Teaching Ideas for a Meaningful Unit on The Crucible  

When you think about what you want students to learn from your unit on The Crucible, think about five years from now.  

In other words, if you were to run into these kids in the future, what would you want them to remember?  Would you really care if they remember that Mary’s last name is Warren or how many people were accused of witchcraft or whether the residents of Salem owned cows or sheep?

The details might matter while students are reading, but they’re rarely the reason we teach a text. What matters is what students take with them after the unit is over.

If you’re going to spend time on a text, you want that time to change students’ outlook, broaden their horizons, and empower them with the skills that they’ll need in life.  This makes for some lofty goals, but it also gets at what matters in the long term.

Here are the five things that I hope stay with students long after our study of The Crucible is over.

1. An understanding of the genre of drama.  

When students study drama, they often see the play in question as just another book they have to read for English class.  One important piece they need to understand is that drama, like any other genre, has both limitations and advantages.  A playwright can’t simply tell readers what a character is thinking—they have to reveal that through dialogue, actions, and staging. Once students experience those limitations themselves, they read plays with much greater appreciation for the craft involved.

So besides examining the elements of The Crucible like set descriptions and dialogue, the best way that I’ve found for students to truly understand this is by trying their hand at writing some drama themselves.  When we are first starting the play, I have students experiment with bellringer freewrite prompts.  For example, I challenge students to think about what they can and can’t do with dialogue by giving them this prompt:  “Write a dialogue between two people in which you show to the reader their relationship, a conflict they have, and how they feel about each other without adding any narrative or explanation of any kind.”  

After continuing to explore with this kind of freewrite prompt throughout the unit, students write and perform an original play in small groups at the end of the unit.  This is the kind of fun group project that really sticks with them years later. It also gives students a firsthand appreciation for the constraints of drama—especially when they start writing scenes involving helicopters and high-speed car chases (ask me how I know about that one).

2. An idea of the values and worldview of Puritan America.  

Arthur Miller’s portrayal of Puritan New England is pretty great, but I’ve found that just reading one version of a time period doesn’t give students the big picture.  So I like to include texts from the period as well as modern pieces that examine the events of those days.  

While Cotton Mather’s writing on good and evil is quite challenging, I’ve found that when students have enough scaffolding and structure, they are very engaged in reading about a time when “the Devils [are} coming down in great Wrath upon us.” When students read Mather’s account of “The Trial of Martha Carrier,” they realize how a small group of people living in a new place that was beyond their control—plus a lot of sick cattle—contributed to the belief that Puritans were battling evil in their daily lives. 

Reading and discussing Anne Bradstreet’s classic poems “To My Dear and Loving Husband” and “Verses upon the Burning of our House, July 18th, 1666,” though they don’t deal with the witch trials, does give students an idea of the worldview of a time in which the afterlife was important, but so were the physical realities of this world.  

Finally, Margaret Atwood’s poem “Half-Hanged Mary,” about one of her ancestors who was hanged for a witch yet survived, gets students pondering questions around religion, women, power, isolation, rumor, and perseverance.

Reading these texts helps students see the Puritans not just as a bunch of crazy people accusing their neighbors of witchcraft, but as a group who acted on deeply held beliefs about how the world worked. It also helps students realize that they, too, have worldviews that direct their decisions—and that those worldviews are not fixed.

3. The confidence to engage in a challenging play on their own.  

One of my main goals as an English teacher is for my students to leave my classroom believing they can tackle challenging texts independently and make meaning from them on their own. I want my students to feel like they can go out and see a play by Arthur Miller or any other playwright and not need to have their English teacher sitting next to them, explaining everything that is going on and what it means. 

When we read The Crucible, like with other texts, this means slowly building their independence with just enough scaffolding. After reading the play out loud together, I give them close reading questions on the play.  Rather than just giving them an explanation, I encourage them to grapple with the text on their own. This means a lot of redirecting them to specific passages and asking follow-up questions that push them back into the text.  When we first start off our reading of the play, we go over most of the close reading questions as a class, but as we move further in our unit, students need less and less guidance and we only go over the most challenging or open-ended questions.  By the end of the play, they are doubting themselves a lot less and are way more self-assured in their analysis.

4. An appreciation for the power of storytelling. 

If The Crucible weren’t all of the above, it would still be a compelling story that captures the attention of even the most jaded students.  As soon as the Salem girls start confessing en masse at the end of the first act, students are hooked.  From then on, the play has everything it needs to keep them coming back to read more. 

One of the great joys of teaching ELA is engaging in fantastic stories year after year, and The Crucible doesn’t disappoint on that front.  I know that if I run into my students years later, they’ll definitely remember the moment that Abigail shouts “I saw Sarah Good with the devil!”  

This is one of the main reasons why I enjoy reading The Crucible out loud as a class—it’s easy enough for students to actually be able to do a decent reading, and the exciting story carries the rest. And honestly, if that were the only thing that they took away from our study of the play—that a text written in the 1950s about the events of the 1600s could still completely draw them in—I think I’d call that a win.

5. The courage to speak out against injustice even when they are in the minority.

While students of today will likely never be accused of witchcraft or have to recite the ten commandments to prove that they have not signed the devil’s book, they will definitely encounter rumors spread online, scapegoating, peer pressure, and situations where they know they should speak up but feel afraid. The specifics have changed. The human behavior has not.  However, by examining the Salem witch trials, how they started and what kept them going and how seemingly normal people were caught up in the whole mess, maybe students can avoid that kind of behavior in their own lives.   

So I make sure to focus our unit on The Crucible on getting students tothink about why things happen the way they do.  They need to get inside the heads of the characters, make sense of their actions, and ultimately, to reflect back on themselves.  We do this with a combination of bellringer freewrite prompts, close reading questions, and then discussion.  So after that first exciting act, for example, we spend some time discussing whether or not students think that the girls are confessing of their own free will, why they think the confessions involve implicating others, and how the others react to their confessions. 

I also like to pair the play with contemporary texts and sources on the importance of speaking out.  A TED Talk about speaking to the enemy, another TED Talk about the connection between schoolyard bullying and genocide, and the classic short story “The Lottery” are all great sources to really get students thinking about scapegoating, tradition, power, and what it takes to talk to people who don’t see the world the same way you do.

Ultimately, what I want for my students is for them to have a better understanding of themselves and the world around them than they did before they started reading.  I want to push them to expand and grow and maybe be a little challenged and uncomfortable at times while still having fun as a class.  

If you’re planning a unit on The Crucible, I encourage you to start with the same question I ask myself every year: What do I want students to remember five years from now?

Once you know the answer, the activities, discussions, and assessments become much easier to design.

And if you’re looking for ready-to-use close reading questions, discussion prompts, freewrites, and creative activities built around those bigger ideas, you can take a look at my complete unit on The Crucible here.