Why I Love Teaching Poetry

with 3 different poems that have brought my classroom to life

When I reflect on my first thirteen years of teaching, there are a few major shifts in terms of my own practice that I end up thinking about. Shaping the systems of our classroom community around core values and beliefs was one major shift; creating dedicated lessons for students to review and reflect on assessment feedback was another one.

A third shift? Centering poetry in our classroom much more frequently and much more confidently.

For me, this transformation in the classroom ironically began to take place outside of the classroom, as during those initial stay-at-home months of COVID school closures in Spring 2020 I stumbled upon a free online course called ModPo (short for “Modern & Contemporary American Poetry”) that put me in the “student seat” and, as a result, helped reawaken my interest and confidence in how to move through poems in myriad ways. Not only did I get to tap back into that authentic curiosity I remember fondly from my college days discussing literature, but I also got to see a masterclass of how a professor facilitated conversation about a variety of poems.

(Seriously: this is a phenomenal course to take as an ELA teacher—and it’s 100% free!)

From that point forward, there has been way more poetry in the classroom and, more importantly, way more conversation and energy within our classroom community around that poetry.

This is one of the reasons I’m so excited to go on a month-long journey exploring poetry with other teachers on Bluesky starting today (!!!) along with

Brett Vogelsinger

and

Chanea Bond

.

Deep in my teaching bones, I believe poetry can energize and transform the classroom—so the more teachers feeling better about bringing into their classrooms, the better!

This is also why I wanted begin this month by sharing three significant ways that poems have shaped my own classroom—along with resources and, in one case, a video explainer. (This is something I’m going to try and start adding to some of the resources I share here, so let me know if that’s a worthwhile addition!)

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⓵ Beginning the School Year with a Poem

The first thing my juniors will encounter when they take their seats in our class this September?

A poem.

Now, it is admittedly a short poem (Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”) but there is a reason that poetry is the way we open our journey to the school year: it immediately invites students into the activity of interpreting collaboratively.

In my experience, poetry opens the doors to a culture of collaborative interpretation more so than any other type of text. As you can see in the image above, we start very simply: “Pick one word to highlight that stands out to you.” They explain their selection with their partner, then I call on students to share out whole-class as we talk about specific words and reasonings.

We continue on from this to a quick narrative writing exercise using the poem as an exemplar (full lesson here), but for me that is secondary to the way the poem immediately establishes what the culture of our room can be when we tackle literature.

(And much better than reading through the syllabus on Day 1, right?)

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⓶ My Favorite Poem To Introduce Poetry

Along with creating a culture of collaborative interpretation, in my experience poetry can also challenge the fixed notions of what a text can do—in a way that leaves students wide-eyed and imaginative about all the things that can be found in any text they encounter.

Without question, “The School Children” by Louise Glück is the best poem I’ve found to make this eye-opening experience happen. (Full slide deck we use available here!)

We still go through our normal “gut reaction” exercise with students picking words and phrases that they feel are important, then sharing with partners and small groups before moving to whole-class discussion—but this poem is perhaps the best I’ve ever found at [a] layering meaning underneath its surface in a remarkable way and [b] serving as a meta-text, too, in allowing us to enact and refute its important critique of education while we explore it.

Even in the final week of the school year, students point back to the day we read “The School Children” and how it changed the way they saw what a text can do.

Poetry can do some pretty amazing things. (Especially the right poems!)

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⓸ Ending the School Year with a Poem, Too

We begin with a poem and we also end with a poem.

Another “Mt. Rushmore” poem in my experience as teacher: “You Mean You Don’t Weep at the Nail Salon?” by Elizabeth Acevedo.

This particular poem is how my sophomores end the year—as we take the final twenty minutes of our course to read and interpret collaboratively one last time with a poem that, I’d argue, offers a path forward that responds to all we have done before in the course and is need more than ever in our current moment.

Instead of another slide deck link, here’s a quick video explainer of what we do to end the year with this poem, for those curious:

(Also: here’s the slide deck in case that’s helpful, too!)

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✍️ Poetry Can Be Transformative

The focus of this post is what reading and discussing poetry can look like—but of course there are all the other things poetry can do, including for student writing. I know I’ve shared before about the narrative poetry activity we do each winter (see image above of the results from this past year!) and, I mean, Brett wrote a whole book about the way poems can elevate student writing.

In my experience, though, the first step to feeling good about bringing poetry into your classroom as a teacher is really leaning into the experience of poetry as a student—reading and grappling with its iterations, seeking out and crafting your own interpretations, and then engaging in meaningful conversations with others around it.

This is what #PoemADayJuly is meant to create: a space to do just that as a community of teachers and educators, and to lean into that broader, better vision of what classrooms could look like with at least a few more poems in them going forward.

Before signing off, though, a couple questions for folks in the comments, if you’re willing!

1. What do you enjoy most about poetry as a teacher—or, more broadly, as a person? How has it resonated with you? (Feel free to include specific poems!)

2. However, if you’re someone who doesn’t like poetry—or an ELA teacher who tends to stay away from it in the classroom—what about poetry is difficult for you? What has the wall been for you up to this point?

(Also, if you find the video explainer a helpful addition to posts like these, let me know and I’ll look into different opportunities going forward to embed more like it.)

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For Those Looking To Explore More Poem Resources

Aside from participating in #PoemADayJuly on Bluesky (seriously: everyone is welcome!) and reading Brett’s book (seriously: it’s incredible!) here are some places I’d suggest checking out for further poetry learning:

• Poem-a-Day at Poets.org—a suggestion I originally got from Brett, signing up for this gets you a poem each morning in your email inbox! Yes, our inboxes are likely cluttered already, but why not add a daily poem to that clutter? (We’ll also occasionally be using the “Poem-a-Day” as part of our July reading of poems!)

• The Slowdown—though on the surface this looks like yet-another podcast subscription, it really is a quite simple and meaningful concept: a poem each weekday to listen to along with a reflection.

• For Dear Life With Maggie Smith—I’ve found that if there is a poet that really resonates with you, do what you can to follow their writing and the thinking that goes with it! That is why I enjoy this newsletter so much, but I’m sure there are myriad more for different poets worth following. (Feel free to share others you’ve discovered in the comments!)