O'Neill, Cognition, and the Common Core Standards

O'Neill, Cognition, and the Common Core StandardsAuthor(s): Jeanine A. DeFalcoSource: The Eugene O'Neill Review, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2013), pp. 198-226Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/eugeoneirevi.34.2.0198 .

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EugEnE O’nEill REviEw, vOl. 34, nO. 2, 2013

Copyright © 2013 the pennsylvania state University, University park, pa

O’Neill, COgNitiON,

aNd the COmmON

COre StaNdardS

Jeanine A. DeFalco

In light of the newly and widely adopted Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in the United States, this article explores how Eugene O’Neill’s plays can be used to promote the development of specific cognitive think-ing skills necessary to successful learning, and advocates specifically for the inclusion of O’Neill’s plays in the curricula for eleventh- and twelfth-grade language arts classrooms. The recommended curriculum calls for the inclusion of an American playwright from the eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth century. Although it is arguable that other dramatic literary works could be substituted to achieve these ends, the analysis and advocacy that follows is specific to the canon of O’Neill, due in no small measure to his historic influence in the domain of the theater arts from the 1910s to today, as well as in consideration of the breadth of his stylistic approaches evident in the canon of his work.

This article begins with an analysis of the historical marginalization of O’Neill in academia. Next, an overview of some of the cognitive skills neces-sary to successful learning will be identified. These skills will then be cor-related with specific dramatic texts by O’Neill that would best support the development of said skills within the language arts eleventh- and twelfth-grade classrooms. Concomitantly, this examination will link these skills and texts with the following CCSS English Language Arts (ELA) Standards (see appendixes A, B, and C): (Reading Literature) ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.1-10; (Writing) ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.2 and 11-12.3; (Speaking and Listening) ELA-Literacy.SL.11-12.1 and 11-12.3. In all, this article will advocate for a consid-eration of how O’Neill’s dramatic works should have a more central place within the language arts classroom and academia more broadly.



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9addreSSiNg the PhilOSOPhy Of CurriCulum

At the crux of many curriculum issues is the struggle between what is the intent or objective of the curriculum and what is the curriculum as experienced by the student. To what end are we introducing content in our classrooms, and what is the educational value of this process? In light of the current educational Common Core Standards reform movement in this country, teachers must now adjust their pedagogy and curriculum with the express purpose of pre-paring elementary and secondary education students for greater success in the workplace and for post-secondary instruction. This reform requires reanalyz-ing not only what we are teaching in the classroom, but also how that content will increase and improve our students’ ability to successfully navigate post- secondary school experiences.

Today’s technology-driven society removes the need to commit to mem-ory the facts and figures that have been the predominant feature of curricula that position subject matter as the educational ends of instruction. Indeed, current trends in educational research point to the need to include the devel-opment of cognitive skills rather than merely promoting the memorization of content across a variety of disciplines. Educational researcher and theorist John Goodlad argues that the aim of curriculum guides—secondary through university level—should focus on content as a means to an end, as opposed to the indefinite curriculum agendas of schools that promote content as the ultimate educational objective. Goodlad asserts curriculum planners should use as their guide an approach that “maximizes fundamental concepts or principles serving to organize a field of study and use specific topics only as illustrative examples for developing these organizing elements.”1

But to what end, exactly, should curriculum be aimed and organized? According to the report “Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma that Counts,” elementary and secondary curricula should prepare high school graduates with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed either in post-secondary education or in the workforce.2 This report was instrumental in developing the current Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the state-led initiative achieved in cooperation with the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers.

The CCSS were developed in cooperation with teachers, administrators, and experts to develop a clear framework to assist in preparing students for post-secondary experiences. Specifically, the CCSS articulates core concep-tual understandings and procedural objectives throughout a student’s ele-mentary and secondary education in order to provide greater opportunities



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for students to master these ideas and skills by the time they are finished with their secondary education.3

For the purposes of this article, two interesting aspects of the CCSS for Reading Standards for Literature in Language Arts for eleventh and twelfth grades are first that, excepting Shakespeare, there are no specified authors or texts prescribed to address the achievement of the CCSS. Rather, the CCSS leaves room for teachers, curriculum designers, and states to determine what texts would best accomplish the goals of these standards.

Second, the CCSS does not address what metacognitive strategies stu-dents might need to monitor or direct in their thinking. In light of these omissions, then, it is a reasonable endeavor to address how specific texts can not only address the goals of the CCSS, but also how these texts can illu-minate the development of specific cognitive skills identified by educational researchers as key in successful learning. For the purposes of this article, I will use Dr. Robert Sternberg’s definition of successful learning, which includes “the ability to achieve success in life, given one’s personal standards, within one’s sociocultural context . . . capitalizing on one’s strengths and cor-recting or compensating for one’s weaknesses through a balance of analytical, creative, and practical abilities to adapt to, shape, and select environments.”4

Thus, given the flexibility within the CCSS that allows for teachers to choose content for their eleventh- and twelfth-grade ELA classrooms, in addition to examining what cognitive skills are necessary for successful learning, this article advocates that Eugene O’Neill’s dramatic texts can serve both educational aims. This article will identify not only the relevant goals within the CCSS Reading Standards for Literature that specific O’Neill texts can meet, but will also demonstrate that in using these texts, teachers can address particular cognitive skills that researchers have shown will contrib-ute to students’ understanding, memory, and transfer of knowledge.

Chiefly, the cognitive skills that inform successful learning include the notions of spreading activation, visual memory, visual imagery, conceptual knowledge, embodied cognition, depth of processing, and elaborative pro-cessing.5 However, before addressing specifically how O’Neill’s work can help develop these cognitive skills within the CCSS framework, I believe it is impor-tant to address why this advocacy for O’Neill is necessary in the first place.

the margiNalizatiON Of O’Neill

O’Neill’s impact on the American theater from the early 1900s to today estab-lishes him as one of the greatest creative American minds within the domain



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of theater arts. For Howard Gardner, the “acid test” for creativity boils down to whether or not the domain in which the participant operates has been significantly altered by their contribution:

The creator stands out in terms of temperament, personality and stance. She is perennially dissatisfied with current work, current standards, current questions, current answers. She strikes out in unfamiliar directions and enjoys—or at least accepts—being differ-ent from the pack. . . . Creators fail the most frequently and, often, the most dramatically. . . . Even when an achievement has been endorsed by the field, the prototypical creator rarely rests on her laurels; instead, she proceeds along a new, untested path, fully ready to risk failure time and again in return for the opportunity to make another, different mark.6

Thus, the creative mind is one in which the creator regularly, over an extended period of time, produces innovative work that significantly alters the specific domain in which they operate.

