The Story of Macbeth Discussion Questions
How I supported students with engaging in debate about Macbeth
In the spring of 2021 I had the opportunity—after three and a half years of teacher-facing staff development work—to go back into the English language arts classroom with a group of sophomores for two weeks. They were engaged in a Louisiana ELA unit on Macbeth with the essential questions revolving around ambition, failure, and hope: What is the corrupting force of power? How does it affect individuals? What are the manipulating forces within relationships? How do they come to life in Macbeth? What are the effects of pride? How do they come to life in Macbeth?
It was invigorating to be back in the classroom; I figured at the close of this Thanksgiving 2021 break that I've prepped at least a thousand days' worth of lessons in my ten-year education career (this was when some of the Sunday fear after the holiday came in, considering I'll be co-teaching some this week). The spontaneity and creativity demanded of teaching and learning bring a certain vitality to the experience, and while the challenge was great, the experience was rewarding for both myself as a teacher and the students as learners—more on that later.
The Unit design begins with examinations of the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. There's some comparative analysis of retellings of the Ovid in a few media: the William Carlos Williams poem "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus", the Brueghel painting of the same name, and Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”. Then, the students begin examination of the Acts of Macbeth.
I knew from the jump that I wanted to bring divergent and debatable open-ended questions to the group; that it would be helpful to build in some activities and routines that required movement; and that it could be powerful to leverage 10-15 minute bursts of teaching and learning to bring kids through the exceptional challenges of Shakespeare's Macbeth.
I was diligent in repeatedly, ad nauseum—to the degree that kids got aggravated with me—pushing kids to cite evidence in support of any claims. The scene-to-scene and act-to-act throughline analysis involved some tracking of plot and character development, some group examinations of excerpts of the text, and some debriefing of sections as a full group to identify potential misconceptions and make sure look-fors were articulated by the students.
I planned to guide at least one open-ended discussion every day, and I sought to structure this in a relatively binary way (I know—some tension with 'open-ended' here). Here are some examples of the Macbeth questions I used with the direction: Consider the question at hand. Do you agree or disagree, or are you on the fence? Find the wall that represents that position and be prepared to explain why you're standing there.
Sure, a simple discussion strategy, but anyone who has worked with K-12 students and discussions knows how they can (when done well) flip the script of the classroom, get kids involved that weren't involved with the reading and writing bits, and invite argumentation we know is in the private thought of students, but isn't always present in writing (because writing is exceptionally difficult and exceptionally poorly taught). An aphorism from my time with Content Leader in Louisiana in paraphrase: Students may not be able to read or write at grade level, but they can think at grade level!
From my first moments with these sophomores, there was a lot of hemming and hawing about having to stand, having to move, having to cite evidence and having to justify opinions or positions. But with teaching it’s really the little things in accumulation that have an impact. So, after two weeks of pushing for citation, getting kids up and moving to demonstrate their position, pushing for more of their thinking with questions like “Say more,” and inviting more of the group to express their private thought in the public forum of class, students experienced much more robust discussion, argumentation and analysis.
But then, we ran into this question in the materials:
How do Macbeth's reactions to the witches, King Duncan, Banquo, and Lady Macbeth reveal his ambition, loyalty and potential for success or failure? (Cite two pieces of evidence.)
If you’ve seen my writing in other places, you’ll know I’m a supporter of use of quality instructional materials. So, I leaned in to this question with some trust in the designers of the materials—only to find the question fall flat before my burgeoning students. It didn’t take too much consideration to figure out why. How many questions are packed into that one whooper anyway? (1) How do Macbeth’s reactions to the witches reveal his ambition? (2) How do Macbeth’s reactions to King Duncan reveal his loyalty? (3) How do Macbeth’s reactions to Lady Macbeth reveal his potential for success or failure? And these are just a few of the potential permutations.
Thanks to the magic of Google Slides revision history I’m able to look at the moments when I made the edits. From 7:00 am on class day to 11:58 am were the failures of the first question. Then they became a series of more open and approachable questions:
Is Macbeth ambitious? How do you know? How much? How little?
Is Macbeth loyal? How do you know? How much? How little?
Is Macbeth confident in the success of their plan? How confident? How do you know?
Each of these served as a scaffold for the more robust, prompt-like question at the start. I found that this routine of yes/no questions with justifiable responses on either side (or in the middle) empowered students to voice their thinking about the complex Shakespearean text at hand without having to encode it in writing (yet). There’s much to be said about the power of discussion as a scaffold for writing; and I found that this series of questions opened kids thinking, allowed us to really isolate the abstractions of ambition, loyalty and confidence, and resulted in more robust and thoughtful conversation.
Finally—and it couldn’t have worked more fortuitously—on my very last day with the group, I dropped this question for the students:
We’d usually do one of these as the closure activity of the class period, after kids had packed their stuff. It was a Friday, and I’d really built some solid relationships with kids and I was a bit in my feels (we all were, I think). So, we approached this question, and students were vigorously involved with a classroom discussion and debate. I couldn’t have hoped for a more vibrant discussion—and I knew I’d really taught them something when a student, in the midst of making a complex claim about Macbeth’s character development, sprinted across the classroom to grab a copy of the text to cite some evidence as justification of his claim.