Workshop Topics

Whole Group Workshops

Friday

1:00 p.m.: Welcome

5:15 p.m.: The Play’s the Thing – Put on the play in your classroom without reading it in your seats. Using a DIY aesthetic, create scenery, props, and costumes and explore the major themes of the play. Learn to introduce the play and themes with a condensed synopsis activity.
– Rebecca J. Ennals of the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival.

Saturday

9:00 a.m.: Warm-up #1 Creating a Sense of Play in Your Classroom. Using clowning and other techniques to get your students to think creatively and lose their fear of failure. – Kevin Coleman of Shakespeare & Company

10:00 a.m.: Bill’s Advice to Richard. What rhetoric can teach your students about the plays. The workshop helps teachers take their students inside the plays by showing them the textual signals for performance – including rhetorical and aural patterns – that Shakespeare gave his actors in their cue scripts. – Ralph Cohen of the American Shakespeare Center

4:30 p.m.: Song and Dance Practice. Learn a dance and song from the Elizabethan period – great tool to use in your classroom to help create ensemble and understand historical content. – Shakespeare’s Globe

5:45 p.m.: Word Salad – Get all your questions answered. Presenters will be taking audience questions.

Sunday

9:00 a.m.: Warm-up #2 Theatrical Warm-up. A basic theatrical warm-up of the voice and body, Linklater techniques.

10:00 a.m.: Contextualizing Violence. It’s not just about sword fights! Learn how you can help your students understand the full meaning of violence in Shakespeare’s plays, and how to teach stage combat using Air Broadswords without ever picking up a weapon. – Kevin Coleman of Shakespeare & Company

Small Group Workshops

A. “Where Do I Start?” – Teaching Shakespeare is hard, but with some of the innovative methods created by the Folger Shakespeare Library, it can be a real pleasure for both you and your students. This session will show you how to use Tone, Subtext, and Stress and other tried-and-true techniques to introduce your students to Shakespeare’s language and get kids to love Shakespeare before you even open the book. – Kevin Costa of Folger Education. Conference Center Room A.

B. Engaging the Audience in Your Elizabethan Classroom – In this exploration, Sarah Enloe will give teachers access to classroom-proven methods for bringing Shakespeare alive for their students. By focusing on the arrangement of space and the audience’s role in early modern plays, Sarah will show teachers how to get students on their feet and keep the entire class engaged and playing with Shakespeare. – Sarah Enloe of the American Shakespeare Center. Conference Center Room B.

C. Performance-Based Learning – Single-Play Focus – How to get students on their feet DOING instead of just READING. Explore Macbeth, a required text in many high schools nationwide. – Joan Langley and Kirsten Giroux of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Mondavi Center Green Room.

D. Differentiated Instruction – This workshop guides students in using a variety of techniques to find connections between themselves and Shakespeare’s plots, themes, and characters. Reading, writing, speaking, listening and tableaux are all skills that we will use to discover personal meaning in Romeo and Juliet. Techniques employed in this workshop were
developed in Will Power to Youth, a seven-week program that hires teenagers to create an adaptation of a Shakespeare play that reflects their thoughts and feelings about the source text. – Chris Anthony, Shakespeare/LA. Mondavi Center Deterding Lobby (2nd Floor).

E. Globe Approaches – Actor Philip Cumbus shares the Globe’s approaches to teaching as well as his own experiences playing and creating Shakespeare’s characters.– Philip Cumbus of Shakespeare’s Globe. Mondavi Center Jackson Hall Stage.