Advanced Placement Classroom: Julius Caesar

The Teaching Success Guide for the Advanced Placement Classroom series helps teachers motivate students above and beyond the norm by introducing investigative, hands-on activities, including debates, role-plays, experiments, projects, and more, all based on Advanced Placement and college-level standards for learning. Julius Caesar allows teachers to take a fresh approach to one of Shakespeare's most famous plays by moving beyond basic history and memorization of quotes. Students will engage in performance approaches to the text, recreate the story's events in a news show format, participate in collaborative literature workshop activities, and debate whether Caesar could have prevented his assassination. The author also provides easy-to-use discussions of Shakespeare's language and how Julius Caesar can be studied from different critical perspectives.


About the Author

Timothy J. Duggan, Ed.D., teaches in the Division of Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education at the University of South Dakota (USD). He also has served as the director of gifted programs at USD, coordinating the South Dakota Governor's Camp and the Ambassadors of Excellence Camp. Dr. Duggan holds degrees from the University of California-Santa Barbara, the University of Nebraska, and the University of South Dakota. He has taught English/language arts at both the high school and college levels, beginning his career in Sonora, CA. From 1997-1999, he served as Director of Education and Outreach for the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival in Omaha, where he managed and performed in the traveling company, "Shakespeare Unbound." Dr. Duggan has given dozens of workshops on teaching Shakespeare through performance and has presented nationally on the subject. He has published articles in Shakespeare, Reading Teacher, and Gifted Child Today, and is the writer/performer of two musical collections devoted to Shakespeare and classic literature, Language Arts 101 and Language Arts 201. He currently lives in the Chicago area, where he continues to teach, write, and perform.