Teacher Resources

Teaching is the World’s Most Heroic Profession

(If you haven’t already, watch “What Teachers Make.”)

Obviously, teaching is difficult. Incredibly difficult. As the saying goes, “Teaching isn’t rocket science. It’s harder.” Teaching poetry might be considered even harder, but it can also be a whole lot of fun, especially with so many new ways to experience poetry.

 

Before We Begin, Let’s Make a Few Things Clear

  1. Technology, in and of itself, does not improve the quality of education. Great teachers improve the quality of education.
  2. Of course, technology can help. With an abundance of tools to choose from, the key is finding the right (i.e. legitimately useful) tools.
  3. This list is to help you sift through new ways to experience poetry in order to discover what will be most useful for you. Some ways are more technological than others; some are hardly technological at all. Please feel free to sample and explore however much you wish. Again, the purpose of this list is to help you!

A Teacher’s Guide to Poetry 2.0

Here are categories, pages, and topics on the site that have proven to be particularly useful for teachers.

YouTube

The most powerful classroom tool is probably the simplest. All of the videos on this site are available as part of an incredible archive on YouTube. Try showing spoken word videos to your students. If possible, show lots of different types. Who knows which poets will speak to which students?

Games

The key, of course, is to help students enjoy poetry. A few quick games don’t hurt. Bot or Not and 2048 (the poetry edition) can begin conversations about the nature of poems, about how poems aren’t any single thing, about how they adopt lots of different forms and functions.

Found Poetry

“Found Poetry” is a hit among all ages. It’s remarkably fun to take text and transform it into something entirely new: blacking out lines of newspapers or cutting out phrases from magazines. Google Poetics provides yet another way to explore “Found Poetry.” 

Social Media

Twitter Haikus serve as a fantastic warm-up. And social media in general helps bring poetry into students’ own domain.

Poem-a-Day

It’s nice to experience as many different poems as possible. Poem-a-Day is an incredibly easy way to expose yourself and your students to new, modern day poetry.

Collaborative Annotation

Genius.com brings annotation to an entirely new level, allowing for interaction and multimedia use, and bringing traditional poems to life.

A New Type of Classroom

For teachers who want to engage in a larger community (and learn more about poetry themselves), or for students who are particularly interested in poetry, Massive Online Open Courses (such as Poetry in America and ModPo) are fantastic, dynamic opportunities.