How to Revive a Stale Unit and Reignite Your Classroom

The stack of dog-eared Romeo and Juliet books was waiting for me in a box in the English department’s storage closet. I’d taught this unit so many times I could practically recite the balcony scene by memory. I could also vividly picture my students’ faces after the third day of reading the play and the third time I asked them to turn-and-talk before writing a summary of the act. They were not faces filled with joy and wonder as I’m guessing Shakespeare intended.

As I opened up the box of books, I realized that I wasn’t looking forward to this unit.

Have you felt this way before about something you have to teach?

Teaching can sometimes feel like the movie Groundhog Day. It can be repetitive and certain aspects of it can become dull after a while. The first time I started this unit, I was excited to teach material that I personally enjoyed, and to use some interesting techniques to teach it. But my excitement wore off after several years, and this affected my ability to get students passionate about the material as well.

There’s a phenomenon called emotional contagion where humans can literally pass their emotions to each other. Neuroscience shows that students can catch their teacher’s excitement, curiosity, and boredom. Emotions are contagious. And I think this is one of the reasons why my students seemed to drag through my Shakespeare unit; I was inadvertently expressing my exhaustion of this unit to them and they were reflecting it back to me.

The repetitiveness was draining my battery. It’s a little counterintuitive, but sometimes doing the same thing over and over can be more exhausting than trying something new.

Finding a new way to teach a unit, or even just making adjustments to give it new experiences and flavor, can transform it for you and students. And it doesn’t mean having to reinvent everything or design completely new lessons. Instead, it’s answering a few key questions and letting that guide the redesign of the learning unit.

Here are som questions to ask when redesigning and giving new life to a unit.

1. What are the core tasks and skills of this unit that I want students to develop?

Start by listing what you want students to gain from the learning unit. For Romeo and Juliet, I wanted them to analyze characters, identify themes, summarize key moments, and interpret tone and style. Those are important skills, learning targets, so I kept them.

If you teach the process of photosynthesis, what core skills do you want students to learn? If you're teaching common denominators, what are the key concepts students should remember?

What do they need to hold onto regardless of how you present the information?

Then I asked a second question:

2. What’s a new source of motivation that could make students actually want to do this work?

So after identifying what I wanted students to learn and the skills I wanted them to practice, I moved on to finding a new source of motivation. I asked myself, What could make this work meaningful, creative, or public?

I realized students didn’t just need to read Shakespeare. They needed a reason to experience the story, wrestle with its themes, and bring it to life. In my original way of teaching the unit, students demonstrated their understanding through unit summaries. If they wanted a good grade or were interested in the story, they did task this well. If they weren’t motivated by either, they didn’t. And part of my problem was that many were not motivated by grades or British Literature.

So I reconsidered the primary motivator and designed the 60-Second Novel Project.

Changing the Primary Motivation

In this version of the unit, students still read and analyzed the play, but now they were doing it with a creative purpose. Working in small groups, they turned Romeo and Juliet into a one-minute film adaptation in the genre of their choice. To pull this off, they had to think carefully about what moments mattered most. They couldn’t include every scene, so they had to summarize and distill the plot to its essentials. That forced them to truly understand the story’s structure, characters, and themes.

After each act, they turned their summaries into short scripts that captured the tone of their chosen genre, storyboarded scenes, and thought about how dialogue, camera angles, and music could communicate emotion.

Then they filmed and edited their adaptations using their phones. The results were amazing. Some groups went for tragedy or romance. Others turned it into a horror film or even a sci-fi story set on Mars. And the best part was that students were talking about Shakespeare. They were debating which lines were essential, laughing at the absurdity of certain scenes, and recognizing the universal themes that still resonate centuries later.

The academic goals never changed. They were still analyzing, interpreting, and writing. But now they were doing it in a way that felt purposeful and authentic.

3. How can I design the learning experience around this new motivation?

Once I found a hook or authentic purpose, I let it guide how I organized lessons and assessments. In this case, everything pointed toward the 60-Second Novel Project. The act summaries became scene outlines. The character analysis turned into scriptwriting sessions. The literary themes discussion informed the genre choices. Each traditional task had a clear connection to something creative and public. I didn't have to develop entirely new lessons; I just had a better motivation for why students should engage during them.

The end result was that students were no longer just learning about Shakespeare. They were using what they learned to make something original.

When we finally shared the films, the classroom felt electric. Students were proud of their work and genuinely interested in each other’s creations. They weren’t just completing assignments, rather they were creating art, collaborating, and laughing together.

And for me, those three weeks were completely different. The repetition and burnout were replaced by curiosity and excitement. I was still teaching Romeo and Juliet, but it felt brand new.

If you’re feeling that same sense of fatigue from a unit you’ve taught a dozen times, try asking these same questions.

1. What are the core skills and tasks that matter most?

2. What’s a new source of motivation or relevance that can reenergize this work?

3. How can you design the learning experience around that new motivation?

You don't have to throw out what works.

You don’t need to scrap what already works. Just give it a new spark, a new motivation for students. When you activate what neuroscientists call the novelty effect in your students, their brains react accordingly. Engagement heightens and learning follows.

Oh, and the novelty effect applies to the teacher as well. Trying new things in the classroom can reinvigorate and make teaching feel alive. And when you feel alive, your students will too.

If you teach ELA or social studies, I put together a unit plan for you to do the 60-Second Novel Project.  You can pick any novel and have students create fun short films about it. You can get the whole unit plan here.