Romeo and Juliet: the scheme in five minutes

Transcript

Introduction0:00

This is Between the Lines, and this is the walkthrough of our Romeo and Juliet scheme of learning. I'm Hannah.

The scheme at a glance0:07

Romeo and Juliet is written for Literature Paper 1, Section A, the Shakespeare question. It's 33 lessons of sixty minutes, which is about seven to nine weeks, with three levels of support throughout. The lessons run in five sequences: Context and Act 1, lessons 1 to 7; The feast and the balcony, lessons 8 to 13; Act 2 Scene 3 to Act 3, lessons 14 to 20; Acts 4 and 5, lessons 21 to 28; Themes and the exam, lessons 29 to 33. There are five assessment points. Four of them are Feedback Loop kits, in lessons 6, 12, 19 and 27, each followed by a feedback lesson, and the fifth is the end-of-unit essay in Lesson 32, with its own feedback lesson after it.

One lesson0:53

Let me show you with Lesson 5, O brawling love. The big question is: How does Shakespeare present Romeo as a lover before he meets Juliet? Apply is about fifteen minutes, and it has two parts. First you explode one quotation together. In this lesson it's "O brawling love! O loving hate!". Before you reveal anything, students try the four empty boxes on the first explode slide: method, zoom in, effect, purpose. Then you think aloud through the full version. The method is two oxymorons side by side, each an exclamation. The word to zoom in on is "brawling", the noise of a street fight, so Romeo gives love the violent adjective "brawling" and his love feels like a battle. The effect: the audience hears a young man more interested in clever words than in the blood on the street, and his sighs sound rehearsed, even comic. The purpose: Shakespeare makes Romeo a Petrarchan lover, copying the sonnets of the 1590s, and ties love and hate together in the first scene as the Prologue promised. That is the whole analytical move the exam rewards, done out loud, once a lesson, for the whole scheme. Then the hinge question, on mini-whiteboards. Romeo calls love "Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!" What do these oxymorons show about him? The right answer is B: his feelings about love are so mixed that he can only describe them in contradictions. And this is the bit I'd ask every teacher to use. The handbook tells you what each wrong answer means. A student who picks A has linked the opposites to the brawl, so you re-read "Here's much to do with hate, but more with love" and start them on Securing. A student who picks C has read "sick health" literally, so you remind them that Romeo arrives after the fight is over and recap what an oxymoron is. The hinge question is how you decide, in thirty seconds, who starts on which level of support. That's what it's for.

Three levels of support2:53

Master is the last twenty-five minutes, and it's where the three levels do their work. Everyone in the room answers the same task. In Lesson 5 it's: How does Shakespeare use oxymoron to present Romeo's feelings about love in Act 1 Scene 1? Securing, aiming for a 4, gives a choice of exact quotations, here "O brawling love! O loving hate!", "cold fire" and "A choking gall, and a preserving sweet", a worked example on a different quotation, and sentence starters for What, How and Why. Strengthening, aiming for grades 5 to 6, gives prompts instead of starters: a clear point for What, a quotation with a method named and one word zoomed in on for How, and a Why prompt asking why Shakespeare might make Romeo sound like a poem, given that love poetry in the 1590s copied Petrarch's sighing lovers, with a checklist. Soaring, aiming for grades 7 to 9, gives a debatable statement to argue with: Romeo's love for Rosaline is a performance, and Shakespeare wants the audience to see through it. How far do you agree? Two paragraphs, the second beginning with an alternative reading. Same extract, same question, same standard. Only the scaffolding changes.

Feedback Loop kits4:07

Four times in the scheme, the Master phase is a Feedback Loop kit: a twenty-five minute progress check that fits inside the lesson. You place the paragraph in one of the six AQA levels, using our indicative content for this task. There is no raw mark, and that's deliberate. A six out of thirty tells a student one thing, that they got six. A level, in AQA's own words, tells them what the paragraph does now and what the next one asks for.

Every scheme, the same shape4:33

That's the Romeo and Juliet scheme. The same structure runs through every Between the Lines scheme, so a teacher who has taught one has taught the shape of all of them, and a student who moves classes mid-year lands in a lesson they recognise. Lesson 3 of every scheme is free at btl.education if you want to show a colleague what a lesson looks like before they open the folders. Thank you for watching, and I hope your classes enjoy Romeo and Juliet as much as mine have.