Social-Emotional Shakespeare Residency

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Performance and Workshops

Through complex text and conflicted characters, Shakespeare provides a rich experience for students to explore and hone their most foundational life skills: self-awareness, critical thinking, empathy, relationship-building and more.

This customized residency ties research-backed social and emotional learning competencies with a live Shakespeare performance and post-show workshops.

How Shakespeare Teaches Social-Emotional Learning

UNDERSTANDING AND MANAGING EMOTIONS
From rage and betrayal to love and joy, Shakespeare’s got them all. Through storytelling, role-playing, movement and conversations, we help students deep dive into their own emotions and learn how to identify and process them in new ways. This is among the most powerful and cathartic work we do.

BUILDING POSITIVE RELATIONSHIPS
Theater helps students get outside of themselves and build connections with one another. During our Shakespeare workshops, students learn how to handle conflict, work cooperatively and communicate thoughtfully in a safe environment.

FEELING AND SHOWING EMPATHY
In order to play Shakespeare’s deeply human characters, students must first understand them. By using Shakespeare’s text and purposeful theater games, students explore the psychology behind complex characters. By working on roles from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they learn about back-story, labelling, and perspective-taking. By doing so, they build greater compassion, empathy and emotional intelligence.

SETTING AND ACHIEVING GOALS
The process of making theater is filled with milestones for students—from learning their first few lines to pulling off a captivating performance. We help students set individual and collective goals for their workshop experience and then provide a framework for reaching those goals and falling short. In doing so, we help students bolster both their confidence and their resilience.

Research shows that students who engage in social and emotional learning activities have lower rates of anxiety, depression and emotional distress and improved attitudes of themselves, helping abilities and academic performances. We’re thrilled to offer schools this new opportunity to help kids unleash their creativity and imagination while boosting these crucial skills.

Participating schools include Brooklyn School of Inquiry, Packer Collegiate and PS261.

Learn more about the benefits of our work and read the frequently asked questions about our Shakespeare Residency.