Members in Action: Shakespearience: “All the World’s a Stage” for Episcopal High School’s English students on their Experiential Learning Curriculum Day, Fall 2018 

By: Millie McKeachie ([email protected]) English teacher and Associate Director of the Washington Program

Wednesday afternoons at Episcopal High School, Alexandria, VA are reserved for experiential learning through our Washington Program. While many of our Wednesday program experiences take the students into the DC Metroplex communities beyond our boarding school gates, we also hold several experiences on campus; this past fall, the Washington Program paired with the English department to plan an all-student experiential day connected to the study of Shakespeare (developed with an English teacher who attended the Summer Institute). During Shakespearience’s one-year trial run, we sought to replace the long-standing tradition of the Shakespeare exam by engaging all students of the community in an afternoon of scholarly and experiential work. The Shakespeare exam was a comprehensive assessment that, prior to this fall, had been used to evaluate seniors on all of the Shakespeare texts covered during their time at Episcopal. In the new plan, we aimed to present the students with as rigorous of a Shakespeare challenge, and we hoped to build from the traditional assessment by including elements of the KOLB cycle in each of our English classes.

Planning began during our English faculty retreat day, in May of 2018. Grade level English teachers gathered to brainstorm possible alternative and experiential assessments that were appropriate to their grade level and honored their prior experience with Shakespeare. The freshmen teachers settled on a Julius Caesar monologue contest, sophomore teachers—borrowing an idea from Gilman School in Baltimore, MD—developed plans for a performance of Macbeth in which each student would memorize lines and perform scenes with a small group. Junior teachers decided that their class would be the audience for the sophomore class and would serve as literary and performative critics, given that they had read and seen Macbeth during the previous school year. Last, seniors had a range of choices for their capstone Shakespeare projects: some students developed original versions of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Universe, in which characters from different plays met up with and engaged one another; others presented entrepreneurial “Hamlet Pitch Projects,” competing for the best modernized Hamlet Pitch; some recited monologues from Hamlet.

While the projects varied, the KOLB process was a steady part of the Shakespearience. After summer reading studies, each English teacher began the teaching semester with a Shakespeare text, thus the students embarked on their “Abstract conceptualization” as they read the text with knowledge of the upcoming Shakespearience projects. For example, while reading it, they had to think carefully about what it might look like to perform the banquet scene in Macbeth. As freshmen, they had to consider the myriad of meanings for Shakespeare’s words, thinking about which syllables they might emphasize during recitation time. With their knowledge of all the past Shakespeare texts they had read, seniors wondered what it might look like if Ophelia were to meet Lady Macbeth. Then, as part of the Shakespearience afternoon and throughout the rest of the week, the students reflected on their experiences, using several methods: “I liked, I wished, I wondered,” said the juniors to the sophomores, regarding the Macbeth performance. Additionally, Dr. James Loehlin, Shakespeare scholar from University of Texas, Austin was on campus for the week and visited classes, reflecting with students on their experiences and claiming that the best way to learn Shakespeare is to act out Shakespeare. Some teachers required journal entry reflections. Juniors wrote reflections that were shared with the sophomore class they had observed.

We left with a lot of inspiration and questions to reflect on how to improve in future years. Were there holes in this Shakespearience day? Could we do better next year? Certainly! English teachers now wonder if there was some inequity of line memorization assignments for the Macbeth performance. We wonder if the juniors—who had studied Othello but reflected on Macbeth—could have had an experience that focused more carefully on their Othello readings, perhaps comparing and contrasting that play to the sophomore presentation of Macbeth. Did the senior students absorb and learn as much as they would have if they’d had to prepare for a comprehensive Shakespeare exam like the one that has been given in years past? Could we have involved Shakespeare scholars from the DC Metro area? Experiential learning is an iterative process for the teachers as well, and we know this point for sure: the students’ feedback proved that they learned much from our day in which “All their World was a Stage.”  They were fully engaged in the day while having immense amounts of fun!