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Teaching Poetry
Research
Poetry in the Past
When our students think of poetry, they often see two polarizing views. One view insists that
poetry is flowery, romantic, and the vehicle we use to declare our inner most desires to the ones we love
the most. The other view insists that poetry is a grim look into the angsty, death-driven, heartbreak-filled
inner monologue that is only appropriate to share so long as it is captured through the artistic aesthetic of
poetry. What these views have in common is that they often imply that the people who write poems are
limited to being deep and uniquely intellectual. The narrow perceptions we have of poetry can affect our
ability to teach it, which in turn affects our students’ ability to learn it and produce it. Poetry is
stigmatized, and has been because of the way teachers in the past have taught it.
In the 1970s, poetry was approached from three different teaching methods: model approach,
where students simply read poems and wrote imitations; activities approach, where teachers prompted the
students to write poems based on specific suggestions; and models and activities approach, where students
read a model poem and wrote imitations based on teacher-specified content. (Jacobs, 1977) These
approaches, combined with a narrow repertoire of poetry written by dead, white men, have made the
experience of learning and writing poetry a painful one for our students. To help break down the stigmas
of poetry past models of teaching have created, we have pulled together a list of research-based
approaches that will make teaching poetry more valuable for our students.
Mentor texts
Students in the beginning stages of poetry writing tend to commit the same poetry errors.
Beginning poets can write work that is full of adjectives (instead of strong verbs and nouns), cliches, and
awkwardly forced rhyming schemes. According to Carol Jago, the use of mentor texts help her students
avoid these common beginner mistakes. (35) By providing her students with a strong mentor text from
which they can model their writing, she avoids these mistakes from the very beginning of the
reading-writing process.
This is especially true when it comes time for students to edit their poetry. It can often be difficult
to encourage students to revise their work because what they wrote is heartfelt and meaningful to them.
However, writing can almost always be improved with a second look. Choosing mentor texts allows
students to learn through example.
Using mentor texts also allows students to learn concepts through experimentation. Students “will
find imitation a more powerful way to understand,” how rhythm, meter, structure, etc. work. (Jago, 34)
Likewise, “Mentor texts provide the examples students need in order to... recognize text structure and...
read a wide range of text with different formats and purposes if they are to become critical readers and
writers.” (Gallagher, 2011)
Close Reading
Another way teachers can help students understand poetry is through close readings. Close
readings, according to The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC),
“stress engaging with a text of sufficient complexity [to] directly examine meaning…[and] encourage
students to read and reread deliberately,” to draw their own conclusions about the meaning of a text.
(Boyles, 2011) As students focus on the reading and rereading of poems, their attention is drawn to the
central ideas, supporting details, word choice, syntax, and structure of the text. Combining these steps
progressively, students are eventually able to arrive at their own understanding of the poem.
Close reading especially applies to the reading of shorter texts, like poetry. Unlike longer texts,
poems allow for students to focus on and practice their reading skills so that they can have a deep
understanding of the text in front of them. Boyles has suggested that while, “we don't want to abandon
longer texts, we should recognize that studying short texts is especially helpful if we want to enable
students with a wide range of reading levels to practice closely reading demanding texts.” (Boyles, 2012)
It could take weeks or even months to read through a 100-page novel to identify a theme or concepts
related to the text as a whole. A short text of a page or two can be digested in one lesson.
Student Choice
Another strategy to help students’ understand poetry and get them motivated about reading poetry
is encouraging student choice. Penny Kittle emphasizes the importance of student choice in her Nation
Council of Teachers of English article “The Top Five Reasons We Love Giving Students Choice in
Reading.” Kittle believes that choice allows students to select pieces of writing they are interested in,
which boosts their levels of engagement. The top five reasons regarding student choice that she found are:
choice empowers students, valuing student choices values the student, choice leads to real and meaningful
conversations, choice helps establish and deepen relationships between students and teachers, and choice
leads to independence, (Kittle 2013). Through student choice, we want these top five reasons to spill into
our lesson. By allowing students to read and write poetry of their choice, we hope our students will be
more engaged with the lesson and can discover how poetry is beneficial to their own lives. Allowing
choice in our lesson will meet the diverse interests and needs of our students.
Works Cited
Boyles, Nancy. “Closing in on Close Reading.” Common Core: Now What? vol. 70, no.4, Jan.
2013, pp. 36-41,
www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec12/vol70/num04/Closing-in-on-Cl
ose-Reading.aspx.
Gallagher, Kelly. Write Like this: Teaching Real-world Writing Through Modeling & Mentor
tenhouse Publishers, 2011.
Texts. S
Jacobs, Lucky. “Three Approaches to the Teaching of Poetry Writing.” English Education, vol.
8, no. 3, 1977. pp. 161-167. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40172187
Jago, Carol. Nikki Giovanni in the Classroom: the same ol danger but a brand new pleasure.
NCTE, 1999.
Kirkland, David E. “‘The Rose That Grew from Concrete’: Postmodern Blackness and New
English Education.” The English Journal, vol. 97, no. 5, May 2008, pp. 69–75.,
www.jstor.org/stable/30046887?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#page_scan_tab_contents.
Kittle, Penny. Book Love Developing Depth, Stamina, Passion in Adolescent Readers.
Heinemann, 2017,
pennykittle.net/uploads/images/PDFs/Workshop_Handouts/JulyBookLovehandouts.pdf.
“Learning Recitation: Poetry Out Loud.” Poetry Out Loud, 2018,
www.poetryoutloud.org/poems-and-performance/video-recitation-series.
NCTE. “How Students Helped to Discover the Relevancy of Poetry in the 21st Century.” NCTE,
2017,
www2.ncte.org/blog/2017/05/students-helped-discover-relevancy-poetry-21st-century/.
