If students love something in class that would most certainly be team work. Collaboration is key when it comes to creating new learning activities for your students. With this idea in mind, Madalina-Larisa Kimak designed a special lesson for her Text in Context class, meant to bring Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Tell-Tale Heart to life.
Having already read the text and familiarized with it through some comprehension questions in a previous lesson, the students were now faced with the challenge of engaging with the narrator of Poe's story in an imaginary trial.
Warm up
Before explaining the main task, the teacher creates the context for discussing the narrator’s state of mind by presenting students with Francisco Goya's print The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters (1797).
The students are asked to study the picture given and to answer the following questions:
· How does it depict the following idea: The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters?
· How does Francisco Goya’s print The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters relate to the narrator’s mental state in Poe’s short story?
Giving the instructions
After discussing the questions in a frontal setting, students are asked to imagine that they are forensic psychiatrists and they are required to testify in court regarding the mental state of a suspected criminal, Poe's narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart. As such, they have to treat the short story as forensic evidence, helping them in building their case.
There will be two teams. The prosecution team has to convince the judge that the narrator was not mentally ill at the time of the killing and thus should be tried and convicted of murder. The defence team will have the duty of convincing the judge that the narrator is in fact insane and was so when he committed the crime and thus should not be tried.
Both teams should look for signs in the text that show a possible motive for the crime, details on preparing the crime, the way in which he tells his story and any other ideas that could indicate whether the storyteller knew exactly what he was doing or he was not in control of his actions.
Building the case
Following the instructions presented above, the students have successfully built their case, collaborating on finding "evidence" and formulating arguments strong enough to support their position. To make this collaborative activity even more interactive, the teacher has created a Padlet where students could add their ideas and build their case.
Needless to say, Poe's short story has not only become one of the students' favorite text, but it has also generated a fantastic opportunity for students to practise their team work, communication and argumentative skills. Moreover, using Padlet as a digital canvas where all their ideas could be displayed facilitated students' participation and developed their creative and critical thinking abilities, all while learning how to use textual evidence for identifying unreliable narrators.