For the domain of theater arts, O’Neill passes Gardner’s creativity acid test. O’Neill significantly altered the domain of the American theater of the early and mid-twentieth century with his contributions of thirty-two full-length plays and nineteen one-act plays, many of which were produced on Broadway. He was the recipient of four Pulitzers and was the first American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize—all testaments to his significance to the American theater of the twentieth century. In addition, O’Neill’s canon reveals a continual creative experimentation with style, including works that were based on the principles of symbolism (Mourning Becomes Electra), expressionism (The Hairy Ape), and realism (Long Day’s Journey Into Night), exploring the human experience in both recognizable and innovative ways. As such, his life and legacy should unquestionably have a more prominent place in the secondary education curricula.

Although acknowledging O’Neill as an important creative mind is not a new discovery, it is curious that even in light of his significant, creative con-tributions he seems to have been largely left out of the American secondary education curricula. This fact was pointedly made in the discussion follow-ing the presentation of “Teaching O’Neill” at the Eighth International Eugene O’Neill Conference, hosted at New York University in 2011.

Some participants at this conference speculated that the reason for O’Neill’s absence in the classroom might be due to the controversial subject matter present in some of O’Neill’s plays. Further speculation included the



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idea that teaching O’Neill in the classroom was not a priority for teachers who need to prepare their students to succeed on standardized tests. Still others suggested that teaching the depth and scope of O’Neill’s plays in the classroom was merely too daunting for the uninitiated.

To the first point, it was counterargued that the early sea plays of O’Neill did not, in fact, contain questionable material. Indeed, the idea of what con-stitutes questionable material is a controversial one, and there seems to be a growing acceptance of the inclusion of alternative subject matter in some high school language arts classrooms. For example, while observing a lan-guage arts class at a high school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the fall of 2009, I took note that the students were reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which has explicit language, violence, sexual sit-uations, and alcoholism.7 Also at this same high school in another language arts class, upperclassmen were reading a novel entitled L.E.S. Love, Eloquence and Stars.8 L.E.S. Love, Eloquence and Stars is a novel that takes place in an urban setting where a student has just come out of juvenile hall, and features a lesbian relationship at the core of the narrative. Although perhaps this kind of literature has not found its way into more suburban curricula, suffice it to say that at least in some of our urban schools the content matter of O’Neill’s plays would likely not scandalize student or teacher.

To the second point of why O’Neill has not been more present in the classroom, it was suggested that a teacher’s unwillingness to diverge from a rigid curriculum could be overcome if an O’Neill question was put on a standardized test such as an Advanced Placement exam. This idea suggests that if teachers were forced to teach to the test, then by modifying a standard-ized test to include O’Neill this would insure his inclusion in the curriculum. Although a reasonable suggestion, there seemed to be a general consensus that achieving this objective would be extremely difficult, if not outright impossible.

However, the last reason why O’Neill has not been introduced more regularly into the high school curriculum seems to be the most likely cul-prit, as well as the easiest to remedy: teachers are daunted at the prospect of teaching O’Neill because they themselves have not been exposed to O’Neill in their own studies. Indeed, Susan Harris Smith notes in her book American Drama: The Bastard Art that American dramatic literature has been largely absent from the American literary canon in part due to long-standing critical assertions as to the “mediocrity” of American dramatic lit-erature, as well as through institutional processes of exclusion.9 Indeed, one could speculate that the O’Neill absence in academia is due in no small mea-sure to the tremendous influence of critic Eric Bentley and secondarily to



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his hero-worshipping protégé, Richard Gilman, and their open disdain for O’Neill.

the diSmiSSal Of O’Neill

Smith notes that there has been a long history of dismissing the value of American dramatic literature, as far back as the landing on Plymouth Rock and the Puritan disapproval of theater and drama. Indeed, Smith’s book explores the historical and cultural roots of the marginalization of American dramatic literature and the allegiance to the European canon. This explo-ration includes an analysis of the early twentieth-century critics and their nearly universal de minimis assessment of American playwrights. Smith also notes how American playwrights were excluded from academia, journals, and literature anthologies, including the famed Norton Anthology. Indeed, from 1979 to 1985, one might be surprised to know that the Norton Anthology had no American dramatic literature included at all.10

In light of how critics and academics helped marginalize American lit-erature from societal esteem and cultural consciousness, I will now focus my attention on how two critic-academicians wreaked the most damage on O’Neill’s legacy: the curmudgeon critic Eric Bentley and the combative elitist Richard Gilman.

In the 1946 edition of The Playwright as Thinker: A Study of Drama in Modern Times, Eric Bentley helped cement his position as one of the primary sources of authority on the modern dramatic literary landscape in America.11 In this book’s first edition foreword, Bentley explains why O’Neill was not included in his book of modern dramatic masters. Here is an excerpt from that foreword:

The fact, then, that many well-known contemporary playwrights are not discussed in this book is not necessarily an aspersion on their work. . . . There are three American playwrights in particular whom I would like to have said more about: Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, and Thornton Wilder. One reason I did not say much about them is that all of them are expected to bring out “major” work early in the new postwar period. Since I regard the earlier work of all of them as chiefly promising, rather than great, I propose to wait for the new work before discussing them at length. The fact that I even put O’Neill in the class of promising, and not in the class of Aeschylus where his friends put him, will suggest another reason



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why many well-known playwrights are not discussed in this book: it is that I do not admire them very much. We have been fooling ourselves into believing that the period of 1920–1940 was a great period of drama, particularly American drama. It was not.12

Interestingly, in Bentley’s 1955 and 1967 reprints, he included a “Foreword to the Foreword,” that marked the notorious nature of his original statement: “so many professional readers would read [the foreword to The Playwright as Thinker]—and ignore the rest of the book. Many reviews of The Playwright as Thinker were reviews of its Foreword alone. Most comments made on the book, from that day to this, have really been comments on its Foreword.” Further, Bentley notes that instead of updating the tenth anniversary of the book to include new works of Eliot, Brecht, and Sartre, he chose instead to remove “the substance of the old Foreword,” which was a lambast against the Broadway theater scene during the 1940s.13

However, what is important here is the fact that even in the 1955 and 1967 reprints, Bentley still leaves intact his original dismissal of O’Neill in his amended foreword and makes no attempt to revisit O’Neill’s later works to discuss them “at length,” as promised. In fact, in 2010, the fourth edition of Playwright as Thinker was released with the full original foreword intact and, again, no amendment to that foreword regarding O’Neill, his work, or his impact on American or European theater. Furthermore, his paltry afterword in the fourth edition seems to be much more concerned about his own influ-ence over Brecht than addressing how his aesthetics had ossified over time.