Skeeters et al, Keri. “The Top Five Reasons We Love Giving Students Choice in Reading.”
English Leadership Quarterly, NCTE, Feb. 2016,
www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/ELQ/0383-feb2016/ELQ0383Top.pdf.
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Lesson One: How does the meaning of poetry change when it is expressed in different mediums?
Essential Question: How is language transformed based on who delivers it?
Learning Objectives: To create new meaning based on the medium in which poetry is delivered
Resources and Materials: class set of “OCD” poem by Neil Hilborn, colored utensils, doc cam,
projector
Formative Assessment: As the students read along with the poem in partners and small groups, the
teacher will travel around the room listening to the conversations. The teacher will listen for students to
defend their reasoning behind their interpretation of the poem with evidence from the poem or video. The
teacher can also informally assess students based on the whole class conversation and the level of
feedback students need to understand the poem.
Summative Assessment: The teacher will collect annotations to see if students were able to identify
differences in performance, based on colored annotations. Students will also complete a quick write at the
end of class that explains their new understanding of the poem based on the different mediums they have
experienced with it. They must explain the specific language, gestures, vocal inflections, etc. that caused
them to come up with a new meaning.
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Learning Objectives: Students will analyze the effect that word choice has on the meaning of a poem
and create a main idea of a text based on evidence found in a close reading of the poem.
Resources and Materials: Printouts of “You and your partner” by Claudia Rankine, from Citizen
Opener/Anticipatory Set/Activator/Motivator:
● Chalk Talk: The teacher will write the question in the middle of the dry-erase board: What is a
micro-aggression?
○ Students will be encouraged to generate their thoughts individually or make connections
to other student’s thoughts by writing them on the dry erase board. Students may not
have experience with this word, but they are encouraged to make their best predictions as
to what it means. They may look to their peers’ responses for help. Give them 2-3
minutes to generate ideas.
○ After each student has written their thoughts on the board, the teacher will use their chalk
talk to talk about the ideas that students wrote. It is likely that not all students will know
what a micro-aggression is, so the teacher should take this as an opportunity for students
to share their experiences with microaggressions, or clarify what the word
“microaggression” means.
Formative Assessment: During class discussion, an informal formative assessment can occur as the
teacher listens to students share and explain how the underlined words or phrases relate to the topic (race
or aggression.) The teacher can also provide students with verbal corrective feedback and encouragement
based on whether or not they were able to create main ideas using the evidence they identified from their
close reading.
Summative Assessment: An informal summative assessment can occur when the teacher collects the
quick-write notecards at the end of class. Teachers can provide feedback to students on whether or not
they were able to connect the thematic material of the opening activity to the text and use either their main
ideas or the findings from their close reading as evidence to support these connections.
An informal summative assessment can also occur if the teacher collects the annotated poems. Teachers
will be looking to see what students found in relation to the topic (aggression or race) and if they were
able to explain how those words or phrases related to the topic.
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Learning Objectives:
To analyze the structure of a poem and identify the effect it has on the poem.
W.9-10.4 Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are
appropriate to task, purpose, and audience. (Grade-specific expectations for writing types are defined in
standards 1–3 above.)
Opener/Anticipatory Set/Activator/Motivator:
Students will be asked to write a 5 minute quick-write answering the following essential question, “What
is the power of words to effect change?” which will be written on the board. After the 5 minutes, students
will then discuss, as a class, their ideas about the power of words and their beliefs on how they invoke
change. The teacher needs to navigate the discussion to be sure to hit on why the students believe words
can or cannot effect change and why. The teacher, during the class discussion, will also focus on the
negative and positive impact words can have. Give examples of events where words helped evoke change.
(Ex. #MeToo movement, the hashtag brought awareness to sexual assault/violence).
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LOGISTICS OF LESSON
Learning Objectives: Students will use close reading strategies to analyze the word choice in poetry to
understand its deeper meaning and present their poetry to the class.
Opener/Anticipatory Set/Activator/Motivator: Students will begin class by doing a free write that
answers the following questions: Who am I? What do I value? How do I define my identity? Students will
be given 10 minutes to complete this activity. I will write one as well and share my free write with the
class. Using the doc cam, I’ll underline key words in my poem that help me find a theme about my
identity and values. I’ll then ask for student volunteers to share their free writes. All students will be
asked to underline key words or phrases that summarize who they are. They will use these underline
words to guide their research of a poem. This lesson centers on student choice. After completing the free
write opener, students will research poems of their choice that align with the underlined words used to
describe themselves and their values.
To summative assess students, I will grade them as they present their poem of choice to the class. I’ll
grade students on their ability to recite a poem and their reasoning behind why their poem represents their
identity and values. I will fill out a rubric as the students present, write down feedback on the rubric, and
give students these rubrics the next day. I will also verbally give feedback after students have presented.
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OCD – Neil Hilborn
You tell your neighbor that your friend, whom he has met, is babysitting. He says, no,
it’s not him. He’s met your friend and this isn’t that nice young man. Anyway, he wants
you to know, he’s called the police.
Your partner calls your friend and asks him if there’s a guy walking back and forth in
front of your home. Your friend says that if anyone were outside he would see him
because he is standing outside. You hear the sirens through the speakerphone.
Your friend is speaking to your neighbor when you arrive home. The four police cars are
gone. Your neighbor has apologized to your friend and is now apologizing to you.
Feeling somewhat responsible for the actions of your neighbor, you clumsily tell your
friend that the next time he wants to talk on the phone he should just go in the backyard.
He looks at you a long minute before saying he can speak on the phone wherever he
wants. Yes, of course, you say. Yes, of course.