Five Tools for Approaching Poetry

What does this poor bunny have to do with poetry? See #2 below!

A poem is a petri dish for language. A poet takes a word, an image, a line, a thought—isolates it, and sees what happens. If you want to know how language works, one way is to study poetry. Instead of inundating the reader with pages of text, poetry presents mere lines—lines that I can read and re-read, lines where a poet has concentrated all her control over all the powers of language to transport a thought, feeling, or image from her heart or mind to mine. And so I call my poetry unit for 10th graders “Paying Attention.”

But what you want right now is some tools—not an apologetic or a motivational speech. Something to reinvigorate tomorrow or next unit or whenever you have poetry staring you and your students in the face. So here are 5 tools I’ve found effective in helping 10th graders grapple with and appreciate poetry: (1) performance poetry, (2) a protocol for poetry analysis, (3) annotations, (4) writing drafts patterned on mentor texts, and (5) looking at song lyrics as poetry.

(1) Performance poetry. I use Daniel Beaty’s “Knock Knock” for an introduction. Students who groan at the very word “poetry” are transfixed by the passion evident in the performance. The topics of mass incarceration, prejudice, inheritance, and overcoming adverse circumstances are relevant to students’ lives, prompting connections and conversation. The poem bears deeper examination of the poetic and literary devices that help convey the meaning. 

Here’s what I’ve done with it. 

• We watch it once, just looking for what catches our attention the first time through. Small groups discuss: What’s happening (summary)? What questions do we have? What words, phrases, images, or pattern caught our attention? What is our initial overall response? 
• Next we read a copy of the text and mark it up (see "Annotations," #3 below). What original observations are confirmed? What questions are answered? What additional words, phrases, images, patterns do we notice? How do our responses develop? Small groups share annotations.
• Finally, we watch it one more time and consider how multiple exposures to and discussions of a text deepen our understanding. (See also my blog  “Using Annotation as Assessment, Formative and Summative.") 

(2) A protocol for poetry analysis. This is not meant to kill a poem by dissection, but to give a little traction for gaining confidence in poetry reading. I’ve seen such acronyms proliferating on teacher threads recently, and you're free to use any one that you find helpful. This is one I created years ago, and it works well for me. I call it “rest in peace, long-eared rabbit” and draw a picture (see photo at top). Once students are familiar with it, they just call it RIPLER, but until then and long afterward, the picture is a great memory prompt. Out of the 6 letters, the first 3 have to do with simply questioning the text, the next 2 with special tools of language, and the final one with personal response.

• Read according to punctuation, not line breaks—avoiding the “round yon virgin” pitfall. In my younger days I had a mental picture of a plump Mary beside the manger due to singing “all is bright / ‘round yon virgin” according to line breaks rather than punctuation. 
• Identify the speaker and audience—“I” may be the poet, or may be a persona. “You” may be the reader, or a real or imagined other. Is every singer always singing about actual break-ups with actual people? Even without an actual “I” and “you” in the text, identifying the speaker and audience helps set the context.
• Paraphrase—Possibly by sentence (helps with #1) or by stanza.
• Listen to sound devices—rhyme, rhythm, repetition, alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia…
• Envision images—both literal sensory images (usually sight, but also sound, smell, taste, touch) and figurative (metaphor, simile, personification) (*See extra: Pictures and videos below.)
• Respond—After reserving judgment and trying to just listen, working to figure out what the poet was trying to say, how he was trying to say it, and in what ways the “how” impacted the what—now: What are your thoughts/feelings in response?

(3) Annotations: For every poem we read, students have a copy they can write on. I call it “putting my brain on paper.” I just write down what my brain does as it grapples with the text. RIPLER is a great place to start, and anything else my brain comes up with: connections, questions, pictures, vocabulary words, other literary techniques I notice, like paradox or parallelism. At the beginning, I model, using a document camera. Student can do it in groups on enlarged copies. (When each student uses a different colored pen, all students are accountable to contribute!) And individuals can do it. In fact, I use this as both formative and summative assessment. (For more, see my blog “Annotations as Summative Assessment: What Can They Really Do?”) (For my full summative assessment prompt, see this link.) 

