Why do we make it so hard? Using cognitive science and assessment objectives to reframe the way we teach Shakespeare at Key Stage 4

Tamsin Page, Director of English, Cambridge Meridian Academies Trust, UK Olivia Tolley, Teacher of English, North Cambridge Academy, UK Shakespeare is hard. The length, complexity, language, contextual understanding and cultural capital often needed to fully access Shakespeare’s plays make the challenge of teaching it a daunting one. And that’s before we even begin to tackle the barriers that students create for themselves, often believing the plays to be irrelevant and impenetrable (Lighthill, 2011). Conventional classroom practice is to approach the play chronologically, with each lesson tackling one section in isolation, which the students are encouraged to analyse. Whether lessons are heavily performance-focused (Gibson, 1998) or not, the model of assessment that accompanies this sequential approach repeatedly requires students to hold a plethora of information in their short-term memory all at once, without necessarily understanding how each layer of meaning fits together i