Understanding Mr Birling

• Students will examine the factors that make up Mr Birling’s identity and consider the ways in which his identity informs his world view and behaviour.
• Students will identify what messages Priestley’s portrayal of Mr Birling sends to the audience, selecting relevant evidence to support their claims.

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 analysing the character of Mr Birling, considering the relationship between his identity and the social context in which he lives. In the next section of the play, Mr Birling references several historical incidents, which are central to understanding his character and the messages that Priestley wished to send to his audience.
• Give students the opportunity to practise making inferences while also reflecting on these historical events by examining a series of images. It might be useful first to review when the play was written and when it is set. 
• Project each image from the image gallery Mr Birling Context Images on the board for a maximum of one minute each. While each image is projected, ask students to work in pairs and to develop inferences by discussing the following questions:
  • What is going on in this image?
  • What do you know? What background knowledge do you have?
  • Using what you see and what you know, what can you infer about this image?
  • How might the image connect to the play?

• Assign five students different reading parts and have them take their relevant props from the prop box. You will need Mrs Birling, Birling, Sheila, Gerald, and Eric. 
• Instruct students to mark the connections to the historical context they have studied either in their copies of the play or using sticky notes if they can’t write in their books. 
• Then read aloud the section from Mrs Birling ‘Now, Arthur, if you’ve no more to say’ (bottom of p. 5) to ‘the sharp ring of a front door bell’ (top of p. 10). You may wish to arrange the classroom so that you have a mock stage at the front, so students perform the scene to the class.

• Explain to students that they will be divided into groups and each group will analyse a different speech given by Mr Birling.
• Begin by dividing the class into groups of 3 or 4 and give each group a large photocopy of one speech to work with (some groups will have the same ones) and the handout Mr Birling’s Speeches Group Activity. If your students can’t write in their books, also provide them with individual copies of their speech that they can annotate.
• Explain to students that each group will read aloud their assigned passage and then discuss the Connection questions on the handout. They should record notes about their discussion on their large A3 copy of their speech. Project the following annotation suggestions: 
  • Underline key phrases and make a note explaining why it is underlined
  • Draw arrows that point to specific pieces of evidence and make a note to explain what the evidence reveals about Birling or a theme
  • Underline key phrases that connect to other parts of the play and/or to their own lives
  • Pose questions about Birling, a theme, or historical context
• After you see that groups have finished their annotations and discussions, give students time to write up the group’s annotations and ideas into their own copies of the play or onto their individual photocopies.

• Have students come back together as a whole class and ask a member of each group to report back about one key phrase in their passage and what it suggests about Mr Birling, and to read their adjectives describing his character. 
• Then, facilitate a class discussion that draws from the following questions:
  • Taken together, what do these five speeches suggest about Mr Birling’s identity and experiences?
  • How does his identity and experiences influence his values and choices? 
  • What does it mean for society if people’s choices and values are influenced by their identity and experiences? 
  • If our experiences and identities impact our values and choices, how can we ensure that we consider the needs of those who have different backgrounds and experiences to us? What challenges might we face? How can we overcome such challenges?

• Explain to students that today they will be thinking about how they can develop their writing skills while deepening their understanding of Birling’s character. 
• Project the following prompts one at a time and ask students to explore them in their books: 
  • Birling describes himself as a ‘hard-headed, practical man of business’ (p. 6). Based on what you have read so far and what you know about Priestley, how do you think Priestley wants us to view people who identify themselves in this way? What makes you say that? 
  • How would you describe Mr Birling in one phrase?
• To review the content, ask the class to share the phrases they wrote to describe Birling and write them on the board.

• Tell students that they will now think about selecting appropriate evidence for specific claims they might make about Mr Birling’s character.
• Guide students through the first part of the Relevant or Not? teaching strategy, to enable them to distinguish between evidence that is relevant to support an argument and evidence that is not relevant to support an argument.
• Next, divide students into small groups. The groups should be different from the Birling speech groups from Part I of this lesson. If possible try to create groups so there is one person who worked on each speech to help students share their previous learning.
• Next, guide students through the second part of the Relevant or Not? strategy, ‘Determine the Relevance of Text-based Evidence’, by asking the groups to identify one claim, for which they find three pieces of evidence. Two of their pieces of evidence should support the claim and one should not. Then, have a few groups share their ideas while the rest of the class guesses which two pieces of evidence are relevant and which one is not, supporting their reasoning for each one. 
• If needed, you could assign a different claim from the list below to each group:
  • Priestley presents Birling as inconsiderate
  • Priestley presents Birling as self-involved
  • Priestley presents Birling as prejudiced
  • Priestley presents Birling as greedy
  • Priestley presents Birling as successful
  • Priestley presents Birling as socially inferior
  • Priestley presents Birling as powerful

• Explain to the students that to analyse how their evidence supports their claim, it is useful to first annotate the evidence, identifying any words or phrases to zoom in on in order to consider whether or not the evidence supports their claim. Doing such a process can also help them identify the sorts of quotations that facilitate rich, in-depth analysis. 
• Ask students to select one claim from the previous activity and one piece of relevant evidence to support their claim.  
• Then, project the PowerPoint slide to display the example annotation. You may also wish to model an annotation of a quotation on the board, thinking out loud to highlight the annotation process. You may wish to use the following questions to guide your verbalisation of the annotation process:
  • How does this piece of evidence support my claim about Mr Birling? 
  • Is there a word or phrase that can be analysed in depth to support my claim further? What does the word or phrase mean? How does this word or phrase support my claim about Birling?
  • Is this evidence relevant to the sociohistorical context of the play, either when the play was set (1912) or when the play was written (1945)? If so, how?
  • How might the audience respond to this evidence? 
  • Is there anything else that stands out about this evidence? 
• Ask students to repeat the process with their chosen claim and piece of supporting evidence. 
• After the students have finished, you may wish to invite a student up to model their annotation on the board.

• Finally, project the following questions one at a time and ask students to discuss each one using the Think, Pair, Share strategy: 
  • How might Mr Birling’s views and values impact his choices and actions?
  • What might be the consequences of these views and values for the society in which Mr Birling is a prominent businessman and respected local figure? 
  • Which of the following do you think most shapes Mr Birling’s values: family, friends, society? What makes you say that? What other factors influence his values?
  • Why might it be important to reflect on the factors that influence our values? 
• Then, ask for a few volunteers to share their ideas with the class.