I observed a senior AP English classroom run by a teacher named Ms. Zelanik, who has been teaching for ten years. The school has block periods, so this class was eighty minutes long. My assumption would be that there would be a lot of activities for seniors in these eighty minutes. Instead, I was unpleasantly surprised to find Ms. Zelanik lectured for thirty-five minutes straight. Nearly half the class period was devoted to lecture and note-taking, which resulted in the visible boredom in the students’ faces. I could actually see students lose focus one-by-one as she lectured about grammatical structure, themes, and Antigone. I found this lacking, because the students became disengaged in the lesson, therefore stopped learning. Personally,…show more content… Zelanik had created a readers theatre by having the students perform the last acts of Antigone. One student’s voice was completely devoid of emotion, when he was playing Creon discovering his entire family is dead, so the teacher stopped him and had him do it over again so he could convey the proper emotion. Throughout the readings, she would interrupt students to ask them about what they just read or watched. I think this was a great way to implement a reader’s theatre into a high school setting, because students are refining their oral skills by performing the play or by debating the theme in a class-wide discussion. This also enables students to develop their cognitive abilities, because they have to critically think of a proper way to answer her questions. Afterwards students had a brief activity where they answered. Afterwards, students were put into groups of four and completed a worksheet together about the themes and symbols in Antigone. The worksheet promoted close-readings of the text and refined the students’ writing abilities, while it being styled as group work allowed social and oral skills to develop further. The only process lacking in Ms. Zelanik’s classroom was visual