In 2016, I wrote a blog about using myShakespeare with students. As a lover of Shakespeare, it was challenging to get students to look beyond the unfamiliar words and embrace these timeless stories of love, betrayal, friendship, and revenge–all things that should interest a teenage audience!
When I met the creators of this free resource, I was excited to use it to help make Shakespeare more accessible to my students. I was thrilled to see how much more they understood when engaging with the tools and resources embedded into this online resource. In the years since I used it as a teacher, the myShakespeare team and I have stayed in contact, and they’ve continued to develop the resources embedded in the platform. In a recent conversation, I asked if a member of their team could write a guest blog sharing this wonderful resource with my readers. Jaime Litton, an instructional designer and equity specialist at myShakespeare, offered to write the blog post below.
Guest Post by Jamie Litton
When reading Shakespeare, students face a crisis of confidence. Students doubt their ability to understand the language, and teachers are unsure how to empower their students to try. When it comes to Shakespeare, even the most resourceful teachers can find themselves without the support they need to foster meaningful comprehension. myShakespeare is a multimedia digital textbook that remedies this issue. We designed our site with three goals in mind: engage students, enhance critical thinking, and save teachers time. We provide robust and engaging features on a user-friendly platform that students and teachers love.
Supercharge Engagement
myShakespeare features six full-text editions of Shakespeare’s plays with built-in support that encourages students to take the lead in their learning. The original language is always front and center but is made immediately more accessible by multimedia tools that bolster comprehension. As students become more familiar with our features, they can choose the resources that best support their learning and growth. For example, a student who begins a play relying heavily on our modern English translations may become empowered over time to interpret the original language on their own with the support of our audio tool or video performance clips.
By providing so many on-ramps to understanding, myShakespeare makes it possible for teachers and students to spend less time decoding Shakespeare’s language and more time diving into the meatier nuances of the text. One myShakespeare teacher describes this effect, saying, “The features are so plentiful that the students are finding it easier not only to just understand what they are reading but also engaging directly with the text and participating in class discussions and activities.”
Foster Critical Thinking
In addition to multiple options for engaging with the original text, myShakespeare provides tools for scaffolding comprehension so that students can begin to explore Shakespeare in more meaningful ways. Our written and animated pop-up notes cover everything from historical background and cultural context to explanations of wordplay and etymology.
Our character interviews are, in the words of one teacher, “a game-changer for helping students understand the text.” Each interview features a host who sits down with the characters at the end of each scene to rehash events, clarify key lines, and dig deeper into character motivations. In addition to being funny and entertaining, these exchanges model critical analysis by providing examples of questions students should be asking as they move through the play. All of our tools work in concert to support comprehension so that teachers can spend more classroom time on discussion, creative projects, and big ideas rather than needing to explain what just happened in a scene.
Save Time with Built-in Tools
Imagine you’re teaching Romeo and Juliet to ninth graders. You’re hoping to familiarize your students with basic literary terms while also exploring the theme of violence in the play. Using our notebook feature, you can ask students to track specific themes and literary devices by highlighting and tagging the text as they work through the play. All of your students’ annotations are saved in their individual notebooks, where you can view their work, and they can revisit their notes to study for a test or find inspiration for an upcoming project. In this way, myShakespeare gives teachers all the tools they need to engage their students and the flexibility to make a Shakespeare unit their own.
Over the years, we have had the pleasure of meeting many teachers who have successfully used myShakespeare in their classrooms. We are always thrilled to hear feedback like this review from a longtime myShakespeare teacher who wrote in to tell us, “My students sometimes tell me this is the first time they’ve understood and enjoyed a Shakespearean play.”
The team at myShakespeare is deeply committed to listening to our teachers about what they are looking for in a Shakespeare resource and how we can continue to meet those needs in the ever-changing educational landscape. One way we have responded to the call for more dynamic Shakespeare pedagogy is by launching our blog, which includes ideas for in-class activities, culturally sustaining approaches to Shakespeare, contemporary connections, and the latest Shakespeare-related news.
Jamie Litton is an instructional designer and equity specialist at myShakespeare and a course coordinator at Stanford Digital Education, bringing Stanford University’s Structured Liberal Education (SLE) program to high school students in underserved communities around the country. Jamie has a BA in Sociology and an MA in Social Justice Education, and she is passionate about finding new pathways to culturally sustaining learning experiences for students of all backgrounds.
No responses yet