Heather Carreiro
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Shakespeare's Context "Para-Pres" Assignment

9/3/2018

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While teaching IGCSE Literature, I wanted to give my grade 9 students a broad yet deep understanding of the historical and personal contexts in which Shakespeare's Macbeth was written. I had also realized that many students had weak paraphrasing  and summary skills, so behold the "Para-Pres" assignment.

In this project, I photocopied and cut up the sections from Stephen Greenblatt's introduction to the Norton anthology of Shakespeare's tragedies. You could use any college-level scholarly introduction.  Each section is between 1 and 3 pages. For my highest-level students who needed a challenge, I also added one full-length critical article, Greenblatt's "Renaissance Self-Fashioning."

On the first day, I gave the students their assigned jigsaw reading sections in pairs. Their first goal was to create a poster, using note-taking and paraphrase skills. Their second goal was to give a poster presentation on the main points of their context area.

In order to check the paraphrasing work, students had to create a draft before making the final poster. This involved a lot of me running around the room, checking individual passages against the original and getting students to rewrite.
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See below some of the finished presentation posters, which were then recycled to make a classroom bulletin board for reference during the Macbeth unit. You can use this assignment with any jigsaw reading. Here's an editable version of the Para-Pres rubric. Make a copy and make it your own! You will see that the majority of the points in this rubric go toward the writing and creating the poster, and only 20% is on presentation skills. Adjust the weight of each category or add specific presentation skills if you want to prioritize the oral presentation aspect of the assignment.
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    Heather Carreiro is an international educator currently based in India.

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