This Companion assumes you already have the week-by-week architecture and the Bacon's Voice layer (Richard II, as Told by Francis Bacon). It answers what those leave open: what does the instructor actually do in the room, and how do you know if a student's work this week was strong or weak? Read the Tone section before you teach Week 1, not after Week 15.
Observation. Students read the scene cold, before any framing. Ten to fifteen minutes, no more.
Cipher. Close reading for statecraft — who has said something plainly, and who has left room for others to fill in the rest for them. Introduce that week's Aphorism here, after students have noticed something, not before.
Laboratory. The analytical exercise itself. The longest phase, and the one most likely to drift — too abstract (generic diagrams with no textual grounding) or too literal (plot summary with new vocabulary). Good work does both: grounded in a specific line, generalizing to a case outside the play.
Dialectic. Structured disagreement. Assign positions if the room isn't naturally split. The goal is forcing students to state the strongest version of a position they don't hold — this play makes that easy, since almost every character in it has a genuinely defensible case.
Synthesis. A short close — two or three sentences — stating the week's mechanic in the student's own words, with one piece of textual evidence. Your fastest formative check.
Epoch I (Weeks 1–5) — Performance of Power. Pattern recognition. Can students identify a mechanic once it's named? Weak work restates the scene. Strong work names the mechanic and cites the exact moment it activates — the specific line where ceremony substitutes for judgment.
Epoch II (Weeks 6–10) — The Silent Coalition. Synthesis across variables. Can students trace how legitimacy moves from one man to another without a single declared cause? Weak work treats each defection as its own isolated event. Strong work draws the chain backward unprompted — this defection because that one, because the one before it.
Epoch III (Weeks 11–15) — The Hollow Crown. Original application. Laboratory work should stop being about the play at all, except as evidence. A student citing a mechanic while analyzing a real succession crisis or leadership transition, unprompted, is doing what the Capstone will demand cold.
Bring a real case of a dispute "resolved" by procedure without a verdict ever being reached. Common pitfall: students read Richard's intervention as decisive strength — push them to notice it settles nothing and creates two grievances instead of one.
Anchor with a real case of an inner circle that filtered information rather than challenged it. Common pitfall: students moralize about "bad friends" — redirect to the structural question of who has access to the decision-maker and why.
Run the "who actually owns this revenue" exercise concretely before abstracting to sovereignty-as-asset. Watch for students treating this purely as a tax complaint — the deeper mechanic is a leader converting a long-term institutional trust into short-term personal liquidity.
This week produces genuine frustration — let it. Ask directly why the room believes Richard doesn't act on Gaunt's warning, and don't let "he's a bad king" be the final answer; press for the structural reason institutions consistently ignore their most credible internal critics.
Have a student defend Richard's seizure on its strongest legal grounds — he is, after all, the king, and the crown's need is real — before the room is allowed to condemn it. Strong work can articulate why an act can be technically lawful and still be the precipitating catastrophe of the play.
Push past "Bolingbroke is lying." He isn't, technically. The mechanic is deliberate ambiguity of stated intent — make students locate the exact line where he could mean either thing, and ask what work that ambiguity is doing for him.
Do not let this resolve into "York should have picked a side sooner." Make students identify the actual moment neutrality stops being available to him, and argue whether any different choice earlier would have changed that.
Map the actual order nobles join Bolingbroke, not just the fact that they do. Strong work notices that no one wants to be first and explains what each defection licenses the next person to tell themselves.
Test the core claim directly: is removing an opponent's enablers before confronting the opponent a form of mercy toward the principal, a form of cowardice, or simply good sequencing? Make students defend more than one answer.
The heaviest Laboratory week — protect the time for it, same as Tempest's Week 10. This is a negotiation simulation, not a narration exercise: force students to state, at each turn, what each side actually controls versus what each side needs to appear to control.
Common pitfall: students read this scene as pure pathos and stop analyzing. Push them back to the mechanic — an institutional identity is not the same thing as the person who held it, and Richard is the first character in the play forced to learn the difference in real time.
Bring a real example of a forced transition still performed through voluntary-sounding ceremony (a resignation letter, a "stepping down to spend more time with family"). Have students identify exactly where the ceremony's language and the actual mechanism of the transfer diverge.
Do not let this resolve into "York is a good citizen." Make students defend York's choice on strictly transactional grounds — what does reporting his own son actually buy him, and the new regime, and is that a fair trade to ask of anyone.
This is the week students most want a clean villain. Resist giving them one. Have a student argue Henry's repudiation of Exton is sincere, and a second argue it is pure theater, using only textual evidence — both readings are defensible, and that's the point.
Graduation, not a normal week. See the separate Capstone Rubric — don't grade it against the weekly calibration scale above. The hard gate matters here specifically: a "Bolingbroke Strategy" that stops at the crown, with no plan for the instability that follows an unlegitimized claim, cannot pass at the top tier.
Read this before Week 1. Every mechanic in this course is morally neutral in itself, but fifteen weeks spent naming how a challenger builds an undeclared coalition risks teaching students to find the taking clever rather than to notice when legitimacy is quietly draining away from something they're a part of. Epoch III ends on an unresolved, guilt-shadowed throne, not a triumphant coronation — but that only lands if you're building toward it out loud from Week 1.
The Student Workbook, Capstone Rubric, Glossary, and Reading Packet each live as their own document, linked from the unit's main page.