Professional Development

Are you thinking about teaching, Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo’s emotionally piercing story about an Afro-Latina heroine? Join FolgerED for the simple instructions you need to get students doing rigorous literary interpretation and evaluation–all without you!

Don’t miss this juicy lesson on how to introduce students to the plot, setting, and characters of a play in a straightforward way so that quickly get inside the language of the play.

Powerful speeches are meant to be spoken and heard. Muscular language is meant to be flexed. This lesson is all about helping students discover the power of Dr. King’s groundbreaking 1963 speech from Washington.

Get students thinking deeply about control and power by pairing soliloquies in two plays: August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Walk through the what, how, and why of this paired text lesson with the teacher who created it: Amber Phelps, Baltimore City College (MD).

A much more exciting, authentic, and rigorous final assessment than an essay or test. Try the monologue project with virtually any text. Find out how and why this project works with any text, every student.

Zoom in on a Folger Teaching lesson plan that will amaze your students and you! Walk through the what, how, and why of this paired text lesson with the teachers who created it: Dr. Deborah Gascon, Dutch Fork (SC) High School, and Corinne Viglietta, Folger Education. Learn how to let these two poems talk to each other—and how to get your students talking back to both of them.