Teaching poetry

Both jobs are worth doing and only one of them is usually timetabled. A department can spend 6 weeks on a set text and never once ask a student to write 4 lines of their own, and the students come out able to identify a metaphor and unable to build one. The workshop answer is not to abandon reading. It is to put the writing first in the hour and let the reading serve it, which changes what gets read, how it gets read aloud, and what the lesson counts as success.

Teaching a poem, and teaching poetry

Teaching a poem asks what this poem means and how the writer achieved it. Teaching poetry asks what this poem does that you could do by Thursday. The second question changes the material on the desk: a poem taught for writing is read for its moves, and the class leaves with one of them in their hands.

The trap in between is comprehension. Poetry reading comprehension is a real and useful exercise, and it is also the fastest way to teach a room that a poem is a locked box with a right answer inside it. A class that has spent 3 years answering questions on poems has learned that poems are for decoding, and the first thing a workshop has to undo is the belief that they are not allowed to write one until they understand all of them.

What the objective of teaching poetry is

The objective is stated most usefully as something observable, and 4 objectives cover a workshop block without any of them requiring a claim about character. By the end of a block a student can produce a draft from a prompt without stalling, can name and use 3 devices deliberately, can read their own work aloud so that a room hears it, and can say something specific about somebody else's poem beyond whether they liked it.

The importance of teaching poetry is argued in much larger terms than those, and this is where a teacher writing a rationale should be careful. Poetry is the only place in the English curriculum where a student is asked to compress rather than expand, which is genuinely unusual and genuinely difficult, and it is one of very few places where the sound of a sentence is the point. Those are defensible arguments about the subject. The wider claims, that writing poetry raises attainment, lifts attendance or builds resilience, are claims about outcomes, they are not equally well evidenced, and The evidence, and its limits sets out which of them survive contact with the research.

Those objectives barely change between a primary class in England, an elementary class in the United States and a sixth form or college group. What changes is the material, the length of the writing time and how much of the sharing is voluntary: younger children volunteer to read out, and 15 year olds have to be given a reason not to be embarrassed, which is what the rules in Running poetry with young people are for.

The first lesson, from the board to the notebook

The first lesson gets from a device on the board to a draft in a notebook by rationing the talking to 10 minutes and giving the writing 15. The device is one device. The model poem is short enough to hear twice. The prompt is narrow enough that a blank page is not an available outcome.

1. Write one concrete question on the board before the class comes in, so the first 5 minutes are already working.
2. Read a short model poem aloud, then say in one sentence what the poem is doing, in words a 13 year old would use.
3. Give the prompt as an instruction rather than a topic: 10 things in your kitchen drawer, not the theme of family.
4. Write for 15 minutes alongside the class, in silence, without circulating for the first 5.
5. Take 3 volunteers, have the room say what it heard rather than what it thought, and stop while people still want a turn.

Two decisions in that hour do most of the work. Writing alongside the class is not a gesture, it is the demonstration that the task is possible and survivable. And ending the sharing early, deliberately, leaves the room wanting the next session, which is a more reliable engine than any amount of enthusiasm from the front.

How to read a poem aloud to a class

To read a poem aloud to a class, read it twice, more slowly the second time, and tell them what to listen for before the second reading rather than after it. A poem heard once is a rumour. A poem heard twice is a text, and a class that has heard it properly will argue about it without being asked to.

• Practise it once before the lesson, out loud, alone, because a first sight reading in front of 30 people is audibly a first sight reading.
• Do not act it: the poem carries the emotion and a teacher performing it hands the class a reading they then have to agree with.
• Keep the line breaks audible by pausing slightly where the line ends, which is the fastest way to teach what a line break does.
• Leave 5 seconds of silence at the end before saying anything, and let the room be uncomfortable in it.
• Give it to a student the second time once the group is 3 weeks in, having asked them the lesson before rather than on the spot.
• Never ask what the poet was trying to say, which invites guessing at a dead person's intentions; ask what the poem does to the person hearing it.

Acrostics, shapes and the activities that teach the wrong thing

Teaching acrostic poetry is worth 20 minutes in a primary classroom and almost nothing after that, because an acrostic makes the spelling of a word the master of every line. The writer stops asking what the next line should say and starts asking what begins with R. That is a spelling activity wearing a poem's clothes, and a 15 year old spots it immediately.

The same objection applies to any activity where a rule outside the poem decides what goes in it: syllable counting for its own sake, shape poems arranged into pictures, and fill in the blank templates all produce something that looks like a poem on the wall and teaches nothing about composing one. They are not useless with young children, for whom the pattern is the pleasure, and they stop working at roughly the age at which a student starts caring whether the poem is true.

What replaces them at secondary level is a device that generates material rather than constrains it: an image instead of a statement, a repeated opening phrase, a list, a poem addressed to somebody who will never read it. Each of those gives a writer somewhere to go on line 2, which is the actual problem an activity is there to solve.

What to teach from, and why Langston Hughes keeps coming back

What to teach from is decided by what survives being heard once, and Langston Hughes keeps coming back because almost everything he wrote does. The poems are short, the diction is plain, the rhythm is audible, and the subject is usually somebody speaking to somebody. He is also the reason two of the most common classroom searches exist: The Dream Keeper and Other Poems is a collection he selected for young readers, and Poetry for Young People is an illustrated series of single poet selections that includes a Hughes volume alongside Emily Dickinson, Carl Sandburg, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Rudyard Kipling and Lewis Carroll.

That series is worth knowing about and worth a caveat: it is aimed at roughly 8 to 12 year olds, and handing it to a class of 15 year olds signals that poetry is a children's subject. Contemporary work performed out loud does not have that problem, and Spoken word poetry is where most classes now meet the form first. Poems that work with teenagers sets out the 4 tests a poem has to pass to be worth reading to a room, and what to do about the poem that lands too close to home for somebody sitting in it.

One rule covers the copying: teach from a poem, never republish it. A poem that is still in copyright can be read aloud in a classroom and used under the exceptions that apply to education, and putting it on a website, a newsletter or a public display is a different act with different permission behind it. The Intellectual Property Office publishes the guidance for the United Kingdom, and it applies in England and Wales, in Scotland and in Northern Ireland alike.