Should there be any doubt as to Bentley’s position on the work of Eugene O’Neill, one need only read his essay “Trying to Like O’Neill” from his book In Search of Theatre.14 Bentley begins “Trying to Like O’Neill” by telling the reader that he really did try to like O’Neill by codirecting The Iceman Cometh for a production in the fall of 1951. Not taking his own advice that the direc-tor should not be a playwright, Bentley confesses that he eliminated an hour’s worth of O’Neill’s play and then, as if in a self-fulfilling prophecy, finds his production of O’Neill’s play is a poor one. This poor production of Bentley’s confirms in Bentley’s own mind that O’Neill’s plays are “unintelligible”15 and O’Neill himself is a “non-thinker”:

O’Neill is an acute case of what Lawrence called “sex in the head.” Sex is almost the only idea he has—has insistently—and it is for him only an idea. Looking back on what I wrote about him a few years ago, I still maintain that O’Neill is no thinker. He is so little a thinker, it is dangerous for him to think. To prove this you have only



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to look at the fruits of his thinking; his comparatively thoughtless plays are better. For a nonthinker he thinks too much.16

The importance of Bentley’s attempts to delegitimize O’Neill lies both in the fact that Bentley exerted a tremendous influence in both critical circles as well as academic. In addition to teaching at Columbia beginning in 1953 and at Harvard in 1960–61, Bentley had a considerable influence on the late critic and academi-cian Richard Gilman. Richard Gilman, having no training in theater or drama, found himself a drama critic for the paper Commonweal from 1961 to 1964. Gilman had attended the University of Wisconsin, 1941–43 and 1946–47, receiv-ing his BA. From 1943 to 1946, Gilman was a staff sergeant in the US Marine Corps and received an honorable discharge in 1946. Indeed, Gilman’s educa-tion about the theater began with reading Bentley’s The Playwright as Thinker.17 Undoubtedly due to his prolific career as a drama critic, Gilman eventually became a professor of dramatic literature and criticism at Yale from 1967 to 1998.

Like Bentley, Richard Gilman was an extremely influential theater critic and likely a very influential figure in the development of theater artists and scholars who graduated from the esteemed Yale School of Drama. In 1972 Gilman published his most “ambitious and arguably his finest work,” The Making of Modern Drama.18 Like Bentley, Gilman did not include O’Neill in its original publication, or in the four reprints that followed. Indeed, Gilman’s 1999 reprint included a new introduction explaining why O’Neill has been and continues to be excluded from this text:

As for O’Neill, my answer is that except for a few of his early sea plays and some late works such as Long Day’s Journey into Night, I think O’Neill was a clumsy, often inept writer, a master faut de mieux (America needed, and thought it deserved, a theatrical giant on a level with the great Europeans; and so a playwright of ordinary talent—and extraordinary ambition—had his reputation inflated, not by any conspiracy but by a rather common process of cultural jingoism to fill the vacuum). I might add that had I been com-manded on pain of death by some authoritarian regime or publisher to pick one American dramatist for the book, without hesitation I would have chosen Tennessee Williams. As for women and minor-ity (in this context, I have always understood this to mean black) playwrights, the answer is that, alas, I know of none who measures up to the standards I was using and continue to maintain.19

What should be highlighted here is the fact that both Bentley’s and Gilman’s influence reached beyond the pale of mere literary reviews and the Sunday



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Times. Rather, both Bentley’s and Gilman’s seminal texts on the masters of twentieth-century playwriting explicitly and specifically excluded O’Neill. Indeed, Bentley’s and Gilman’s cooperative effort to promote this campaign of exclusion is well illustrated in Gilman’s introduction to the fourth edition of The Playwright as Thinker (2010), in which Gilman identifies “Trying to Like O’Neill” as “the shrewdest estimate I know of our (alas!) best playwright.”20

As a professor at one of the premier institution for dramatic studies, Gilman exerted a thirty-year influence over future theater practitioners, the extent of which is beyond the scope of this article but undoubtedly must have been significant. To demonstrate Bentley’s influence, however, I would like to point to a 1991 TDR interview in which the interviewer, John Louis DiGaetani (a professor of English from Hofstra University) commented on Bentley’s considerable influence over generations of theater practitioners and academics with his work on Brecht, Beckett, and other modern masters:

digaetani: What do you feel you’ve contributed to the American theatre? I know that’s a big question.

bentley: With a small answer? I usually haven't gotten anywhere with my projects for the theatre. When people ask me if my writing for the theatre has had any effects, I'm quite skeptical, but I suppose it’s part of the more general question: what impact is made on the world by any attempts to make a dent in it? I get nowhere.

digaetani: I want to disagree because when I was a student I learned about many contemporary playwrights through your work. I learned about Pirandello through your translations; I learned about Brecht through your introductions and translations. You've made many people aware of the giants of twentieth-century theatre.

bentley: Well, there has been an influence through the educational system.21

While Bentley was instrumental in introducing the American public to Beckett and Brecht as great modern playwriting masters, and Gilman cham-pioned Harold Pinter and Peter Handke, O’Neill was quite unceremoniously kicked to the curb of academia. To dismiss or diminish O’Neill’s work based on a narrowly constructed, Eurocentric-dominant paradigm, as both Bentley and Gilman did, arguably has had a significant impact on O’Neill’s marginal-ization in our current educational curriculum.

In light of the considerable amount of O’Neill scholarship that has emerged in recent years, and recognizing the impact O’Neill had during his own lifetime, it is a valuable endeavor to advocate for a greater inclusion of



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O’Neill’s plays in American secondary school classrooms, particularly if O’Neill’s exclusion was due in part to mere aesthetic prejudice by influential critic/academicians. I will now turn my attention to how the plays of O’Neill can be used to help develop specific cognitive skills that can contribute to the successful intelligence needed for college and career readiness of our eleventh- and twelfth-grade students, as well as meet specific CCSS for Language Arts.

COgNitive SkillS, O’Neill, aNd the laNguage artS

COmmON COre StaNdardS

Perhaps it would be sufficient to advocate for the inclusion of O’Neill based solely on how his works can fulfill certain guidelines within the CCSS. However, it is my position that by further correlating empirical research regarding how people learn with arts-based pedagogy, this article can pro-vide teachers with the science to justify creative instruction in the classroom. In this way, theater, and art more broadly, can be recontextualized as the backbone of effective instruction, taking a more central place in the second-ary classroom.

Recognizing the time limitations that many secondary education teach-ers face in the classroom, an arts-based approach to instruction risks being marginalized if it is assessed as an “extra,” something secondary to “real,” effective instruction. My aim here is to demonstrate that current research in cognitive science is empirically demonstrating that effective learning is a complex task dependent upon a number of neurological phenomena. As such, it is my position that the science of learning can best be addressed through nontraditional, arts-based instructional means that are superior to passive, active, and event-constructivist instruction. Although there is a dearth of empirical research in theater education, what I propose here is a correlative analysis matching function to form, demonstrating how an arts-based approach to learning supports a variety of tenets in cognitive science. Clearly there is a need for future empirical investigations of these propos-als, but I believe that the following analyses are a valuable endeavor in the absence of controlled, multivariate testing.