*Extra: The sounds of words. To have fun with and foster just enjoying the sounds of words, I play a recording of Dr. Demento’s radio skit “Bulbous Bouffant.” If you’re not familiar with it, it’s 4 minutes of word-nerd hilarity that not many non-word-nerds can resist. We just enjoy it, discuss words that are new to some, propose our favorites, and suggest any other words we find cool or funny just from their sound. 

**Extra: Pictures and videos. Use a Google search and projection to cultivate a response of actually conjuring up images and sounds. When we read “In Flanders Fields,” what do poppies look like? What does a lark sound like? When we read “The Guitar” by Federico Garcia Lorca, what does classical Spanish guitar look like? Sound like? 

(4) Poem drafts patterned on mentor texts. Doing deepens learning, so every time we read and discuss a poem, the students and I practice doing ourselves what we just watched a professional do. I pick a cool move the poet made with language, and challenge us to try it. It’s the scrimmage after studying the game. Sometimes we are surprised at how effectively we can communicate, and sometimes we learn that it is harder that it looks, but we always understand language and appreciate the skill it takes to wield it well better at the end. (For more, see my blog “Learning by Doing: Poetry”) 

(5) Song lyrics. This is my final assessment—what the whole unit is building toward, the transfer of skills I really want students to be able to do. Essentially, it’s a poetry analysis paper, with the analysis practiced upon student-selected song lyrics, with a hypothetical audience and purpose created by couching it as a school literary magazine article. Here’s the introduction: “As a teen who is much more aware than the average of the power and beauty of language all around us, you have a challenge: it involves kids who think poetry is irrelevant and miss half of the artistry of the lyrics they listen to, and adults who think modern songs are mental fluff and no one’s written good poetry in the last 100 years. Your goal is to convince kids (and adults) that poetry is not dead, lyrics can be powerful poetry, and being able to analyze them as such will deepen their understanding and appreciation of the songs they listen to every day, of truth, and of the power of language.”  (See here for the full prompt.)

The next thing I want to try is blackout poetry--I've heard so many good reports about its effectiveness.

What tools do you find effective for helping students appreciate poetry?

Embracing the Why: Purpose Motivates

I love having access to a local public library! Here's my haul from this week's visit.

• What’s a fun activity I can do with my students to get them engaged in Animal Farm?
• What’s a good short story I can do with my students?
• What are some good pieces for a nonfiction unit?

These are questions teachers frequently ask other teachers. The hitch is there is no one activity (or even a list of 10) that will automatically engage students for the rest of the novel, unit, or course. There is no piece of writing—fiction or nonfiction—that is guaranteed to engage every student no matter how it is presented. (If there were, it would have been used long before students got to me, or I’d use it at the beginning of the year, and then I’d be back to where I started.)  

The most important question is Why? Why should students read that novel, short story, or set of nonfiction pieces? There are many strategies for student engagement, and the most motivating of all is purpose. I may have designed the most fun activity in the world—say, an escape room or a game—which may engage students for a period, but they’ll still come back the next day and say, “What fun activity are we going to do today?” 

One qualification: I may say the purpose is to understand a great novel’s structure and beauty, to learn to read more effectively, or to analyze arguments. Those align with the standards, but aren't really something the students care deeply about right now. I need a deeper purpose. How does it touch their lives? What are the questions that consume them (or that I can introduce to them as questions that are intriguing) that they can explore during this study? 

For instance, the driving (or essential) question as we read the modern prose drama A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen is “Who am I?” As we read Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it’s “What’s the difference between infatuation and love?” As we read Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night, it’s “What is human dignity and why does it matter?” As we read Cry, the Beloved Country by South African writer Alan Paton, it’s “How do people build and destroy peace and justice?” For contemporary Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s After Dark, it’s “What is empathy and why does it matter?” These are all important questions in the lives of my students, the hallways of our school, the viral posts of social media, and the civic conversations of our society.

For significant discussions of these questions, do students need skills for deeper reading of the text? Yes. Do they need background knowledge for deeper understanding of the topic? Yes. Do they need discussion and thinking skills for more effective processing of the questions? Yes. And do I want to use the most engaging strategies to help them master those skills and that knowledge? Yes. How does this work?  

