Poetry Workshop

Poetry Workshop for Middle School: Activities That Inspire Meaningful Language Learning
by Michelle Ambrosini and Teresa M. Morretta

As I considered the various possibilities for teaching poetry in my own classroom, I found that I had difficulty connecting poetry to the rest of the units, lessons, and skills that I wanted to teach to my students. Although I enjoy reading poetry recreationally, I had the view that many high school students hold: poetry has little value outside of poetry itself, and the skills found from reading and writing poetry aren’t as transferrable as other skills. However, as I have begun to read pieces on the place of poetry within the secondary classroom, particularly in my study of Poetry Workshop for Middle School: Activities That Inspire Meaningful Language Learning (henceforth “Poetry Workshop”), I’ve realized that, taught well, poetry can have a long-lasting and meaningful impact on students as readers, writers, and listeners, and actually can address far more parts of Common Core than I originally thought.

The premise of Poetry Workshop consists of a focused, three- to four-week intensive workshop. Students are invited to read, write, and listen to poetry from a variety of published poets, their peers, and themselves. Most important, students are encouraged to think deeply about their own and others’ works, from an aesthetic standpoint where the purpose is appreciation, and from an efferent stance, reading critically and looking for what makes good poetry good. Ambrosini and Moretta set the stage for this workshop as being effective not only in the teaching of poetry, but also creating a more open, respectful, and constructive classroom environment in which students feel comfortable making academic commentary on works they have read and in writing their own works. The book states that teachers of poetry within the secondary classroom join their students in writing and editing poetry so that students are exposed to in-classroom modeling of the writing process. Poetry Workshop also includes activities and concepts as a way for poetry to be included in units beyond the workshop, so that students are repeatedly exposed to the principles taught in the workshop and poetry does not become an isolated event, taught only out of necessity, but rather an academically enjoyable activity to be integrated into the classroom and teach students how to love the intricacies of language.

To begin the poetry workshop, Ambrosini and Moretta go beyond specific instruction on how to teach poetry, actually suggesting the adoption of a new teaching philosophy. Poetry Workshop commends aspects of direct instruction, the explicit teaching of necessary facts and skills from teacher to student, with that of “whole language,” which promotes authentic settings in a student-centric, rather than teacher-centric, instructional environment. Students within this multi-week poetry unit are exposed to direct, teacher-modeled strategies such as looking for the use of figurative language or structure within a poem, and then they are also given opportunities to reflect, read and create using various aspects of poetry, which method the authors state will allow students to become more confident in their skills, effective in their communication and analysis of future works.

In the poetry workshop, reading is essential, and a wide exposure seems to be the best way to go. Students in the poetry workshop read as many poems as there are skills in the “poet's toolbox”-- a poem for simile, one for metaphor, one for onomatopoeia, another highlighting alliteration. One practice I thought was interesting was the suggestion of using picture books to demonstrate different types of poetry. Because some students see poetry as unreachable or too stuffy and academic, reminding them that poetry can be found in simple, enjoyable, and engaging works that they have interacted with before gives them exposure to poetry in a new light. Reading picture books allows the students to takes works that they are familiar with and recognize the intentionality of the authors’ choices, and realize the process that goes into writing and editing poetry. Once students have read various examples of poetry and are familiar with the vocabulary, they’re ready to start writing.

Poetry Workshop focuses highly on letting students create their own work. Students are encouraged to experiment with styles like limerick or haiku, rhymed or blank verse, with and without prompts. Students practice writing works of their own creation and in response, sometimes as a sort of mimic to the works of others, as a way to build their “poet’s toolbox”, or their poetic repertoire.

A misconception I held in my secondary exposure to poetry was that writing poetry was kind of a one time thing-- you sat down, wrote out some rhymes or whatever you felt like at the time, and maybe it was good, and maybe it wasn’t. Certainly I believed that practice led to improvement, but I wrongly assumed that practice meant writing new poems. I hardly stopped to consider that poetry could work like any other type of process writing, with revision and editing as a natural part of progressing a poem and making it better. I think I realized that poetry came from emotion, and because of that, I thought that it was from a more untouchable place than, say, a research paper. Ambrosini and Morretta focus on encouraging students to constantly evaluate their work for opportunities to improve, modifying word choice for greater impact, adding and cutting and moving around so that the poem morphs into something the student consciously and successfully created.

Part of that revision process allows students to practice using more advanced vocabulary. The words that Ambrosini’s and Moretta’s students used during the workshop weren’t above middle school level; the words were just used less frequently. Poetry workshop influenced students to take big concepts and put them into short, artfully constructed poems--in middle school! I believe the use of vocabulary in poetry workshop shifted the students’ ways of thinking in ways that it would be harder to change in any other unit. I think that if I were to use a poetry workshop in my classroom (and, after reading, I believe that is a good possibility), that I would teach it toward the beginning of the year, and then build on those essential skills, such as analysis and word choice, as the year progressed. Poetry shifts students’ mindsets on language, and if taught well, influences them toward a potent curiosity and an enjoyment of language that is essential for any student to have a positive experience in an English class. Watching language work in short pieces greatly assists students when they start watching that same language move in larger works, or when they start creating their own pieces.

A large part of poetry writing within the workshop, and possibly one of the most important pieces, comes from conferencing. Conferencing allows students to work with the teacher—a more experienced writer—and with their peers to gain optimal perspective on their work, both what the student did well and ways the student might improve. The authors suggest that students should be able to drive the focus for at least some of the conferences. That is to say, rather than merely receiving a grade or feedback on a piece that a student has written, students should be encouraged to think critically about their own writing, and self-motivate to suggest and implement changes themselves, so that they truly come to own the writing that they have created.

I loved the opportunities Moretta and Ambrosini gave for applying poetry to outside, non-poetry texts. The authors used poetry as a way to assess student understanding of the plot, characters, and emotions of texts such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. They were able to address multiple standards by having students summarize the main points of each work within a poem that compared and contrasted the pieces, using textual evidence. I loved the idea of using poetry as an assessment; it seems creative and refreshing, and if a teacher differentiates effectively within the poetry workshop, students will enjoy trying out a new form of assessment. And as Moretta and Ambrosini point out, the goal of poetry workshop is to differentiate, for interest by using relevant and engaging texts, for readiness by providing texts of different levels, for the learning environment by creating multiple opportunities for students to share their work in a respectful academic environment. By applying the principles of the book to the activities outlined in it, teachers will successfully be able to motivate students toward a love of poetry.

The goals of the poetry workshop seem to angle towards the idea that students take pride in themselves as poets and as readers of poetry. In the secondary classroom, students often have misconceptions about poetry and its use, but Moretta and Ambrosini point out that poetry teaches applicable use of figurative language, as well as the important ability to convey thoughts and feelings in a concise and impactful manner. Letting students read and write poetry influences better word choice, conscientious use of language, and a more skillful understanding of students’ individual voices and capabilities as writers.