
It’s easy to assume students won’t “get” the play and that they will necessarily need to read or review every bit of it in class with a teacher to explain it to them. But, I’m not coming with them to college in future years to explain any of that reading to them. My job is to make sure they get better at reading and parsing complicated texts for themselves. That skill will be more valuable to them than having detailed (and likely soon forgotten) knowledge of the significance of a poppet in Act II. Therefore, I began the play with a four act plan for gradual release of responsibility. This is how it worked.
In Act I, most of the major characters are introduced and most of the major conflicts are also revealed. We read this act together as a class with volunteers reading the parts in the play. I performed the quintessential English teacher role. I stopped the flow of their reading as often as possible to ask clarifying questions, probe character motivations, explain significant vocabulary (even though it was also posted on the wall) had them take notes about the characters, and generally make sure they knew what was going on. This took us five days of class.
For Act II I split the class into heterogeneous groups of 4-5 kids each. (I determined the groups heterogeneous nature based on the results of a quiz I gave them about Act I.) I wrote seven questions on the board that they should try to answer while reading Act II and reminded them to stop themselves and ask the same kinds of teacher questions I did in Act I. I hung a chart with the vocabulary I thought might challenge them and circulated among the groups. The difference between Act I and Act II was that now every student was responsible for a part, not just the volunteers up front. And, they would have to decide as a group how to answer the questions I wrote on the board. Engagement went up. I took pictures and they didn’t even notice. Reading Act II this way took about two days. (Act II is a lot shorter than Act I.) I had another quiz ready for them about Act II and they did better than they had for Act I. (I use Google forms to make quizzes. More about Google Forms here.)

Before reading Act III, we revisited the end of Act II. Elizabeth has been arrested and her husband, John, must decide what he will do about it. He has several possible choices. With my classes we made a decision tree for John. We listed his possible choices horizontally and then under each possible choice we listed the possible consequences of that choice. This lesson did two things at once. It made students interested in reading Act III to see what Arthur Miller would choose to have John do and it modeled the decision tree they would be making about Elizabeth’s choice. (Examining the choices author’s make is a part of the Common Core Standards.)

By Act IV I gave them hardly any direction at all. I asked them to read it. I asked them to make sure they were stopping often to have conversations and I sent them off. Once again I circulated, listening to their great conversations, stopping to answer a question here or there. Near the end of the period I heard a student say to his group, “You know, if we each read the rest of Act IV tonight at home, we could spend all of our time together in class tomorrow just to talk about it.” I had to walk away so they wouldn’t see me smiling.
It takes a lot of planning to make sure that my students are engaged in our classroom. Lea said, “Mrs.R you just have everything organized so that we can do the work. I like that.” I believe students want to be active learners. They want to figure things out for themselves. They liked The Crucible because they had to make sense of it without a teacher telling them what every little bit meant. They made meaning for themselves and once you make something yourself you want to hang on to it.
Will they remember the fine details of The Crucible in ten years? Probably not, but I think that’s true no matter how the text is taught. Will they feel more confident about tackling complex texts? Maybe. I’ll know for sure after they work their way through some Twain, Poe and Fitzgerald.
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