Understanding Class

• Students will read and discuss primary sources concerning the social expectations and values of Victorian and Edwardian England.
• Students will examine what messages Priestley transmits about the social hierarchies in the world of the play, linking these messages to language, setting and character. 
• Students will discuss the impact of class, etiquette and hierarchy in the play and in modern society on an individual’s identity and choices.

Each lesson in this unit includes a PowerPoint of student-facing slides. The PowerPoints are intended to be used alongside, and not instead of, the lesson plans because the latter include important rationales and context that teachers should familiarise themselves with before teaching the lesson.

The PowerPoints include basic content and student-facing prompts from the lesson plans but are minimally designed because we expect teachers to adapt them to fit the needs of their students and class.

• Explain to students that today they will be learning about class and exploring how social hierarchies manifest themselves in the play and in the world today. It might be useful to review your class contract and remind students of its content to ensure that they are mindful of how they share and communicate their ideas on this potentially challenging topic. 
• Project the following prompts and ask students to explore them in a journal reflection. Let students know that they will not have to share their ideas with others if they do not wish to do so. 
  • Have you ever felt inferior to someone else? 
    • What did that person say or do that made you feel inferior? 
    • How did you respond to the situation?
• Have you ever felt superior to someone else?
  • What was it about the situation that made you feel superior?
  • How did you respond to the situation? 
• Before having volunteers share their ideas, acknowledge that it can be hard to share our ideas with others, and then model risk-taking by sharing something from your journal reflection with the class.
• As this topic is potentially sensitive for some students, reiterate that they do not need to share it if they do not want to do so.

• Tell students that unspoken rules in society, which often dictate our opportunities and experiences, can be connected to class. Most teenagers have heard the word class, but they might struggle to articulate a definition. Tell students that to help them reflect on their understanding of class, they will create a concept map, a visual representation of the word using words, phrases, questions, the space on the page, lines, and arrows.
• Lead students through the steps of the Concept Maps teaching strategy, first generating a list of words, phrases, and ideas they associate with class, and then representing the relationship between their ideas on the page using spacing, lines, arrows, colour, and sizing.
• Next, have students share their concept maps in a Think, Pair, Share. Invite them to revise their maps by adding new information they learnt from their ‘pair, shares’ that extends or challenges their thinking.
• You might then facilitate a discussion in which students share ideas from their maps for you to add to a class concept map that you hang in the room, refer back to over the course of this scheme of work, and modify as their thinking about class develops.
• Provide students with a dictionary definition of class and ask them to identify similarities and differences between their concept maps and the definition. Then explain the relationship between class, status, etiquette and hierarchy (see Overview and Notes to Teachers sections, above) and have students add these terms to their concept maps. Finally, ask students to share their ideas about where they placed status, etiquette and hierarchy, and how they connected them to other concepts on their maps.

• Explain to students that they will be divided into groups and will be given a different piece of source material to explore social etiquette rules in Victorian England, which would still be relevant in Edwardian England. You may wish to give students access to dictionaries. Encourage them to keep their concept maps out on their desks and to add to them over the course of this activity if any new ideas emerge about class, status, etiquette and hierarchy that they hadn’t previously considered.
• Begin by dividing the class into small groups and give each group a copy of one of the four readings from the Social Etiquette in Victorian England handout. Depending on your class size, some groups may have the same one. 
• Explain to students that each group will read the group’s assigned reading together out loud. As some of the texts have difficult vocabulary and diction, it might be a good time to remind students of the reading skills they employed in the last lesson with the stage directions. Encourage them to pause to ‘talk to the text’ by asking questions and figuring out words in context when they are reading. You might also ask them to consider how this text connects with An Inspector Calls.  
• After they have read the text, ask students to briefly discuss and respond to the Connection questions on the handout.
• Give each group a chance to share their summaries of their given text with the rest of the class. 
• Finally,  lead a class discussion asking students to reflect on the following questions:
  • What does the existence of these etiquette books suggest about Victorian society?
  • How do you think people felt having to adhere to such strict codes of conduct?
  • Do we have anything equivalent to these handbooks today? 
  • How do we learn the spoken and unspoken rules of society? 
  • How does knowing or not knowing them impact an individual’s choices and/or their access to positions of power?
• If there is time, you may wish to close the lesson with a quick wraparound, in which students share one word to summarise their learning or something from today’s lesson that resonated with them.

• Explain to students that they will be reflecting on the characters in the play they have met thus far and how they are impacted by the class system and social system of the society in which they live.
• First, to get students thinking about the characters once more, ask them to complete a 3-2-1 activity in their journals to reflect on one of the characters introduced in the first five pages of the play:
  • Write down three adjectives to describe one character 
  • Write down two pieces of historical context that you learnt in previous lessons relevant to this character
  • Write down one rule of social etiquette that you learnt in the last lesson relevant to this character
• Give students the opportunity to share their ideas with each other using the Think, Pair, Share strategy.

• Tell students that they will now reflect on the social hierarchies present in the play. Encourage them to reflect on and incorporate their understanding of Victorian and Edwardian society, its social systems and its class structures, based on what they have learnt in previous lessons and in their other classes. 
• Ask students to work in pairs and list the characters in order of their social rank in Victorian and Edwardian society (1 being the most valued by society, 6 being the least). To ensure that students do not leave any characters out, you may ask the students to reread the second half of the stage directions to tell you who is on stage at the start of Act One (Edna, Eric, Gerald, Mr Birling, Mrs Birling, Sheila). 
• Ask them to select quotations from what they have read in the first five pages of the play to justify their positioning of each character, and to link their ideas to the historical context they have learnt on gender and etiquette. 
• Invite one pair of students to the front of the class to write their ranking on the board. Give the rest of the class an opportunity to engage with this rank order and to share what they have written. If another pair has a different ranking, invite them to the front of the class to reorder the list and share their justification. Continue this process as time allows, inviting pairs and individual students to contribute. Challenge pairs to support their rankings with evidence from the text and other historical documents you have studied in this scheme thus far. 
• Ask students to then reflect on the ranking by discussing the following questions in small groups of 3–4 students:
  • What have you learnt about what the society in which the Birlings live regards as important? How are the Birlings’ values influenced by society? 
  • What do these social hierarchies suggest about the power dynamics present in the play? Which characters do you think hold the most and the least power? What makes you say that?
  • What social hierarchies exist in modern society? What impact do they have on opportunities, behaviour and/or values?

• Give students the opportunity to share their thoughts on class with you in a Class Debrief Exit Card, which uses the following prompts:
  • How might living in a society that has a class system impact the way people see themselves and others?
  • What impact might the existence of a class system have on society as a whole?
  • What are some ways in which the class system impacts your life and experiences? 
• Collect in these exit cards, so you can understand the students’ personal responses to studying the class system and follow up with individual students as needed.