The Julius Caesar Unit Plan That Works for Reluctant Readers

When you think of engaging a room full of reluctant readers, Julius Caesar is probably not the first text that comes to mind.

But as any English teacher knows, sometimes you’ve got to work with what your district assigns you, and our 14-year labor of love was creating a Julius Caesar unit plan that would engage our reluctant sophomore readers, many of whom were English learners reading below grade level.

Over time, however, we came to enjoy teaching Julius Caesar, and we believe it’s actually a great choice for struggling readers.

While we’ve shared many of our strategies and resources for teaching Shakespeare before as well as our approach to creating a unit plan, we thought we’d dive into the nitty gritty today and let you get a feel for what one of our favorite unit plans really looks like in practice.

Why Julius Caesar Is a Good Choice for Struggling Readers

Before we get into the activities, we realize you might not be sold on our claim that Julius Caesar is actually a great choice for struggling readers.

One reason we like it is that it’s one of Shakespeare’s more straightforward plays. Usually, there are side plots and complications aplenty (we see you, Hamlet and . . . pretty much every single comedy), but in Julius Caesar, we’re just watching the plot to assassinate Caesar unfold, and then we’re watching the consequences play out.

Now, about those consequences. You can skip them. We did, for many years. This might be the only Shakespeare play you can truncate at Act 3 without feeling like you’re cheating your students. Once Caesar dies and the famous funeral speeches have been made, the play shifts to the civil war between the conspirators on one side and Mark Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus on the other, and the whole play feels different. It’s really easy to end the play at Act 3 and briefly summarize the rest, allowing you to tackle the rigor of Shakespeare without its length.

Another reason Julius Caesar works well for reluctant or struggling readers is that it tackles topics they’re interested in. Many of them are at least somewhat familiar with Julius Caesar from their history classes, and bloody conspiracies tend to be attention grabbers. But more than anything else, our teenage students have a lot of feelings about a best friend (Brutus) who literally stabs his friend in the back. Betrayal is something they can get on board with, and get on board they do.

Which Version of the Text Works Best?

We create all of our Shakespeare resources based on the Folger Shakespeare Library editions. Their gloss is one of the better ones, providing not only definitions but explanations of customs and idiomatic phrases that make no sense to the modern ear.

But here’s the real goldmine if you teach struggling readers: Leon Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories. We absolutely love Garfield’s prose adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. They’re engaging and readable, they’re accurate, they’re rich in figurative language, and best of all, they use lines from the play as dialogue so students gain exposure to the original language.

Our unit incorporates materials for both versions of the play, so if you have struggling readers like us, you can use the Garfield adaptation, but if you have stronger or PreAP readers, you can use the original text (with line numbers from the Folger version).

Framing the Unit Plan: Our Approach

Our introductory activities don’t make a lot of sense if you don’t know where we’re headed with this unit, and we’re big proponents of beginning with the end in mind so we can make sure everything leads up to the final project. This strategy has been essential for us in planning as well as streamlining when things get complicated.

So, before we get into the details, let’s frame the unit. We tackle the play from a criminal investigation approach. After reading, students complete a crime report, as if they are investigators who showed up on the Capitol steps after the assassination and funeral speeches. Since there’s no question as to who committed the crime, we have students focus instead on whether Brutus had a good reason to murder Caesar, ultimately writing a business letter to a historian about whether Brutus should be remembered as a traitor to the Roman republic or “the noblest Roman of them all.”

Students enjoy the approach (and have strong feelings about Brutus’s actions), and the business letter format seems less intimidating to students than a formal essay, even though they still have to write a hearty literary analysis paragraph. We love coming up with ways to “trick” our students into writing by not calling the assignment an essay, and the business letter format works nicely with the criminal investigation approach.

Should Brutus be remembered as a traitor to the Roman republic or ‘the noblest Roman of them all’?

Introducing the Unit

If your students don’t have a lot of experience with Shakespeare, we recently created an alternative to the b-o-r-i-n-g introduction PowerPoint presentation we relied on for far too long with the Introduction to Shakespeare Escape Room in which students solve five different puzzles to free Shakespeare from being held hostage by a rival theater company:

If we’d had this activity when we were teaching our Julius Caesar unit, we would have started here! The resource also includes an activity in which students are introduced to Shakespeare’s language by working through one of his sonnets (we did this activity with our students, and it was very successful).

In terms of the actual Julius Caesar unit, we wanted to engage our students, taking advantage of their new semester energy (we taught the play in January and February) and introduce them to some aspect of the unit that would help them to be successful later.

We decided the best way to meet our goals was to introduce criminal investigation vocabulary and the structure of the crime report they would complete after reading the play. Not only was the activity engaging and the vocabulary familiar, but it allowed students to become comfortable with the final project before adding a challenging text.

