English Journal - Volume 96, Issue 1, 2006

Members of the Secondary Section Steering Committee comment on topics of importance to English language arts educators.

Members of the Secondary Section Steering Committee comment on topics of importance to English language arts educators.

“Snapshots” offers insights about teaching and learning through teacher stories about a particular classroom event.

“Speaking My Mind” invites readers to speak out about controversial issues relevant to the teaching of English language arts.

“Teacher to Teacher” provides a forum for teachers to share ideas, materials, and activities

High school teacher Sheri Skelton discusses the role of poetry in her rural Alaska classroom. She shares several successful lessons and students’ examples to show how poetry can be an everyday component of teaching, “something routine, expected, and natural.”

Mary Lynn Huie wants students to understand common themes in diverse literary works. Using Nicolás Guillén’s “Ballad of the Two Grandfathers,” this high school teacher encourages her students “to resolve and embrace conflicts so that they might move beyond them.” They do this by writing personal shadow poems.

Inclusion and collaboration are the keys to creating an annual arts celebration in Buffalo, New York. High school teacher John B. Kryder describes how educators across grade levels have brought poetry, music, and dance together in ways that help students better understand and appreciate these art forms. He also suggests smaller-scale possibilities for connecting poetry with art, math, and science.

Urban middle school students gain a passion for reading and writing poetry through weekly workshops started by teacher Nancy Schwalb. Specific teaching activities and students’ poems provide evidence of the power of a vision supported by creative thinking, community resources, and dedicated teachers.

Teacher Honor Moorman explains an extended poetry lesson that connects art and poetry. Students perform published poems written in response or reaction to paintings as preparation for their visit to an art museum, where they emulate the professional poets in writing original poems about art. Sample poems show the effectiveness of this idea.

High school teacher Rachel A. Wilkinson uses “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” to emphasize the importance of the journey to create meaning from a poem. In one class period, students learn that there are many ways to make sense of a complex poem.

Students can better understand poetry when they recognize the importance of rhythm. Barbara Mather Cobb shares a scansion unit that uses Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Wilbur H. Sowder Jr. teaches students to read a poem by first giving them just a skeleton of it. In this article, he shares a detailed, inductive lesson that can be modified in several ways to help students discover and appreciate the poet’s craft.

In reviving his school’s poetry elective, high school teacher Ian A. Strever stimulated poetic discussion and creation across departments and in the community. He shares ways “to bring poetry to untouched corners of the school.”

How can a teacher grade student poetry while making it clear that the writing, not the poem’s emotion or subject, is the target of that grading? Middle school teacher Andrea Griswold uses an assessment tool that she shares with students to explain the grading process.

Mark Dressman and Mark Faust return to the archives of English Journal to see how teaching practices in poetry have—and have not—changed since 1912. They recommend ten articles, written by practicing classroom teachers, that “deserve to be reread and restudied in the present.”

Melinda McBee Orzulak describes classroom practices and professional development activities that were influenced by her participation in an arts integration course. Risk-taking, empathy, complexity, and imagination became hallmarks of her instruction.

Karen A. Wink’s trip to Germany and Poland to study the Holocaust helped her address apathy in her Coast Guard Academy classroom. She presents three vignettes to illustrate the evolution of her thinking.