5. The pedagogy of an experienced secondary English teacher
Sabrina Broadbent at Hornsey Girls’ School
Year 9 (mixed ability)
Just watching an experienced teacher really helps because you kind of think ‘What can I do with that?’ and apply it to me as a person, me as a teacher; and the tasks that she did or the way she moves around the room – it’s made me think – maybe I should be more vocal or sometimes step back and let them do it; and the pace [of Sabrina’s lesson] is fantastic … I guess it comes with experience
(from Macbeth in the Classroom 2: a Secondary English NQT commenting on watching Sabrina Broadbent in Macbeth in the Classroom 1).
What follows is an attempt to itemise the approaches to Macbeth that Sabrina Broadbent is shown using in Macbeth in the Classroom 1.
In Macbeth in the Classroom 2, a group of newly-qualified English teachers watch Macbeth in the Classroom 1. They identify and comment on the approaches to teaching Shakespeare that they have observed. The list of strategies emerges from the NQTs’ discussion – it is not something that should be presented as a tick-list. It is also important that there is space in this discussion for the new teachers to be critical of the practice they are observing – to say what they would do differently, or not do at all, and to be honest about the activities that would not work in their own classrooms.
Strategies
First, a cautionary note. Something that needs to be stressed is that what is presented in the programme showing Sabrina with her Year 9 class simply cannot be boiled down to a string of isolable techniques. What happens in the classroom is a product of a set of historically-constituted relationships (how well Sabrina knows the class, how well they know her, the length of their relationship and position of Sabrina as an experienced and established teacher in the school). This is not just an important context in which the lesson takes place; rather, it informs and inflects every interaction by means of which the lesson is conducted and the learning is achieved.
Lesson 1
5.1 Quick run through to get the story
- using the resources of video (Polanski) as well as the text.
This is not part of the lesson, but it is an essential precondition for the lesson. The detailed work on particular scenes can only happen because students have already acquired a fairly secure sense of the story and the main characters: they know who does what to whom, and so have somewhere to put the more detailed and analytical knowledge that they begin to gain in these lessons.
This is a vital general point: with complex texts, start big and then zoom in.
5.2 Quotes – speaking, knowing and owning the lines
- ‘Key quote’
- ‘I want you to know and own this quote’
- ‘Mutter it to yourself’
- Then (pairs) conversation just using quotes
- Then jabbering without listening – repetition of your own quote
- Then say it out loud (whole class) in a persuasive tone, then in a whisper
- Then shout as if suddenly terrified
What this does is to give students – all students – confidence in handling Shakespearean language. What it also does – simultaneously – is to open up an interpretive space, to suggest that performance matters and is part of the meaning of the play: the lines are not simply on the page, but are there to be spoken, performed and interpreted by actors.
5.3 Quotes: attribution to characters
- Witches/Macbeth/Banquo
- ‘If you’re not sure you can check with your partner’ (thereby giving responsibility to students and allowing SB to intervene with individuals who need more support/guidance)
- ‘Is it the kind of thing the witches would have said?’
- Movement/grouping around the room
- Each of the 3 groups says their lines – then SB turns to the group in the middle and says ‘Shall we help you sort out your quotes?’
- Use of idiomatic translation ‘It kind of means ‘whatever’ … I think Macbeth is a very ‘whatever’ kind of bloke…’
- ‘What’s really good about this is that our confusion is really part of the play’
In this activity, students are already drawing on – and hence developing collaboratively – their knowledge of the text, the play …
There are important teaching points here too about misreadings. When do you intervene? When do you not? And what does Sabrina gain by holding off the teacherly intervention?
5.4 Acting out the play (see also Section 1.3)
- Casting – and actors who are reading through at the front.
- ‘Shakespeare is giving you a bit of time to wander onto the stage…’
- ‘Do you see, you got a stage direction from Banquo’s speech?’
From the start, there is an emphasis on staging – not just text, but how the performance creates/communicates meaning – so the question ‘I don’t think the witches are visible to Macbeth and Banquo, are they?’ or ‘What do you think we should advise at this point?’ both directs attention of the students to staging issues and also positions SB and the students as co-constructors of the performance.
It is also worth emphasising that the translation into modern equivalents that occurs in the lesson focuses attention not on the words but on the ideas: a focus on translating the language emphasises what is difficult – and hence tends to solidify the barriers to understanding; translating the ideas into a modern context/contemporary frames of reference, on the other hand, enables students to make sense of the play.
Lesson 2
5.5 Pairs of opposites: scanning with a purpose:
revisiting the same scene with specific focus
- Hunt for as many pairs of opposites as you can find
- 10 minutes to make a list
- SB says that this is hard: alerts students to the challenge
- Then report-back, SB scribing on board
(SB asks the class then to come up with an overarching explanation: she is self-critical of this – could just have said – ‘This is a play about uncertainty and confusion and good and evil.’)
5.6 Class: speaking and reading text
- Text on OHT
- ‘What we have been trying to dig for is meaning, but there is another place that the meaning sits in and that, strangely enough is the punctuation’
- Class divided into two groups – choral reading – change of readers at punctuation mark.
- Then discussion of the meaning – arouse curiosity by encouraging speculation about psychology – close reading
5.7 Viewing the RSC Macbeth
- Stage production – choice of adaptation (Anthony Sher) to bring out the modernity
There is also the point that the students have now been exposed to two different productions. Again, this foregrounds the issue of interpretation – and helps to ensure that students do not simply identify the play with a single realisation in performance.
 
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