As such, the following sections focus on recommendations for pedagogical approaches using O’Neill dramatic texts in the ELA, eleventh- and twelfth-grade classrooms designed to address students’ understand-ing, memory, and transfer of knowledge. The success of these processes has been empirically correlated to the following principles in cognitive



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research: conceptual knowledge, spreading activation, grounded cognition, mental imagery, depth of processing, and elaborative processing. Further, these cognitive concepts are correlated to the teaching of the following O’Neill plays: The Hairy Ape, The Homecoming from Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, “Anna Christie,” and Desire Under the Elms.

coNceptual KNowleDge: The hairy ape (ela-literacy.

rl.11-12.1, 2, 4 aND ela.-literacy.w.11-12.2)

The first recommendation for teachers to improve the understanding, mem-ory, and transfer of knowledge for their students is based on the principle of conceptual knowledge. Conceptual knowledge refers to how we categorize information to distinguish one element from another. John Anderson, pro-fessor of psychology and computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, tells us in his authoritative text on cognitive psychology that research on conceptual knowledge has focused on how we form categories and use these categories to interpret experiences.22

Anderson states that the way in which we categorize and organize our knowledge strongly influences how we remember information and experi-ences.23 More recent research on how people categorize information comes from the work of Anderson and Betz who note that people employ both abstractions and specific instances in categorization.24 This emphasis on the interplay between abstraction and specific instances speaks to the impor-tance of being able both to encourage students to use their own imaginative skills to understand new information and to provide students with specific instances to demonstrate new information.

With this research in mind, then, the recommendation to improve a student’s contextual knowledge would be for teachers to create learning experiences through which certain key terms (categories) within the text of The Hairy Ape could be used as a framework to predict themes (interpret experiences) found throughout the play. This could be accomplished through employing the technique of tableau vivant within a curriculum unit.

Tableau vivant is literally a “living picture” people create with their bod-ies that can be employed to demonstrate a collective understanding of word, idea, or event. To use this technique, the teacher would have students get into groups of four or five people, and assign act 1, scene 1, from The Hairy Ape for the students to mine the text for three words: (1) one word that is repeated in the scene; (2) one word used metaphorically in the scene, and (3) one word that is identified as a strong action verb. Once students have chosen their



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three words, they would be instructed to pick one of their words and create a tableau vivant demonstrating their interpretation of the word.

These interpretations could be an abstracted image (i.e., an image that demonstrates fear), or an image in which the word is being “acted out” though frozen in time. The tableaux generated by the class, then, could serve as possible themes for understanding The Hairy Ape. These tableaux vivants and themes would also be a way for students to categorize important textual clues, which could serve as a conceptual unifying point around which other information can be arranged.

The Hairy Ape is one of O’Neill’s expressionist plays in which the subjec-tive emotions and responses of the characters are depicted instead of a more objective picture of reality. As such, the structure and themes of this play lend themselves readily to the more stylistic and expressive activity of the tab-leau vivant exercise. Indeed, the tableau vivant can be used to illuminate and make transparent the explicit and implicit meanings of this densely symbolic and emotional play.

Accordingly, using The Hairy Ape and the tableau vivant exercise would be an engaging way to fulfill ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.1 that speaks to stu-dents demonstrating an ability to use textual evidence to support analysis of explicit and inferred meaning. Also, ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.2 would also be addressed through this unit: students must identify two or more themes that are identified and analyzed as to their relevance to the rest of the body of the text. Further, ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.4 would be relevant here, as that stan-dard speaks to students determining the meaning of figurative and connota-tive words and phrases used in the text. Last, having students memorialize this experience through a journal entry or short essay would provide a sum-mary account of the theme and how they predict it could relate to the rest of the play, partially addressing ELA.Literacy.W.11-12.2, in which students write informative/explanatory texts to explore ideas through analysis of content.

SpreaDiNg activatioN aND primiNg: Mourning

BecoMes elecTra (ela-literacy.Sl.11-12.3 aND 11-12.7)

This next recommendation is based on the notion of spreading activation and priming. In lay terms, spreading activation reflects the notion that ideas or content that a person attends to can make associated memories more readily available for recall. Related to spreading activation is the idea that this effect can prime a person’s memory particularly as it relates to comprehension of text.25 This means if someone is exposed to a stimulus it will affect that per-son’s response to a later stimulus. Introducing certain concepts and content



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wearly in a lesson should prime a student’s ability to process other ideas and content addressed later in the lesson.

Memory is improved through priming when prompts are provided that are closely associated with the context of a particular memory. Eich argues that “the magnitude of contextual effects depends on the degree to which the participant integrates the context with the memories.”26 Thus, one way in which teachers can prime students’ memories and support the process of spreading activation is to engage students in an activity before students begin reading a text such as Mourning Becomes Electra.

The suggested instructional design for this particular play can begin with introducing the world of the play within a more contemporary and familiar framework. Before students even read the play, the teacher can explain to the class that they are going to explore the world of The Homecoming, the first play in the trilogy that makes up Mourning Becomes Electra, through the improvisatory activity “The Interview.”

In the Interview activity, the teacher explains to the students that they are going to read a play in which a murder takes place. The teacher can then write down a number of characters from the play on the blackboard with some notable character information alongside the names. Next, the teacher would explain to the students that she is going to go into a role as one of the characters from the board. In the Interview activity, the students are to ask the teacher, once she is in role, information about the character she is portraying: who is the character, what does she know about the murder, and so on. In this way, students begin generating questions about the text, circumstances, and the characters so that this process primes a student’s ability to identify and remem-ber key information while studying The Homecoming. Using this Interview activity, then, not only addresses the notion of spreading activation theory and priming, but also addresses the ELA-Literacy.SL.11-12.3 in which students are required to assess a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, stance, word choice, point of emphasis, and tone used—in this case, the speaker being the teacher in role and the students evaluating through the Interview construct.

Also, if a teacher wanted to expand this unit and include the other two parts of the trilogy, The Hunted and The Haunted, the goals of ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.7 would be addressed. RL.11-12.7 requires students to analyze mul-tiple interpretations of a story, drama, or poem by an American dramatist. By teaching the entire trilogy of O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, secondary students can examine how O’Neill’s trilogy corresponds to the themes of the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus.

