12--Project #3: End of Week 1 (K&N2K, starting reading)

So the seniors started the Making Macbeth Modern project his week. We read a brief piece of Taming of the Shrew and then had a discussion about why we fear Shakespeare. I like starting Shakespeare this way because I try to be honest and share with my kids that in college I was TERRIFIED of Shakespeare so I just didn't read it.

Starting out with our fears and how we're going to try to overcome them is important. We also discussed how we can relate to Macbeth we just have to be open to the idea.

Students started reading the first, shortest, and in my opinion easiest part of the story -- Act 1 Scene 1. We discussed how to take notes and I showed them a new way to track characters, mood, setting, and meaning in their notebooks. We read that first section out loud, broke it down, and discussed.

We also used this opportunity to make our Knows & N2Ks list. Here is a picture of what we ended up with on our project poster! This poster is displayed in the classroom throughout the entire project and I try to reference it often.

Knows & N2Ks: 

After launching the project and doing the activity above we discussed what we would know and need to know for this project. Students worked in a think-pair-share environment and I had one student writing our ideas down up at the board. I have to say they came up with multiple things that I wouldn't have thought to put on our list. They really wanted to know about a lot of background on the story (history, lifestyle, etc) that I wouldn't have thought to do a workshop on. Because of this N2K this was one of the first lessons myself and my student teacher did.

I was a little disappointed to still see some of the following N2K comments on students lists in their notebooks:
"Why are we doing this project?"
"What is the point of this?"
I try to take these in stride and keep in mind these were from students who have drifted through school for the past 11 years and are frustrated with the fact that I'm making them think, asking them to go outside of their comfort zone, and asking them to actually do something other than a worksheet.
I addressed these items on an indivudal level by asking the students if we'd already asnwered their questions when we formed our problem statement (PS). When we create a PS as a class we fill in the statement "We as ____what is our title?______ will ______what will we do?_______ so that _____why are we doing this?__________." I asked the students if we'd already outlined that? If they gave input to that discussion? I told them that was their chance to speak up and make meaning out of the project. This usually got them to cross the items of their list or add it to their "Know" column instead.

However, I can see the students same bad attitude at the end of the project with their lack-luster final products. This is just one struggle when it comes to changing the expectations and culture with seniors!

Update: 4/3/13

Looking back on this project I needed to incorporate and revisit the K&N2K list more throughout the project. They had great "Need to Knows" for reading the story and we covered most of them throughout our reading process. Because we didn't revisit the N2K list I think there were many need to knows that had to do with creating their modernizations that I didn't do workshops on. I had them do an exit ticket sharing what workshops they needed rather than coming back to our N2K list. I guess I didn't think to do it as a class since they were all doing very different projects. I think next time I'll have each group create a N2K list on top of our class N2K list, especially once we get to the project creation part of the project.