Tips for Teaching Poetry

We asked our Teacher Trailblazers for their top tips for teaching poetry. Here's what they came up with.

New Tips for 2011

1. Don’t Be Yourself                                                                                                                                              Children can find it difficult to express themselves in poetry from their own point of view. They can get too bogged down in the literal and struggle to look awry at the world around them. Tell them to be a banana, a lost dog, a falling leaf, a neglected grand piano... Instantly, you will have opened up their imagination and they will have a whole new perspective to play around with.

2. Share Your Enthusiasm                                                                                                                                  When trying to inspire your pupils to write, stick to poems that you like yourself. It doesn’t matter why you like it. Even if a poem is obscure or you think that it may go beyond their full understanding, as long as you can convey your passion, your pupils will respond.  Tell them who first introduced you to the poem and how it affected you then. Tell them why it still affects you now. They will be intrigued and will approach the poem with a desire to unlock the secret magic.

3. Think Cross Curricular                                                                                                                                        Don’t assume that ‘poetry’ and ‘English’ have to go hand in hand. Some of the best ideas for poetry can come from other areas of school life and be used in other subject areas. Open an atlas and you have a wealth of weird and wonderful words with which to find rhymes. Pi can be learnt to fifty places and beyond with mnemonics crafted into verse. The metre of assembly hymns that your pupils know already like the back of their hand can be used as a ready-made framework for metrical poetry. Using poetry in a totally unexpected context and for an unusual purpose will engage even the most reluctant poets.

4. Use a visual stimulus                                                                                                                                               The Pullitzer Photography Prize website is a great place to start. Rather than showing the whole photograph, why not ask students to be the zoom on the camera.

5. Explore different perspectives                                                                                                                        Use Matt Madden’s ‘Exercises in Style’ to show students how exciting it can be to look at the relatively mundane through a new pair of eyes. The book is a worthwhile investment but Matt’s website http://www.exercisesinstyle.com/ is a good way in.

6. Use the internet to your advantage                                                                                                                The web is a way of life for your students and so use to engage them. Why not start with Eminem showing us how easy it is to find a word to rhyme with orange. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kQBVneC30o

7. Ask students to respond poetically to other poems                                                                                  For example, “Not a red rose or a satin heart, I give you a….”. If students struggle, give them a list of everyday objects to explore.

New Tips For 2010

1. Find the extraordinary in the ordinary.
A good warm-up activity, to get students tuned in to their environment and to shake off the dread of writer’s block, is to ask them to write down everything that goes through their mind in a one minute spell. The real benefit, however, is to show that there are always interesting things going on beneath the apparent normality of the everyday. In short: the mind has a mind of its own and this can be a source of creativity.

2. Make space for the imagination.
Using images to give students inspiration for writing is commonplace. One angle is to ask students to think beyond the frame. What is not seen perhaps slowly becoming more important and leaving room for the imagination to take hold.

3. Take risks with learning.
That goes for teachers as well as pupils. Make space in the curriculum for reading poetry, even long narrative poems. Play games with poems, such as poetry charades or imagery Pictionary. Make students love language, enjoy its drama, its tension and they will not forget it.

1.       4. Find the right pupils.
Enlist the help of poetry confident young people, ideally leaders among their peers, the rest will follow!

5. Tie workshops to national events.
If you are asking a poet to come into the school,  make sure that the workshops coincide with National Poetry Day or World Book Day or another celebration of poetry or literature to enable them to see the wider benefits of what they are studying.

6. Enthusiasm and determination.
Your love for poetry must be clearly demonstrated together with the belief that this is their chance to shine and succeed.  This will be a great motivator!

Timeless Tips for Teachers:

1. Convince your Head Teacher to pay for you to go on an Arvon course.
Keep copies of everything and ask the poets you work with to let you use their workshop activities.

2. Become a voracious reader of contemporary poetry.
Start to write your own poems or at least try writing with your pupils as they attempt the exercises you set them – and then model the redrafting process for them so they can see clearly how the ‘raw material’ produced by workshops can eventually become poems.

3. Share all your tips with your colleagues.
Then poetry writing becomes an integral part of the courses – and the ethos – of the whole department.

4. Accept that writing poetry takes time.
Persist; put the first draft in a drawer for a month and let the mind work on it at a subconscious level as the initial excitement dies away.

5. As a teacher, do not seek to dominate.
Be a prompt, a diversion, a raconteur or a source of jokes, but write with your students and show your vulnerability.

6. Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way recommends the 'morning pages'.
Write three pages of A4 to clear the brain of normal thoughts and patterns. Encourage this stream of consciousness writing at the beginning of the lesson. The students then discuss patterns they observe in their thinking. This leads on to fresher thinking for the rest of the lesson.

7. Encourage the use of juxtaposition.
Duffy’s ‘clever-smelling satchel’ from Mean Time is a good example of an image and the use of the unexpected. Juxtapose abstract with concrete images. Play with the senses: if you could smell joy what would it be like?

8. Create the right atmosphere
Good warm-up exercises include using music to create the right ambience or starting sessions with automatic writing. This exercise gets brains and hands ready for writing.

9. Develop imagery
One exercise which helps students develop their powers of imagery is to give students an object written on a card, such as the moon, a tree or the sun. Ask them to write three similes and pass their book on. Every child adds a simile to their class mates’ books for ten moves. The books are returned to the owners and then each student uses the images as a bank in writing their own poem.

10. Follow the advice of great poets
"Some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the language of prose, when prose is well written" (William Wordsworth, 1805). Try to write a piece of grammatical prose and cut it up into line-lengths.

11. Use art, photographic images or a visit to the great outdoors as a stimulus for ideas
Pupils love to select paintings to write responses to. The more detailed the images are the better and pupils should be encouraged to ask questions about the pictures and to map the results. What to write about is often a problem; works of art help the ideas to flow.

12. Stop making poetry scary
Too much emphasis is placed on poetry being ‘difficult’ or needing to have some profound meaning. Use simple workshop exercises to make poetry fun, accessible and part of everyday school life.

13. Bring poets into the department
There are some fantastic poets out there who are brilliant at teaching teachers to teach poetry.

14. Imitate published poems, but write from experience
Most students seem to be more successful when they write about something they have experienced which has had an emotional impact. They are usually adept at collecting words and phrases to express their feelings, but often need a structure on which to hang their words; therefore allowing them to model their poem on a poem they have already read, but which is written on a different subject, helps support their writing.

15. Less is more
Challenge students to prune their poems. Do they really need those articles and conjunctions that are disturbing the rhythm of their work? A comma or careful lineation can often be a good substitute. Do they really need all those verses, too? Every word should bring something to the poem and if it doesn’t they should remove it.

16. Book yourself in for a writing course or workshop
Seeing a teacher take creative writing seriously encourages students to value writing more, and the experience you get with your own writing will vastly improve how you teach it in class. More opportunity for teachers to work alongside writers would revolutionise creative writing in schools.

17. Learning to draft is crucial
Some poets rattle off poems in a few moments, but these poets are rare. Encouraging students to spend time on a single poem is valuable, as is making sure they keep copies of these drafts.