Today, I observed Vicki tutor a Year 7 student on Shakespeare’s play, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and her strategy made the student less intimidated by Shakespearean play format and helped her actually enjoy the play/English literature.

Instead of jumping straight into analysing quotes and literary techniques, Vicki focused on making the story enjoyable first. She described the play as “basically magical chaos,” which instantly made the student laugh and relax. Rather than treating Shakespeare like something overly serious and untouchable, she approached it as entertainment, which helped the student engage much more naturally with the text.

One thing that stood out was how interactive the lesson was. Vicki encouraged the student to read parts of the script aloud and even act out certain scenes. This made the dialogue feel less confusing and helped the student understand the emotions behind the words. The scenes involving Puck were especially effective because the humour and trickery kept the student interested throughout the lesson.

Vicki also constantly connected the play back to modern experiences. She compared the relationship drama in the play to “friendship group chaos,” which made the themes much easier for the student to understand and relate to. Instead of feeling like an old text with no relevance, the play started to feel surprisingly modern.
This is also building essential skills that will help the student all throughout highschool, where we try to appreciate texts context in the modern world, particularly how texts have universal themes. The universal themes make texts timeless, meaning they can have relevance to the human experience, regardless of context. This is why we can still analyse texts from the 15th/16th century today, and they still teach us some valuable lessons about the human experience.

Overall, observing this lesson showed how important engagement is when teaching Shakespeare to younger students. Vicki’s relaxed and interactive approach helped turn a difficult text into something fun, memorable and much less intimidating

Mary Diamond