Because I start with a question students want to have significant discussion of, they are invested in learning reading skills, studying nonfiction, and developing discussion skills. Thus, for instance, when we read A Midsummer Night’s Dream we study reading skills like identifying motifs, understanding word play, and using textual aids. I use engaging instructional strategies like annotating text, sharing modern word play, and acting or drawing scene summaries. 

When we explore the question “What is human dignity and why does it matter?” we read nonfiction like the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a Time magazine article “What Makes Us Moral?,” the introduction to An Ordinary Man (the memoir of the main character in the movie Hotel Rwanda who saved lives during that genocide), and a study of implications of the Biblical concept that people are made in the image of God. I use engaging instructional strategies like think/pair/share, jigsaw, and TQE (thoughts/questions/epiphanies). 

For significant discussions of these questions to be most productive, the final piece is direct instruction in and scaffolding of discussion skills like asking questions, listening to understand rather than compose one's own answer, and building on others’ comments. 

How do I come up with my driving questions? When planning a unit, I can start with a question and look for literature and nonfiction that explore it. Conversely, I can start with a piece of literature that really grabbed me, and ask, “Why? Why did this grab me? What intriguing question did it help me explore? And how does that question touch my students’ lives?”

“Why do we have to study this?” This question can be defanged  by embracing it. To transform the material and skills themselves into inherently engaging stuff, I work to context them with a purpose that will motivate students. After all, it's why we as adults read, write, and discuss, and I want to invite my students to "play the whole game at a junior level."

"Playing the Whole Game at a Junior Level"

Was any budding musician ever captivated by scales? Or an athlete by running ladders? Aren’t scales and ladders what fledgling pianists and football players do because they’ve had a little taste of what playing is really like, and they know this discipline will make them better? Student interest is kindled in the same way—by allowing them to do the work of the field—whether that is science, history, math, or English—at the level they are able.  

Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine conclude their 2019 analysis of what IS working in small pockets in American education with a list of 8 stances of “deeper learning” teacher versus traditional teachers. The first one is their stance toward the goal of education. While traditional teachers see it as to “cover the material,” deeper learning teachers teachers see it as to “[d]o the work of the field; inspire students to become members of the field” (350). A related phrase they use is “playing the whole game at the junior level” (In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School).   

I’m reminded of my love affair with sports which began in 4th grade. At my new school, the 4th and 5th grade boys spent all recess every recess playing basketball. I was fascinated. It looked much more fun than 4-square or monkey bars, which I was familiar with. This shouting and running, this heat and action, this celebration and frustration, this mixture of patterns and improvisation fascinated me. I was totally new to the sport. Sure, I knew my dad watched it on TV sometimes, but that meant nothing to me. Now I sat on the sidelines enthralled, at first utterly mystified why someone would shout “double dribble!” or “traveling!” and all play would stop while an argument ensued. Gradually I began to deduce the rules. My whole body yearned to join in, but I just knew I’d be rejected as both a girl and a total neophyte. Finally the day came that a teacher noticed the devotion of my vigil. “Do you want to play?” she asked. I nodded. “Won’t they let you?” Skipping the part about how I’d never even asked, I shook my head. The boys got an undeserved scolding, and I was in. 

That was the day that lead years later to a partial basketball scholarship to a small Christian college. A lot of other stuff, of course, happened in between. First the mocking calls of the other team, “Throw it to the female!” since that would lead to a turnover. There were the hours of shooting and dribbling by myself between the time the rest of the students went home and the time my mom, a teacher, was ready to leave. Eventually there was being the only 10th grader to make the varsity team in another new school.

Along the way, I did my share of drills, shooting, conditioning, weight-lifting, and studying of playbooks. I did those things not for the love of doing them, but for the love of playing the game. And whether I was playing it on the elementary school playground, on the middle school team, or at the Long Beach Arena in the high school area divisional championship, playing the whole game at the junior level also drove me back to the study and practice that would raise that game even further. 

Imagine if that first elementary playground supervisor had told me, “Well, here’s a rulebook, and you can practice over there, and if you work hard, in 12 years you might be a basketball player.” Nope—I was a basketball player from the first moment I stepped on that asphalt court with a bunch of 4th and 5th grade boys. I was an unskilled and clueless basketball player—but I was one. I adopted the attitudes and behaviors of a basketball player: being on the court every spare moment, running like crazy up and down the court, requesting a basketball for Christmas, carrying that basketball back and forth to school in my bicycle.