The Homecoming, then, is an excellent choice for addressing these aforementioned Common Core Standards, given the requirement to



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11analyze multiple interpretations of a story, drama, or poem by an American dramatist. This play also is well suited to the Interview activity as the murder mystery inquiry is a familiar framework both in the media and in books, film and television, lending itself to support the principles of priming and spread-ing activation. Given that O’Neill constructed this play as a revival of Greek tragedy indicates that both the content and structure of this particular play would be uniquely well served through this Interview activity.

grouNDeD cogNitioN: The iceMan coMeTh (ela-literacy.

rl.11-12.5 aND ela-literacy.w.11-12.3)

The notion of grounded cognition is another cognitive theory that addresses how people learn. This view endorses the notion that knowledge is partly situated and a product of the activity, culture, and context in which it is con-structed and employed. Also, grounded cognition theorists maintain that cognition is not restricted to the body’s physical encounters with its envi-ronment, but is also grounded in a myriad of ways that include simulation, action, and bodily states.27 Teachers can employ the principles of grounded cognition through an exploration of The Iceman Cometh.

This recommendation would include having students construct a tab-leau vivant that would incorporate thought tracking in order for students to understand narrative perspective and event sequencing. Thought tracking is engaged when students are in their tableau vivant. A teacher would tap on the students’ shoulders one at a time and have them express what either they or their character is thinking. The thought-tracking exercise could also be designed to have students create a tableau vivant that explores what charac-ters might be doing and thinking before the action of the play starts or after the play concludes.

For example, the teacher could have students create a tableau vivant showing what happened before the characters entered Harry Hope’s saloon, or what happened the last time James “Jimmy Tomorrow” Cameron tried to go outside to get his old job back. Another tableau vivant could also depict what happened the last time Hickey visited the saloon and before he decided to give up alcohol. Then the teacher would tap the students on the shoulder for them to say a line either about what they are thinking or what they are doing in their scene.

An extension of this activity includes having the students create a second tableau that demonstrates what happens next for these characters based on their original tableau, and then a third tableau that might reveal a resolution or unexpected conflict that happens among these characters. The teacher



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wcould then have the students run through the sequence of their tableaux, creating a dramatic narrative. This exercise could also culminate in the stu-dents memorializing this dramatic narrative, perhaps writing their own dia-logue, short story, or a poem about a real or imagined experience related to the themes of one or all of their tableaux.

The Iceman Cometh particularly lends itself to this tableau vivant instruc-tional design. The motley crew of characters, each one consumed with his own pipe dreams and unique back-stories, provides a breadth of opportu-nities for experimenting with narrative perspective and event sequencing. Who were these characters before they came into the saloon? How did they get their dreams? How would these characters react if their dreams ever came true? By embodying these characters through the tableau vivant and exten-sion activities, students can physicalize who these characters were before the action of the play as well as how they may change post the action of the play.

Through the tableau vivant sequence, then, the principles of grounded cognition (physical encounters with the environment, simulation, action, and bodily states) can provide an immediate and deeply personal way for students to construct meaning about these characters and this play. As in The Hairy Ape, the expressionist elements of The Iceman Cometh may best be understood by embodying the characters through the movement, gesture, and thought tracking that can emerge from the tableau vivant and accompa-nying improvisatory structures.

This unit could be used to satisfy ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.5 in which stu-dents are expected to analyze how authors structure their texts, for example, how they choose to begin and end their work, and how the piece is resolved. This unit could also be used to satisfy the ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.3 in which students are required to write narratives to develop real or imagined experi-ences with details and well-structured event sequences.

meNtal imagery: long Day’s Journey inTo nighT

(ela-literacy.rl.11-12.6, 9, aND 10)

The next recommendation for teachers is based on the principle of mental imagery using the text of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The objective of this recommendation is to encourage students to see things through perspec-tives other than what is specifically stated in the text. Mental imagery reflects the principle that individuals can anticipate how objects look from different perspectives in the absence of external sources for perceptual information. Further, mental imagery enables us to construct and inspect new objects in our minds.28



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13Noting the importance of mental imagery in processing new

information, teachers can develop a unit on Long Day’s Journey Into Night in which students are brought to understand and identify abstract concepts such as tragic irony within the play through the use of “Role on the Wall.” Role on the Wall is an outlined drawing of a nondescript body that the teacher would hang on the wall of the classroom. On this outline, students would fill in the outside of the outline first, writing down examples of what the Tyrone family say to each other, while on the inside of the outline they would write down what the characters may be really thinking but are keeping hidden from each other. This process would help teach the notion of tragic irony where words and actions of characters contradict the real situation of a moment as real-ized by the readers or spectators.

By contextualizing the Tyrone family’s public and private thoughts and actions through the activity Role in the Wall, students can create a visual construct of what tragic irony consists of, which can then be used as a mental image to prompt students when they are required to identify other abstract elements in a text. Students can employ the image of Role on the Wall as a way to mentally decode the text and the respective intent of the characters through visualizing their analysis, as represented on the outline. Students can also use the principles of mental imagery to imagine the difference between what is said by the characters and what they intend by having them imagine what the scenes might look like if they were watching the characters speak according to their real intentions.

The value of using this activity with Long Day’s Journey Into Night lies primarily in the fact that this work, deeply steeped in the tradition of real-ism, lends itself particularly well to investigating subtext, satire, sarcasm, and understatement. So many of the conversations of the Tyrone family are pregnant with hidden and double meanings, pregnant with implications, and incredibly hostile under the surface. Indeed, although the text itself is masterfully crafted, the arguable genius of this work is the unspoken agony that bubbles under the surface of the spoken word and, when attended to, completely transforms the meaning and rhythm of this play. Having students contextualize, then, the unspoken thoughts and feelings of these characters could arguably bring a richer, more profound understanding to the tragic story of the Tyrones.

This activity would address ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.6 in which stude-nts are to distinguish what is directly stated in a text from the subtext, thus d iscerning satire, sarcasm, and understatement. Also, by teaching Long Day’s Journey Into Night, teachers would be satisfying ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.9, which states that students should be able to articulate knowledge of



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w eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century foundational works of American literature. Last, ELA-Literacy.RL.11-10 requires students to read literature (including dramas) within the 11-CCR text complexity band. Long Day’s Journey Into Night has long been considered a foundational work of the greatest literary merit and also has a 1220 Lexile range, falling within the 1215–1355 range that corresponds to the 11-CCR text complexity range.29

Depth oF proceSSiNg: “anna chrisTie”

(ela-literacy.rl.11-12.3)

The depth of processing principle is based on the notion that we retain new information better if our interactions with material are done in a way that is personally relevant and meaningful. Therefore, the aim of this recommen-dation is for teachers to have students understand the play “Anna Christie” through close examination of the language of the play and attend to how that language creates meaning.

