At myShakespeare, we know that offering varied learning pathways through multimedia support has profound implications, improving accessibility for students with disabilities and those with learning differences while increasing engagement for learners of all skill levels. In Teaching with Interactive Shakespeare Editions, scholar Laura Turchi identifies myShakespeare as “providing scaffolding for recursive reading, re-reading and otherwise engaging the play multiple times.” According to Turchi, one teacher reported, “I want my students to slow down and ask questions [of the text], and this edition encouraged them to do that.” myShakespeare is designed to provide exactly that kind of meaningful engagement with Shakespeare’s classic works.
Here are four key ways that our tools and resources enhance student engagement.
Performances
Reading Shakespeare’s texts is valuable, but it is through performance that the magic of his genius really shines. myShakespeare offers direct-to-camera performances of key passages that pop up right from the margin so that students never have to navigate away from the text to experience a Shakespearean performance. These quick but powerful performances support student understanding of tone and characterization, while our diverse casting allows students of all backgrounds to see themselves in the stories.
If you like to include student performances in your Shakespeare unit, our performance videos can be a great starting point for student productions. Students can use our actors’ performances to inform their own understanding of how a character should be presented on stage, or they may decide to go in an entirely different direction and showcase how the meaning of a character’s lines change with a different delivery. Since myShakespeare does not feature full-length performances of the plays, students may also benefit from acting out passages that are not included on the site.
Audio playback
Our full-audio playback is voice-acted by the same cast featured in our videos, and helps students get a sense of a character’s tone and implied meaning. Absorbing literature through audio performance is often seen as taboo among those of us who believe in the importance of literacy and reading fundamentals. However, there will always be students that struggle with pulling the words off the page and end up missing out on the story entirely. In an article for Education Weekly, educator Molly Ness says, “We know that when kids spend a lot of time with decoding, if their fluency is low, they can’t get to the meatier stuff of comprehension.” While we encourage students to read and perform Shakespeare’s lines for themselves, listening to the words can engage students who might have otherwise checked out.
Contrary to some of the assumptions around traditional paths to literacy, studies have shown that both listening to and reading new information stimulate the same emotional and cognitive areas of the brain.3 While audio alone is great for absorbing new information, myShakespeare’s format, which includes audio support alongside the original text, can also improve literacy and analysis skills. In her research, Laura Turchi reports that one teacher commented, “‘hearing the words read and using the glosses and other “hints” as needed, students realize that they don’t have to understand every word to understand what is happening and why.’” 1
Interviews
In addition to performances of the original text, myShakespeare offers a unique way to peel back the layers of Shakespeare’s characters through our character interviews. Each play comes equipped with talk show-style hosts that sit down with the characters
at the end of each scene to rehash key events and dig deeper into their motivations. The hosts model engagement for the student, asking important questions about the plot, teasing out themes, and examining the plays through modern critical lenses. Laura Turchi found that teachers reported our interviews as especially valuable, writing, “One powerful, if probably unexpected, way that the myShakespeare edition encourages academic engagement is through its ‘Series Hosts’, modern-day characters who are integral to each edition as guides, interviewers, and at times interpreters.” 1 The interviews are fun and lighthearted while staying true to the essence of the stories, noticeably increasing classroom engagement, and improving comprehension.
Study Tools
Using traditional textbooks can be difficult when practicing close-reading, but with myShakespeare’s study tools, students will stay
locked into the text as they ask questions, track themes, and improve literary analysis skills. Our built-in annotation tool allows students to highlight, color-code, tag, and annotate as they work through the play. Cult of Pedagogy contributor Andrea Castellano writes, “Annotation — marking up and making notes on a text — can be an extremely effective tool for improving comprehension and increasing levels of criticality and engagement.” Our annotation tool was designed with this outcome in mind and offers a way for educators to explore creative assignments that enhance skills and encourage student innovation. You can read more about how to take advantage of this dynamic tool here.
Additionally, myShakespeare’s multiple choice and short-answer questions are embedded throughout the plays, prompting students to check their understanding of plot, character, tone, and other literary elements. These check-ins keep students anchored in the most substantial elements of the plays, engaging them in the story even when the language becomes especially challenging.
Staying engaged with Shakespeare is not always an easy task, but the payoff is worth the effort required by both students and educators. As the most robust and interactive digital Shakespeare textbook available, we aim to keep students engaged from the prologue to the final bow.
- Teaching with Interactive Shakespeare Editions
- Education Weekly: “High School Kids Barely Read. Could Audiobooks Reverse that Trend?”
- The Journal of Neuroscience: “The Representation of Semantic Information Across Human Cerebral Cortex During Listening Versus Reading is Invariant to stimulus Modality”
- Cult of Pedagogy: “The Art of Annotation: Teaching Readers to Process Texts”
