Last week, I was teaching the scene in Macbeth when our hero sees an illusionary dagger. It was a lower ability group in Y9. The scene was homing in on the quotation ‘Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell/ That summons thee to heaven or to hell’ and the question my Academy booklet, which all teachers are required to work from, wanted me to ask was ‘Why might Shakespeare have used rhyming couplets?’
The booklet said the reason was to bring the scene ‘closure’ and so the students copied this down from my visualiser, then repeated it verbatim and in unison, shared the exact wording in their pairs and even wrote it again on a whiteboard. The belt and braces of obedience had been completed. I was compliant with the Trust-wide policy. Time for me to move to the next page of the booklet.
Although this was a satisfactory interpretation, it didn’t seem sufficient. The class hadn’t given it any thought of their own and, as an experienced teacher, I could tell the students didn’t fully understand what they were being asked to write down. So I decided to deviate from the booklet.
I turned the visualiser off, moved to stand with the students in the middle of the room, where I would have naturally stood before being required to teach in a formulaic way, asked them ‘why else do you think Shakespeare used a rhyme here?’ and prompted them to write down their own ideas. They looked terrified.