Craik and Lockhart argue that material that is rehearsed in a meaningful way is critical in storing long-term memory.30 The research of Kapur et al. included a PET study of how the brain correlates deep and shallow process-ing of words, the end result being that participants remembered 75 percent of the deeply processed words and 57 percent of the shallowly processed words.31 Further, the research of Barsalou, Simmons, Barbey, and Wilson states that people better understand sentences by coming up with a perceptual interpre-tation of those sentences.32

With this in mind, then, in order for students to understand the struc-tural elements of “Anna Christie,” that is, where the story is set, how the action is ordered, and how characters are introduced and developed, this recom-mendation incorporates the activity where a teacher engages students in a “Story Whoosh,” and further assigns students to enact scenes from the play. In a Story Whoosh, students sit in a circle (preferably on the floor) and take turns speaking lines from the circle while volunteers physically act out the spoken text within the circle. In this activity, roles are not assigned but rather every-one takes a turn in speaking the text out loud. While the text is being read and enacted in this way, students would have the opportunity to process more deeply what the text means by physicalizing it, watching it, and speaking it.

This activity is particularly conducive to the complexity of the cir-cumstances within “Anna Christie” in which the physical environment and the spatial relationships that the characters have both with each other and with their environment can further transform a cursory reading of the text. O’Neill’s placement of this drama on land (in a bar) and on sea both



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15metaphorically as well as temporally influences how the characters speak their speech and relate to each other physically. By having students physi-calize this story and not merely say the text, students can better discern the influence of that these circumstances have on the construction of meaning of this drama.

After the Story Whoosh, teachers could then assign a more traditional acting exercise where students are assigned a scene to perform in class. This activity, including an extended rehearsal process of perhaps four to six weeks, would further the students’ ability to process more deeply the text of “Anna Christie” by encouraging students both to understand the meaning of the words they are hearing and saying and to encourage them to find ways of expressing that understanding through movement, voice, and gesture.

Through these two activities, teachers would address the ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.3, which require students to analyze how an author organizes cir-cumstances and action within a text, as well as how characters are introduced and developed.

elaborative proceSSiNg: Desire unDer The elMs

(ela-literacy.Sl.11-12.1)

The last recommendation for teachers to improve the understanding, mem-ory, and transfer of knowledge of their students is based on the principle of elaborative processing, using the text Desire under the Elms. Elaborative pro-cessing, closely related to depth of processing, is the principle that when we articulate new connections and inferences from content we obtain a greater understanding of that content.

Anderson tells us, “There is evidence that more elaborative processing results in better memory. Elaborative processing involves creating addi-tional information that relates and expands on what it is that needs to be remembered.” Relevant research about elaborative processing includes the research of Anderson and Bower, who demonstrate that for participants in their experiment who generated elaborations on sentences the experimenter provided, the participants were able to recall 72 percent of the objects initially presented to them. Owens, Bower, and Black also demonstrated that par-ticipants were able to recall more of a story because of participant-generated elaborations. In sum, the consensus seems to be that memory for materials improves as long as meaningful elaborations are integrated into the process of learning content.33

So, in order to improve a student’s memory about the characters and sequence of events in a dramatic text, the last instructional recommendation



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woffered is that teachers facilitate experiences where students can articulate information that relates to and expands upon what is written in Desire under the Elms. This next pedagogical recommendation, then, is that teachers facil-itate a “Process Drama” in which students and teachers engage in role-play to further aid students’ ability to remember the circumstances, events, and characters from Desire under the Elms.34

A Process Drama, according to process drama expert Cecily O’Neill, is “to generate a dramatic ‘elsewhere,’ a fictional world, which will be inhabited for the insights, interpretations, and understandings it may yield.”35 For the Process Drama proposed in this recommendation, the fictional world could be a contemporary courtroom where Abbie Putnam would be put on trial for the murder of her infant.

In this Process Drama, the teacher would explain that she needs stu-dents to play the prosecutors, the defending attorneys, witnesses, and judges. Within this improvisatory structure, students would establish and assume for themselves one of these aforementioned roles as opposed to being assigned these roles by the teacher. Additionally, the teacher could be in role as Abbie and either speak on her behalf or keep silent, requiring the students to cre-ate her story on her behalf. Each student would be responsible for not only knowing his or her own character but knowing the sequence of events as that character would know it (either as characters from the play or the role they are playing, e.g., prosecuting attorney). Students would also be responsible for elaborating on the observations, evidence, and speculations that would come up during the improvisatory Process Drama.

One of the unique aspects of the Process Drama is that at any point in time the action of the improvisation can be stopped and students can reflect on what happened in the improvisation. The improvisation can then either be resumed or roles can be reassigned so students can experiment with engaging in the drama from a different perspective. Essentially, through this Process Drama, students would be required to do significant elaborative pro-cessing regarding the play. This experience could help students generate per-sonal, meaningful elaborations of content that can then be further applied through essay writing or any other formal evaluative measure.

Desire under the Elms was O’Neill’s last naturalistic play and is another example of his attempt to employ classic Greek plots and themes in his dra-mas, essentially retelling Euripides’ Hippolytus and Racine’s Phèdre. Although one can argue that Mourning Becomes Electra or any other play by any other author could theoretically be substituted for Desire under the Elms, I would argue that this play has earned a place within the classroom as “the first



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17important tragedy to be written in America,” according to Travis Bogard, the late preeminent O’Neill scholar.36

Perhaps more than any other of O’Neill’s work, Desire under the Elms is a richly dramatic, uniquely American play. Indeed, one could argue that this play foreshadows in style, theme, and tone Steinbeck’s East of Eden: both Adam Trask and Eben starting their lives on a desolate, rural Connecticut farm where warring half-brothers set the stage early for their respective tragic journeys. More important, however, is how masterfully O’Neill constructs this play in which the climatic tragedy is both surprising and inevitable, achieving a timeliness comparable to the ancient Greeks with its depiction of epic love, loss, and longing.

Drama, it is said, is action. With that in mind, Desire under the Elms offers a historically rich and emotionally complex drama for students to explore, deconstruct, and reassemble through Process Drama techniques. Through this Process Drama construct, then, elaborative processing can be best capi-talized, namely, using theatrical structures to create improvised, additional information that relates and expands on what needs to be remembered about this exemplar of American tragedy.

In using Desire under the Elms with this particular instructional approach, then, the ELA-Literacy.SL.11-12.1 would be met. This standard requires students to initiate and participate in a range of discussions with peers on eleventh- and twelfth-grade topics, texts, and issues, where demo-cratic discussion and decision-making occurs, and where conversations fol-low a response to questions that probe reasoning and evidence.

