This Companion assumes you already have the week-by-week architecture and the Bacon's Voice layer. 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 information the others don't, who is performing versus speaking plainly. 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.
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) — 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.
Epoch II (Weeks 6–10) — Synthesis across variables. Can students hold two or three mechanics in relation to each other? Weak work treats each week as sealed. Strong work draws lines backward unprompted.
Epoch III (Weeks 11–15) — Original application. Laboratory work should stop being about the play at all, except as evidence. A student citing a mechanic while analyzing a real case, unprompted, is doing what the Capstone will demand cold.
Bring one real historical case of sudden disruption where credentialed authority failed and competence didn't. Common pitfall: students conflate "nature strips titles" with "chaos is good" — the point is unearned authority fails under pressure, not all authority does.
Let a student argue the "god" side of the Aristotle line first, then complicate it with the essay's own rebuttal. Anchor with a case where cutting a leader off from counsel — not force — visibly worsened their decisions.
Run the chokepoint exercise as a physical diagram before abstracting to "monopoly." Redirect students who name the biggest actor as the chokepoint toward the smallest thing the system can't route around.
Pairs well with a real information-network case. Watch for students treating "network" as purely technological — Ariel is relational and obligational too.
This week produces genuine disagreement — let it. Write the poverty/discontentment distinction as two columns before students touch the play.
Spend real time on the distinction between a real grievance and the language used to weaponize it. Strong work names a real slogan and asks what grievance it is, or isn't, attached to.
Push past "propaganda is bad" — the mechanic is controlling appetite and hope specifically. Ask what the banquet promises that a lie alone couldn't.
Name the tension directly: is earned buy-in through shared struggle different in kind from coercion, or just gentler in degree?
Test the core claim directly: what happens to the deterrent effect the moment people stop believing they're watched, even if surveillance continues unchanged?
The heaviest Laboratory week — protect the time for it. Resist tuning the model until stable; an unstable model that reveals a real breaking point is worth more.
Bring a real example of institutional ceremony. Common pitfall: students treat "culture as governance tool" as cynical — Bacon's point was narrower, that even sincere ceremony still does this work.
Have a student find the specific earlier moment Prospero could have acted and didn't, and defend why the delay was correct.
Do not let this resolve into "mercy is nicer." Make students defend mercy on transactional grounds, not sentiment.
Connect back to the K-12 program's design principle about institutions surviving their founders. Strong work names something concrete that failed exactly because its founder never let go.
Graduation, not a normal week. See the separate Capstone Rubric — don't grade it against the weekly calibration scale above.
Read this before Week 1. Every mechanic in this course is morally neutral in itself, but fifteen weeks spent naming and modeling these mechanics without a clear destination risks teaching students to find them clever rather than to understand when they're being used on them. Epoch III ends on mercy and institutionalization, not the checkmate — 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.