We thought students would enjoy watching an episode of a TV show with a criminal investigation, which they did, but it took us a few tries to get the episode right. (Let’s just say we needed one with minimal science and nuance involved.) We settled on an episode of Psych (“Meat Is Murder, but Murder Is Also Murder,” Episode 2.6), and the humorous style was perfect for our students.

As they watched the episodes, students answered guided viewing questions written to help them pick up on key information they would need for the crime report, and then they filled out a crime report form, recording information about the victim and his injuries, the crime scene, witnesses, and evidence. Finally, we introduced students to the business letter format they would use for their Julius Caesar project, and they wrote a letter to a judge arguing for the charge and punishment they believed the murderer should receive.

Students had a lot of fun watching the episode and completing the activity, and they did well on the writing assignment, which was a nice start to the semester grade and morale-wise. We also gave them a short quiz on what they learned so they could begin the semester with a solid test grade as well.

As a transition to the text itself, we had students watch a TedED video, “The great conspiracy against Julius Caesar,” to get a little bit of historical context, a much more efficient strategy than the lectures we’d tried in the past.

Guiding Students Through the Reading

For our struggling readers, we assigned Leon Garfield’s prose adaptation of the story, and we created guided reading questions to accompany the sections of the story that corresponded to each of the five acts.

While students reading at or near grade level could complete these assignments independently, we were working with extremely reluctant learners who would not have done the work on their own. We read the adaptation together in class, pausing every time we got to a question for students to check their understanding. Each set of guided reading questions contains 1–2 short-answer questions with sentence starters, and the rest are multiple-choice questions (making feedback more manageable). (Our full unit also includes traditional guided reading questions for PreAP students that align with the original text.)

We were able to get through most “acts” in 1–2 class periods, and between each one, we had students watch a review video and revise any incorrect or inadequate responses from the guided reading assignment. This broke up the reading and helped students clarify their understanding before we moved on.

We mentioned above that we truncated the play at Act 3 for our struggling readers. We did, but this was when we were still trying to wade our way through the original text (and we’d recommend a similar approach if this is what you’re doing). Once we switched to Garfield’s prose adaptation, it was easy enough to cover the entire story. Surprisingly (not surprisingly?), the prose version feels less disjointed than the original.

Filling Out the Official Crime Report

After students finished reading the play, they completed their crime report. After years of painfully grading written reports, we created an engaging drag-and-drop assignment in Google Slides where students provide information about the victim, the crime scene, the evidence, and interviews with key witnesses (Cassius, Brutus, and Mark Antony). 

In addition to identifying key information, students had to place quotations from the text that supported the information on each slide. Not only did this give students the opportunity to practice identifying key evidence to support claims, but it provided them with the evidence they would need to write their business letter. (See, we told you we like to begin with the end in mind.)

Writing the Business Letter to a Historian

After completing the crime report, students had a decision to make: should Brutus be remembered as a traitor to the Roman republic or “the noblest Roman of them all”?

We’re big believers in the use of sentence frames and structured paragraphs, so we provided students with a Memorial Recommendation assignment that walked them through each sentence of their letter of recommendation. We provided a range of sentence starters and hints to help students know where to look if they were having trouble (our unit also includes a PreAP version without the sentence starters). After years of reading documents that were, essentially, a potpourri of fonts and sizes found from all corners of the Internet or woefully transcribed by our students, we also started providing a “quotation bank” with all of the quotations from the crime report already in MLA format.

As students worked through the Memorial Recommendation, they constructed a summary of the events that made up the crime and a triple-5C paragraph (claim, concrete evidence, context, commentary, connection) in which they argued that Brutus should be remembered as either a traitor or a noble Roman.

Before submitting, students formatted their final draft as a formal business letter, and while we used a detailed rubric, holding students accountable for specific elements of business letter format (and giving struggling writers a little grade boost for following the formatting directions), our unit includes a holistic rubric for teachers who are less concerned about the formatting details.

Wrapping Things Up with a Final Exam

We ended the unit with a multiple-choice final exam focused on plot and character details, and our unit includes a PreAP version that also asks students to identify the speaker of key quotations.

The unit took about six weeks, and it was time well spent. Our students were engaged throughout the unit, despite the challenging language, and most of them were able to meaningfully explain their decision about Brutus’s actions and support it with evidence from the play.

We hope you’ll consider trying Julius Caesar out with your struggling readers, and if you do, we hope you’ll find it as rewarding as we did! If you’re interested in the approach we’ve taken (and, more importantly, in saving yourself hours of prep time), you can purchase the full unit, complete with answer keys, scoring guides, and materials for both standard-level and PreAP students. Please reach out to us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works to let us know how it goes!