Similar to the recommendation for Mourning Becomes Electra, Desire under the Elms could also be used to fulfill ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.7 where students are to analyze multiple interpretations of a story, drama, or poem by an American dramatist—particularly if the unit also incorporated either Euripides’ Hippolytus or Racine’s Phèdre. Although Desire under the Elms can stand on its own merit for inclusion in the curriculum, addressing both cog-nitive learning principles and Common Core Standards should give ample reason why this play should be brought into the secondary ELA classroom.

a Call fOr the iNCluSiON Of O’Neill iN the ClaSSrOOm

I believe we are on the cusp of a very exciting time in education. The advancement of cognitive science and the ability to empirically validate how the mind thinks and reasons has enormous implications for the future of



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wcurriculum design and instruction. Combining the science of learning with an arts-based approach to meeting the Common Core Standards holds the promise of an engaging and meaningful learning experience as educators recalibrate their classroom instruction toward the postsecondary education success of their students.

The continued exclusion of O’Neill in academia is a grave oversight that has been perpetuated by a history and a culture that has unjustifiably mar-ginalized American dramatic literature. O’Neill was demonstrably a quint-essential creative mind of the early twentieth century, a mind that helped transform the literary and performance landscape of American theater. As our secondary schools move forward in embracing the Common Core State Standards to improve the learning of all students, secondary educators and those entrusted with the education of preservice teachers should include O’Neill and his dramatic literature in their curriculum designs. By doing so, they would arguably make significant strides in preparing their students for postsecondary college and career readiness in such a way that would also address the development of important cognitive skills necessary for success-ful intelligence. Not to mention, they are also really, really good plays.

aPPeNdix a

Reading Standards for Literature 6-12

The CCR anchor standards and high school grade-specific standards work in tandem to define college and career readiness expectations—the former providing broad standards, the latter providing additional specificity.

Grades 9-10 students: Grades 11-12 students:

Key Ideas and Details

1. Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

1. Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.

2. Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text.

2. Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.



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3. Analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme.

3. Analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed).

Craft and Structure

4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone (e.g., how the language evokes a sense of time and place; how it sets a formal or informal tone).

4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including words with multiple meanings or language that is particularly fresh, engaging, or beautiful. (Include Shakespeare as well as other authors.)

5. Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure a text, order events within it (e.g., parallel plots), and manipulate time (e.g., pacing, flashbacks) create such effects as mystery, tension, or surprise.

5. Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact.

6. Analyze a particular point of view or cultural experience reflected in a work of literature from outside the United States, drawing on a wide reading of world literature.

6. Analyze a case in which grasping point of view requires distinguishing what is directly stated in a text from what is really meant (e.g., satire, sarcasm, irony, or understatement).

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

7. Analyze the representation of a subject or a key scene in two different artistic mediums, including what is emphasized or absent in each treatment (e.g., Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus).

7. Analyze multiple interpretations of a story, drama, or poem (e.g., recorded or live production of a play or recorded novel or poetry), evaluating how each version interprets the source text. (Include at least one play by Shakespeare and one play by an American dramatist.)

8. (Not applicable to literature) 8. (Not applicable to literature)

9. Analyze how an author draws on and transforms source material in a specific work (e.g., how Shakespeare treats a theme or topic from Ovid or the Bible or how a later author draws on a play by Shakespeare).

9. Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature, including how two or more texts from the same period treat similar themes or topics.



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Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity

10. By the end of grade 9, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, in the grades 9–10 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range. By the end of grade 10, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, at the high end of the grades 9–10 text complexity band independently and proficiently.

10. By the end of grade 11, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, in the grades 11–CCR text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range. By the end of grade 12, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, at the high end of the grades 11–CCR text complexity band independently and proficiently.

© Copyright 2010. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved.

aPPeNdix b

Speaking And Listening Standards 6–12

The CCR anchor standards and high school grade-specific standards work in tandem to define college and career readiness expectations—the former providing broad standards, the latter providing additional specificity.


Comprehension and Collaboration

1. Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 9–10 topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

1. Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discus-sions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 11–12 topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

a. Come to discussions prepared, having read and researched material under study; explicitly draw on that preparation by referring to evidence from texts and other research on the topic or issue to stimulate a thoughtful, well-reasoned exchange of ideas.

a. Come to discussions prepared, having read and researched mate-rial under study; explicitly draw on that preparation by referring to evidence from texts and other research on the topic or issue to stimulate a thoughtful, well- reasoned exchange of ideas.



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b. Work with peers to set rules for collegial discussions and decision-making (e.g., informal consensus, taking votes on key issues, presentation of alternate views), clear goals and deadlines, and individual roles as needed.

b. Work with peers to promote civil, democratic discussions and decision-making, set clear goals and deadlines, and establish individual roles as needed.

c. Propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that relate the current discussion to broader themes or larger ideas; actively incor-porate others into the discussion; and clarify, verify, or challenge ideas and conclusions.

c. Propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that probe reasoning and evidence; ensure a hearing for a full range of positions on a topic or issue; clar-ify, verify, or challenge ideas and conclusions; and promote diver-gent and creative perspectives.

d. Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives, summarize points of agreement and disagreement, and, when warranted, qualify or justify their own views and understand-ing and make new connections in light of the evidence and reasoning presented.

d. Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives; synthesize comments, claims, and evidence made on all sides of an issue; resolve contradictions when possible; and determine what additional information or research is required to deepen the investigation or complete the task.

2. Integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively, orally) evaluating the credibility and accuracy of each source.

2. Integrate multiple sources of inform-ation presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quanti tatively, orally) in order to make informed decisi ons and solve problems, evalua-ting the credibility and accuracy of each source and noting any discrepancies among the data.

3. Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, rea-soning, and use of evidence and rhetoric, identifying any fallacious reasoning or exaggerated or distorted evidence.

3. Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric, assessing the stance, premises, links among ideas, word choice, points of emphasis, and tone used.

Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas

4. Present information, findings, and supporting evidence clearly, concisely, and logically such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, substance, and style are appropriate to purpose, audience, and task.

4. Present information, findings, and supporting evidence, conveying a clear and distinct perspective, such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning, alternative or opposing perspectives are addressed, and the organization, development, substance, and style are appropriate to purpose, audience, and a range of formal and informal tasks.



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aPPeNdix C

Writing Standards 6–12


Text Types and Purposes (continued)

3. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences.

3. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences.

a. Engage and orient the reader by setting out a problem, situation, or observation, establishing one or multiple point(s) of view, and introducing a narrator and/or characters; create a smooth pro-gression of experiences or events.

a. Engage and orient the reader by setting out a problem, situation, or observation and its significance, establishing one or multiple point(s) of view, and introducing a narrator and/or characters; create a smooth progression of experiences or events.

b. Use narrative techniques, such as dialogue, pacing, description, reflection, and multiple plot lines, to develop experiences, events, and/or characters.

b. Use narrative techniques, such as dialogue, pacing, description, reflection, and multiple plot lines, to develop experiences, events, and/or characters.

c. Use a variety of techniques to sequ ence events so that they build on one another to create a coherent whole.

c. Use a variety of techniques to sequ-ence events so that they build on one another to create a coherent whole and build toward a particular tone and out come (e.g., a sense of mystery, suspense, growth, or resolution).

