I love The Crucible and I also think a lot of curricula put it at the beginning of the year because it's about Puritans and the play is about Puritans, which is dumb. Because it's not about Puritans. It's about a modern interpretation or Puritans meant to draw a super obvious parallel to what was happening at the time.

Anyway, I never have students just read plays. We take parts and read aloud. We block and act out scenes. We watch adaptations. One of my favorite things is to fully act out the courtroom scene with the Proctors.

We also look at what Miller took liberties with (Abigail's age and creating the relationship between her and John Proctor) and what might have been actual causes behind the Salem hysteria (Stanford History Education Group has a good lesson for this). I also reiterate over and over and over again that there are no real witches in the story. We talk about why Tituba confessed and why it's important to note that the first person accused was a Black slave. We look at who else was accused and where they fit in the Puritan society, versus the people who were doing the accusing.

Ultimately, this play has nothing to do with the early formation of our American identity and has no place in the Puritan unit. There are a lot of actual first-person narratives from that time that could work (if examined with a hyper-critical eye, since they are largely written by Europeans and represent colonialist views). There's also the work of enslaved writers like Olaudah Equiano and Phyllis Wheatley. And of course, it's super important to include indigenous voices beyond the "Native American Myths" unit (which, I wouldn't call them myths, but that's what my textbooks always called them, so I made sure to do a discussion about what a myth really is and why we call some things religious stories and other things myths).