 Sarah Massey is a High School English Language Arts teacher with Foundations for the Future Charter Academy. Today, Sarah is using a thinking organizer called SayMeanMatter to engage her students and help them organize their thoughts to do a critical analysis of the play Macbeth. SayMeanMatter engages students in a thinking routine that can be used to extract deep meaning from a literary text. The strategy is also a helpful format for the analysis portion of a body paragraph in a critical essay. So our students use the strategy from grade 9 to grade 12, but even in the higher grades, grade 11, grade 12, it's still important to be modeling it before you ask them to do it and to also have opportunities to work together to do SayMeanMatter. Because oftentimes we're thinking about really high-level ideas and it can be for teenagers that don't have a ton of life experience to approach those ideas. So modeling that critical thinking is really important. The other tip I have is when you get to the matter and they're asked to take the text out of it and come up with a life statement basically. Sometimes they struggle with that. So taking the situation that's happening in the text and trying to find a similar experience from their own life or even from another text or even from a movie can be helpful to get their life lesson out of that experience. Well, what's the mean part? Especially when you do a say, it's kind of just a paraphrase. But what the mean, you actually have to go in, look at the literary devices and how the character is developing and whatnot. Which helps with the matter, which is the human condition part. And then with the human condition, you kind of bring into your own personal experiences in order to make the matter and connect it to what the text is saying. When you're starting Saming Matter with students, it's probably important that you select the quotations so that they have enough to work with. And as you work through this with them and you instruct them in good quotation selection, then they can start to choose their own significant quotations but to make sure that they have enough material to analyze. So like after Macbeth orders Benkvote to be killed, he's like excessively paranoid and guilt-ridden. And then Lady Macbeth insults him because he's filled with his guilt and he's acting excessively paranoid. And he's basically losing his mind and acting superstitious. So at this point he's hallucinating again because he sees Benkvote's ghost. So Lady Macbeth tries to tell him that it's like the dagger he sees again. And there's a metaphor as well. It says a woman's story at a winter fire. So this is showing how Lady Macbeth is basically calling Macbeth an old lady and ridiculing him about it. And overall he's feeling really guilty. For the matter, the quote suggests that when a manipulative individual loses control over a situation, they will use their previous tactics in order to regain power for their own selfish intentions to be fulfilled. To give kids a structure for thinking when they're reading something. So it gets them thinking about literally what is happening in a situation that they're reading, but also to look for that deeper meaning and to connect it to their own personal life with the matter. So especially in the mean part, I'm looking for them to fulfill all of the items on that checklist. They're looking for any changes in the character, character motivation, literary devices, symbolism, other connections in the text. And then I want to see in the matter that they're able to compare that to a real life situation without being too literal and dependent on the text. I find that this helps me to connect to the real world easier and just to help understand and break down the text even more, which gives me a better understanding of not only the section of it, but also the full piece of literature. So the end goal is hopefully that they're doing this independently as they're reading and as they're working through literature, but it does take a lot of modeling and collaboration to set that up.