5. Make strategic use of digital media (e.g., textual, graphical, audio, visual, and interactive elements) in presentations to enhance understanding of findings, reasoning, and evidence and to add interest.

5. Make strategic use of digital media (e.g., textual, graphical, audio, visual, and interactive elements) in presentations to enhance understanding of findings, reasoning, and evidence and to add interest.

6. Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and tasks, demonstrating command of formal English when indicated or appropriate. (See grades 9–10 Language standards 1 and 3 on page 54 for specific expectations.)

6. Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and tasks, demonstrating a command of formal English when indicated or appropriate. (See grades 11–12 Language standards 1 and 3 on page 54 for specific expectations.)




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d. Use precise words and phrases, telling details, and sensory language to convey a vivid picture of the experiences, events, setting, and/or characters.

d. Use precise words and phrases, telling details, and sensory language to convey a vivid picture of the experiences, events, setting, and/or characters.

e. Provide a conclusion that follows from and reflects on what is experienced, observed, or resolved over the course of the narrative.

e. Provide a conclusion that follows from and reflects on what is experi-enced, observed, or resolved over the course of the narrative.

Production and Distribution of Writing

4. Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience. (Grade-specific expectations for writing types are defined in standards 1–3 above.)

4. Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience. (Grade-specific expectations for writing types are defined in standards 1–3 above.)

5. Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach, focusing on addressing what is most significant for a specific purpose and audience. (Editing for conventions should demonstrate command of Language standards 1–3 up to and including grades 9–10 on page 54.)

5. Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach, focusing on addressing what is most significant for a specific purpose and audience. (Editing for conventions should demonstrate command of Language standards 1–3 up to and including grades 11–12 on page 54.)

6. Use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products, taking advantage of technology’s capacity to link to other information and to display information flexibly and dynamically.

6. Use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products in response to ongoing feedback, including new arguments or information.

Research to Build and Present Knowledge

7. Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question) or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.

7. Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question) or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.



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8. Gather relevant information from multiple authoritative print and digital sources, using advanced searches effectively; assess the usefulness of each source in answering the research question; integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and following a standard format for citation.

8. Gather relevant information from multiple authoritative print and digital sources, using advanced searches effectively; assess the strengths and limitations of each source in terms of the task, purpose, and audience; integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and overreliance on any one source and following a standard format for citation.


NOteS

1. John Goodlad, Education Renewal: Better Teachers, Better Schools (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997), 136.

2. The American Diploma Project, Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma that Counts (2004), 1. Retrieved from http://www.achieve.org/ReadyorNot.

3. National Governors Association, Council of Chief State School Officers, Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects from the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers (Washington, DC: Authors, 2010).

4. Robert J. Sternberg, “The Theory of Successful Intelligence,” Review of General Psychology 3, no. 4 (1999): 293.

5. John Anderson, Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications (New York: Worth Publishers, 2010).

6. Howard Gardner, Five Minds for the Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2006), Kindle edition.

7. Sherman Alexie, Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (New York: Little, Brown, 2007).

8. Kim Kelly, L.E.S. Love, Eloquence and Stars (New York: Self-published, 2010), accessed from http://kimkellywriting.com/.

9. Susan Harris Smith, American Drama: The Bastard Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3.

10. Ibid., 23–28, 33.11. Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker (Cornwall, NY: Reynal and Hitchcock,

1946).12. Ibid., 13–14.13. Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker, reprint of 1946 ed. (New York: Meridian,

1955), ix, xi.



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14. Eric Bentley, In Search of Theatre (New York: Vintage, 1952).15. Ibid., 94.16. Ibid., 97.17. Bentley, Playwright as Thinker, reprint of 1946 ed., xviii.18. Ben Brantley, “Richard Gilman, Theater Critic, Dies at 83,” New York Times (Theater

section), October 31, 2006. Retrieved from http://theater.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/theater/31gilman.html?r=0.

19. Richard Gilman, The Making of Modern Drama, reprint of 1972 ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), x.

20. Ibid., xxii.21. John DiGaetani, “The Thinker as Playwright: An Interview with Eric Bentley,” TDR

35 (1991): 85–86.22. Anderson, Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications, 132.23. Ibid.24. J. R. Anderson and J. Betz, “A Hybrid Model of Categorization,” Psychonomic

Bulletin and Review 8 (2001): 629–47.25. Anderson, Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications, 159, 160.26. E. Eich, “Context, Memory, and Integrated Item/Context Imagery,” Journal of

Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 11 (1985): 764–70.27. Lawrence Barsalou, “Grounded Cognition,” Annual Review of Psychology 59

(2008): 1, 2.28. Anderson, Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications, 93–95, 101.29. Daniel Burt, The Drama 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Plays of All Time (New York:

Facts on File, 2008), accessed from http://www.scribd.com/doc/34271098/10/THE-ICEMAN-COMETH. The Lexile Framework for Reading is a scientific approach to reading and text measurement. A Lexile text measure represents a text’s difficulty level on the Lexile scale. A Lexile text measure is reported on a Lexile scale from a low of BR to a high of 2000L. For example, Charles Dicken’s Pickwick Papers has a Lexile measurement of 1210. For more information see http://www .lexile.com/m/uploads/downloadablepdfs/WhatDoestheLexileMeasureMean .pdf. Also see http://www.lexile.com/findabook/ to search for the Lexile measure-ments of other texts. See also Common Core Standards and Text Complexity at http://www.lexile.com/using-lexile/lexile-measures-and-the-ccssi/the-common-core- and-text-complexity/

30. F.I.M Craik and R. S. Lockhart, “Levels of Processing: A Framework for Memory Research,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 11 (1972): 671–84.

31. S. Kapur et al., “Neuroanatomical Correlates of Encoding in Episodic Memory: Levels of Processing Effect,” Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, USA 91 (1994): 2008–11.

32. L. W. Barsalou, W. K. Simmons, A. Barbey, and C. D. Wilson, “Grounding Conceptual Knowledge in Modality-Specific Systems,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (2003): 84–91.

33. Anderson, Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications, 166, 167, 190–91.



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34. For a more in-depth discussion of how to incorporate a process drama in the classroom, see Cecily O’Neill’s Drama Worlds: A Framework for Process Drama (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995).

35. Ibid., 12.36. Jean Anne Waterstradt, “Another View of Ephraim Cabot: A Footnote to ‘Desire

under the Elms,’” Eugene O’Neill Newsletter 7 (1985): ix; retrieved from http://www .eoneill.com/library/newsletter/ix_2/ix-2f.htm.



O'Neill, Cognition, and the Common Core Standards

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