
In grading their final project, I will have a rubric that I will share with all students so that
they know exactly what grade to expect based on the work they give me. I will make sure that
they know I will take off for the grammar rules that I taught them, but if it is something we did
not go over, I will not take off. I am not testing them on knowledge they were given in the past
just on what they have learned in my class. I want students to have the skills to deal with
intolerance and discrimination in a way that can be productive and change-causing in a society