Top Tips for Teaching Poetry

Our Teacher Trailblazers – known for their enthusiasm and commitment to poetry – have compiled an inspiring collection of their top tips for teaching poetry. Check them out in the document below, or download a plain text version here.

 

In addition to the brilliant ideas, above, here are some 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.