Understanding difficult literature is a daily task for Language Arts teachers at every grade level. One tool to help with this is tableau, an approach utilized during the 2022 Summer Institute Mythology and Metamorphosis: Enduring Transformational Journeys. As a teacher of Shakespeare, Darren McGarvey from Kettering Fairmont High School knows his text is difficult at any level, but especially for students new to iambic pentameter. Therefore, to reduce frustration and increase understanding, Darren utilized tableau to help students dissect and decipher the lines of an essential scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By creating frozen depictions of essential meaning, this lesson requires students to demonstrate their understanding – or lack of – complicated passages and can be adapted for any piece of literature in any classroom.

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