There are a lot of options for how to set up the prompts, (personally) I like role playing (or forced perspective). An open ended question that has either a) no known answer or b) no known good answer is especially fertile ground.
There’s research that indicates some rules about responses that can be useful (or in a large enough class, you can run analytics on the responses/interactions you’re seeing and use that), but it’s always wise to be as specific as possible with the students about what you expect their responses to look like (and how many, and how often).
Telling them how long responses must be (and having a firm, enforced upper limit to that), and designating roles for people can all help give the sense of purpose to students that can keep a conversation firing.
All that said, there are something that will just kill stuff- too small a class (ever tried to do an online conversation with two students and an instructor? Won’t work), or an instructor that interjects often, or a wonky dynamic (which just sort of… happens sometimes).
examples?
Hypothetically, sure:
In Macbeth, there’s a scene where Macbeth meets with two murderers, as he sends them off to do his dirty work. But when the moment comes, there are three murderers on stage- so the question is, who has shown up as the third murderer?
There’s textual evidence for three or four characters to (potentially) be correct, but there’s no clear answer (and no consensus in the literature). I’d either force students to defend a given choice (as in assigning each one of the four choices and making them defend), or if I was feeling generous, I’d let them pick who to defend.
The grading becomes a matter of looking at the strength of arguments and evidence presented.
Wait, what? It’s totally in the script, Macbeth adds a third, probably to keep an eye on the other two given what the second murderer says. There’s no reason to think that it’s some other character.
First Murderer
But who did bid thee join with us?
Third Murderer
Macbeth.
Second Murderer
He needs not our mistrust, since he delivers
Our offices and what we have to do
To the direction just.
A+
and other stuff here because Discourse
I have such a love-hate with Macbeth these days. I keep looking at the current administration play out and being like “FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AGO WE KNEW THIS TO BE BAD!”
Macbeth totally failed upward. FWIW I also think Lady Macbeth got a bad rap in the 1970’s with the shift to make her a larger accomplice.
Yes, Macbeth sends the third- but there’s no mention of who that third might be (if we work with the not-unreasonable starting point that the third murderer is another character from the play.
But I digress.
Ridiculous, of course it’s unreasonable. That’s like asking who the first two are, they’re the two murderers.
Part of why Macbeth likes being king is that he can source out the murderin’.
A friend of mine used to deal with students reluctant to give Shakespeare a fair chance by telling them Macbeth was a comedy. There’s some evidence:
When the Macbeths are told the king is murdered, Lady MacBeth exclaims, “What? In our house?”
(No, this old man got up in the night and went to the next castle over during the storm to end all storms.)
And when faced with all the unnatural stuff that happened during the storm – horses biting each other etc etc – MacBeth shrugs it off by remarking “'Twas a rough night”.
Once they laugh through the murder scene the kids would warm up to it
Shakespeare gets a bad rap in class because it’s a dry read, it’s just designed to be read by people who know what they’re doing. Having a halting high school student mumble through the Queen Mab speech is totally going to make it incomprehensible.
Once you can show them all of Shakespeare has scene after scene of things said hilariously they can get into it, like the knock knock scene in Macbeth. It’s been given such high regard that as a result too many people think it’s over their head when the reality is that it’s written for the guys in the stalls first and the people who rented cushions second.
I’ve always wanted to see Romeo And Juliet done as a farce
It’s so different to see if performed well. I saw a great production of Romeo and Juliet where Juliet was actually a teen, or cleverly played as one, and wow that was so great. Midsummer Night’s Dream is so wonderful to see staged, too, with all the costumes for all the matching lovers making sense of all the mismatches.
@William_George I’m willing to do an AMA here but I might keep a few answers vague to avoid personal identification
Also, I won’t be very available until around November 1st.
You can sign up at the top post, which is editable by everyone.
I see, thank you
I’m looking forward to hearing some news about how one gets to be a moon. That’s a big job.
To clarify, for those who have already PMed me images, I am not interested on how one gets mooned.
A rolls royce get driven into your swimming pool.