American Shakespeare Center serves as a national resource for teaching Shakespeare

The American Shakespeare Center hosts its Winter Teacher Seminar on Feb. 4-5, focused on classroom applications of Much Ado about Nothing and Richard III.

Through four workshops in these teacher training programs, the ASC seeks to expand methods of performance-based learning in Virginia classrooms and across the country. The ASC reaches over 2400 students each year through the educators who attend teacher seminars.

At the ASC’s teacher seminars, Education Artists model classroom techniques and provide lesson plans and course outlines for educators at the high school and university level. In addition to workshop materials, Seminar attendees receive ASC Study Guides, which provide a start-to-finish model for teaching a Shakespearean play through activities that fulfill both Virginia Standards of Learning and the U.S. Core Curriculum Standards.

Teachers at the Winter Seminar will also attend performances of both Much Ado about Nothing and Richard III and will have the opportunity to discuss those shows with ASC actors in post-show Talkbacks. The current Actors’ Renaissance Season, with its focus on early modern rehearsal methods, provides further opportunities as a model for active learning.

Part of the ASC’s educational mission is to help teachers present Shakespeare’s works as plays, valuing his stagecraft as well as his wordcraft.

“Having students read Shakespeare while sitting in rows of desks is deadly,” says Cass Morris, ASC academic resources manager. “We encourage teachers to rearrange their classrooms to resemble an Elizabethan stage. This setup shakes students’ expectations and also allows them to explore the staging conditions that Shakespeare so expertly manipulates in his plays.

Incorporating lessons on how actors use clues from the text to inform character choices and workshops featuring specifically challenging stage moments, ASC Teacher Seminars focus on getting students out of their seats and up on their feet for active exploration of Shakespeare’s plays, helping them read not only the page but also the stage.

For the Winter Seminar, more than twenty teachers from Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Michigan will attend. Many of them are return attendees, drawn back to the Blackfriars Playhouse by the high quality programming.

Says Tom Delise of Century High School in Sykesville, Md.: “I have been attending ASC teacher workshops for the past eight years, and every time I attend, I am sure to learn something that is fascinating and of great educational value when it is incorporated into my lessons. Whether it is learning strategies for getting students up on their feet to perform the text, exploring historical connections to the text and Shakespeare’s time, or the myriad of other strategies that ASC personnel use to breathe life into the texts, the workshops have proved be exhilarating and rewarding for both teacher and students.”

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