Poetry & Pedagogy: Prepping for an In-Class Essay

To prepare students for an upcoming in-class essay, we did a version of “reciprocal teaching.” The essay prompt asks students to use two scholar’s theories to make sense of a phenomenon. In this case, the theorists are Paulo Freire and Jean Anyon, two educational scholars. The object of study is a classroom of their choice - perhaps one they remember from elementary or high school or one they are currently enrolled in here at college.  We’d done multiple “draft readings” and several pre-writing activities to unpack the scholar's ideas, but the “moment of truth” was upon us, and I wanted to them to rehearse. 

Instead of a classroom, for this exercise, we used poetry that describes an educational issue, Suli Breaks' spoken-word piece “I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate.” The piece is short enough that we could listen and read along with a transcript twice. The first read-through, I asked students to simply listen to take in the piece, to get a feel for Break’s content and style. Students did a quick pair-share, discussing noteworthy passages or ideas.

When they shared in the large class discussion, all I did was ask them to take us to the line in the poem and affirm their selection. No challenging. No way to be wrong - just share what struck them. Students spoke about several moments in the poem, recognizing themselves in Breaks’ passages, mainly where he spoke on exams and test scores.

Before listening to the poem a second time, I showed my notes, how I simply marked sections or phrases that seemed connected either to Anyon’s or Freire’s ideas. I instructed them to do the same: “As you listen this time, simply mark wherever you think a quote in the poem speaks to something from Anyon or Freire.” Working individually, half the class focused on Freire, the other on Anyon. 

This time, I played the poem at 75% speed to make it easier to read along and annotate. I told them I didn’t expect them to catch everything, but I did challenge them to mark as many connections as they could. Next, I split the class into pairs, each working on the same author. They shared their annotations and explained why they believed their marked passages were linked to their theorist’s ideas. Moving from group to group, I observed most students had many accurate annotations - they found this part easy. So I urged them to keep looking for connections. 

After a few minutes, I asked pairs to shuffle, mixing it up, so each pair had an Anyon and Freire expert. They shared and explained their annotations, and I challenged them to find where the poem manifested both scholars’ concepts. Throughout this portion of the activity, I buzzed around different pairs, listening in, prodding, and guiding as necessary.

The majority of the pairs invested in the activity, pointing out the connections they had found. I could tell they had more than a competent grasp of the concepts. During the large group discussion, students shared links between the poems and the scholars’ ideas. The more difficult task was explaining the connections they found, walking us through the relationship between the theory and poetry. 

Students gave one-word explanations, implying the connections were self-evident, unnecessary to clarify. So I modeled two different examples, showing them how to articulate how I “squeezed” what happened in my brain into a step-by-step verbal expression that others could follow. 

I gave them time in pairs to practice with one connection they agreed would be easy to explain. They shared out again, this time with better results, with lots of prompting from me. While I could tell students knew the theories well enough to use them, I saw that they needed help elaborating on their logic, articulating the connections they had made practically immediately. 

So the review was successful in two ways. Students got a chance to practice wielding theory on an object. They can apply theory!  Secondly, I have a stronger sense of what to focus on in the next unit, i.e., helping students express their reasoning more clearly, the thinking behind that application.

Notes for Next time:

• I need to design mini-lessons to help them make visible the lines of reasoning their neurons processed so rapidly. And that line of reasoning needs to be a sequential, step-by-step expression that listeners or readers can follow. 

• I need to do a better job of having students collect and curate critical ideas and quotes from their sources before this stage of rehearsal. Creating their own “cheat sheets” may help them better “lock-in” key concepts. - and students will have them at the ready for exercises like this (instead of relying on their highlighted, annotated readings). 

• I need to prepare a set of examples - perhaps with a stanza of the poem. Perhaps a handout or a slide - something concrete illustrates the kind of intellectual work I expect them to approach. I did that with the annotations - I need to do the same with the “connections” aspect of this activity. 

• I can add a short written component, either immediately or for homework, where students practice the kind of thinking with a single quote from the poem and a unique concept from either Freire or Anyon . Keeping it short will make it easy for me to quickly assess and reteach if necessary.

Muchismas gracias to IM for her able revision assist.