English Journal - Volume 91, Issue 3, 2002

Bruce Goebel stresses the importance of including the poetry of Native Americans into literature curriculums along side canonical works. He argues that “a careful study of the cultural values and poetics of early Native American songs can help our students better understand these speakers and writers as people and as artists.”

John N. Moore shares lessons he learned while trying to teach poetry. He offers helpful strategies and guidance for instructors regardless of your career stage.

For James Mayer, “the solution to reducing that distinction between poetry at home and poetry at school was to allow students to discover their own muses of playfulness. I realized this was somehow related to the request my student had made about teaching a lesson in my class. To get students to write as freely as they do when they write poetry on their own, while at the same time getting them to do it as an ‘assignment,’ I decided to put them in charge. Thus, the student-led poetry workshops were born.”

After years of teaching poetry according to “tradition,” Fred Barton is inspired to try an innovative tactic to get students more involved in not only reading and appreciating poetry, but also by actually writing their “good” poems. Read this article for tips to renew your own poetry classes.

In this article, witness the collaborative efforts of a group of teachers that take a fresh approach to teaching poetry by “utilizing recording music,” “bringing in local poets who read and performed,” faciliating online sharing and critiquing of students’ poetry,” and “staging a poetry slam as a culminating activity” during their poetry unit.

According to Matthew Cheney, “English teachers have often been enemies of poetry—killing all beauty and pleasure with our precise dissections of symbols, themes, images, devices—but no poetic form has suffered worse mistreatment in our hands than haiku. Despite common misconceptions about haiku, there is a lively and vibrant haiku community throughout the United States and many other countries.” Read this article for further discussion on the use of haiku in your own classroom.

These educators invigorate their poetry classes by using technology to create “3-D haiku…a new multidimensional poetry genre created by Kolitsky, [which] provides a means for rewriting traditional two-dimensional haiku in a three-dimensional cube that can be viewed only in cyberspace!”

To get her students to connect their own experiences to the poems they write, Nicole Baart “developed a set of writing workshops designed to facilitate poetry writing by appealing to the senses. These workshops teach students to look past the ordinary, be aware of the world around them, and find inspiration in perfectly normal, uninspiring places. The result is often a mixture of personal enlightenment and the expression of self.”

For everything from what inspires a poet to write to the poet’s writing process, in this article get tips for teaching poetry from the experts!

Seeks evaluative strategies for grading poetry that occupy an elusive middle ground between flexibility and consistency. Discusses rubrics, collections, conference/negotiation, self-evaluation, and explication.

Salam creates new techniques for studying poetry. This article discusses: poetry as a prereading activity; collaborative invention of poems; poet as gatherer of ideas; considering the poetic memory; remembering people through poetic memory; communication and creation; form and meaning; and engaging all students.

Describes the positive results when a high school English teacher decided to have her students choose poems to be presented to and discussed by the class. Notes that Alice Walker’s poems were chosen often by the students. Suggests students began to have a genuine interaction with these poems they chose themselves.

Presents brief essays from 12 secondary English teachers describing their favorite poetry teaching activities.

Describes how a high school English teacher taught herself how to use hypertext in her classroom. Discusses how she used it in her creative writing classes and then moved on to use it in her other classes. Notes the positive responses of her students to the activities.

Describes five young adult novels that may help young adult males shape their identities in positive ways by showing the consequences of bad male behavior. Describes briefly 10 more new or overlooked young adult books worth reading.

Describes assignments that link Gary Soto’s novel “Taking Sides” to a collection of Latino poetry. Notes that the students’ final presentations were successful, as indicated by their enthusiasm and engagement throughout. Full text available in print version only.

Presents seven suggestions to help writers and teachers go beyond limericks, parts of speech poems, and haiku. Frames the suggestions for those who are (for whatever reason) trying to write poems, including teachers who are joining their students in the act of learning poetry writing. Full text available in print version only.