What does it mean to teach Shakespeare with purpose? It means freeing teachers from the notion that teaching Shakespeare means teaching everything, or teaching "Western Civilisation" and universal themes. Instead, this invigorating new book equips teachers to enable student-centred discovery of these complex texts. Because Shakespeare's plays are excellent vehicles for many topics -history, socio-cultural norms and mores, vocabulary, rhetoric, literary tropes and terminology, performance history, performance strategies - it is tempting to teach his plays as though they are good for teaching everything. This lens-free approach, however, often centres the classroom on the teacher as the expert and renders Shakespeare's plays as fixed, determined, and dead. Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose shows teachers how to approach Shakespeare's works as vehicles for collaborative exploration, to develop intentional frames for discovery, and to release the texts from over-determined interpretations. In other words, this book presents how to teach Shakespeare's plays as living, breathing, and evolving texts.

'For the next six weeks, we meet here, in this room. Unless you are hospitalised, or deceased, or suffering some kind of catastrophic physical or emotional trauma, you need to be here'. It's back to school with a bang for Alisha, Iman and Kareem - they all failed GCSE English and there are only six weeks until their resits. This is their last chance to continue Sixth Form, failure is not an option. It's down to Miss Murphy to see the trio through. But collectively, the students are unruly, she's already snowed under with her other classes and the school is literally falling apart. Can she deliver when there's just as much drama in the staffroom as there is in the classroom?