Spot-Lit workshop at HMYOI Wetherby

At Novus, we are always looking for new and innovative ways to engage learners in education, especially through our creative enrichment provision. In December, HMYOI Wetherby received a visit from Spot-Lit, who ran interactive workshops with GCSE learners to help with their exam preparation. 

Who are Spot-Lit Education?

Spot-Lit Education are a company who provide interactive GCSE, A-Level, 11+ and other enrichment workshops to energise and further engage learners in the study and revision process.

They are a team of professional actors and experienced teachers who aim to ignite an interest in literature for young people by acting out key scenes from plays, novels and poems with debates and analysis in-between. 

Engaging youth offenders in GCSE revision at HMYOI Wetherby

Spot-Lit visited HMYOI Wetherby, their first experience of visiting a youth offender’s institute to deliver a workshop on Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’, to a group of young learners, revising for their GCSE’s. 

The workshop aimed to engage GCSE learners in literature by bringing texts to life through the dynamic and interactive session. The two-hour workshop consisted of a live performance of key scenes from the text performed by Spot-Lit actors, followed by an intensive and discursive revision session. The facilitated discussions were led by a Spot-Lit educator who guided learners through thematic and character-based discussions between performances, promoting active participation from the learners as well as critical thinking. 

Discussions revolved around key themes such as ‘To what extent can Macbeth be considered as entirely (or partly) responsible for his own downfall’, ‘How lady Macbeth toys with Macbeth’s masculinity to prompt him to commit multiple crimes and how this would be re-enacted in a modern context’ and ‘The way in which guilt can erode the conscience psychologically and whether one can harbour any empathy for ‘this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen’ after their tragic denouements’. 

The workshop gave learners the opportunity to explore and connect with the Shakespeare text in a new and creative way, offering them a deeper understanding of the text as well as fostering a deeper connection to literature. Workshops like these, enable learners to think critically about the text, and also gives them new interpretations and insights that they may not have thought of before. Having a better understanding of the course material, benefits their overall revision, helping them to prepare for their exams as well as enhancing their confidence in expressing their ideas and interpretations. 

As well as positively contributing to their GCSE revision, the workshops also helped develop the learner’s literacy skills. Throughout the workshop, learners were able to think critically, identify key themes and develop their comprehension skills, which are skills that can be utilised in everyday life, as well as further engaging learners in reading. 

The visit was a huge success with learners fully engaging in the discussions and performances, with one learner commenting positively on the experience:

It showed different perspectives from people who have studied the play for years. I got to hear from both actors and teachers. It was the first time I had seen a play I was studying, performed

The English GCSE teacher at HMYOI Wetherby also spoke positively about the impact the workshop had on learners:

"Personally, I found the greatest impact for the learners was that it exposed them to alternative perspectives on the text. The freedom to ‘interpret’ and ‘explore’ a text is something that the learners have previously struggled with; seeing actors and educators debate the meaning of a scene was valuable in this way. The impact of this has been immediately visible in class".

To learn more about how we engage learners in education, take a look at the news section.