What does "the whole game at a junior level" look like in English? It looks like having a "big idea," real world purpose or essential question for reading and writing, and then scaffolding that reading and writing so students can increasingly take ownership for uncovering and communicating meaning. They discuss their observations and questions in small groups, because we're smarter together than alone. Sometimes they point out things I had not yet discovered. Sometimes I share my writing with them. My goal is not to have my students master a body of knowledge about the particular works we study, but to take on the identities of readers and writers as they read those works and write about related ideas. To become competent, confident, motivated independent readers and writers. Parts of speech, metaphors, paragraph transitions, and canonical writers are studied as means to this end. Not as prerequisites so that in some undefined future they can become readers and writers, but as they do the actual work of reading and writing. Because I want them to feel the joy and challenge that I felt on that elementary basketball court, that I feel as I read and write now, doing the work of my field.

What is the work of your field—the actual “game" practitioners play? How do you induct your students into that work? How do they play “the whole game at the junior level”?

Productive Struggle

Everything in me wants to intervene, to show my 3-year-old grandson where the flat-edged puzzle piece that he’s trying to fit into the middle of the puzzle really goes. Of course, I would narrate for him how I know and how he could figure it out: “You see this edge here? Do you know what that means? Where do you see other flat edges? What do you see on the sides of these other pieces?” But I sit on my hands and chew on my tongue as he tells me, “This is a really tricky puzzle, but I can do it.” I count to five in my head, and—viola!—he slips the piece into its place on the boarder. He grins up at me, and I praise him for his tenacity. I’ve tried the explaining thing before—it just got a bewildered look from him while he sat back and let me make the puzzle.

This is a perfect picture of the productive struggle that is an important part of learning not only for 3-year-olds but also for my high school students, and even for myself. Productive struggle requires identifying the Goldilocks sweet spot of learning—not too easy and not too hard, but just the right amount of challenge to be interesting but not discouraging. It also needs investment in the learning (I want to struggle through for some reason), problem-solving tools, and a risk-friendly environment—because if the struggle is real, the possibility of failure is real, too. 

This 12-piece puzzle is in my grandson’s Goldilocks sweet spot. He’s beyond the peg puzzles my 1-year-old grandson is just beginning to get, and not yet ready for the 1000-piece puzzles that I enjoy. An important part of teaching is identifying where that sweet spot is for students, designing learning opportunities that put them in it, then standing back and letting them struggle. Swooping in to “help” too soon can actually disempowering. 

It’s like the adage about giving a person a fish or teaching her how to fish. Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey recount a vignette about a piano teacher watching a student struggle with fingering (Better Learning through Structured Teaching: A Framework for the Gradual Release of Responsibility).The student complained, “If you were a good teacher you would tell me what to do!” The teacher replied, “And because I’m a great teacher, I’m letting you figure it out yourself.” 

What does this look like in a writing classroom? Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher address this in 180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents. In one of the accompanying videos, they discuss when to give advice on student revisions and when to ask students what they’re struggling with and how they’re going to address it. It’s the tension of helping students make this piece of writing better vs. helping students become better writers. When do I let a student struggle, and when do I tell her what to do? Penny seemed more on the side of student struggle; Kelly raised the question What if the student hasn’t even learned the move that would make this piece of writing better? 

I actually find it encouraging that the experts don’t always agree. It’s part of a teacher’s productive struggle. As long as I’m aware that there is a balance to keep and I’m providing a toolbox of writing moves via mini-lessons, mentor texts, teacher modeling, and the opportunity to struggle. And when I’m modeling the struggle—with the risk of sometimes failing—because life and learning and writing are like that—I’m most likely to be creating a classroom community where students also value writing and struggle and feel safe to take writing risks.   

I’m thinking of putting this picture of my 3-year-old grandson on my desk to remind me of the value of productive struggle—for my students, for myself in my classroom, and for myself in life. For all the times I wish God would just tell me what to do, it will remind me that God knows exactly how to not be a helicopter parent or teacher, but allows me productive struggle so that I can grow.