The Poetry Unit

Poetry has never been a strength of mine. I wouldn't say I necessarily enjoy reading poetry, and I certainly would not consider myself a strong writer of poetry. That being said, I designed a poetry unit for my ELA classes and I really enjoyed not just the process of building it, but also delivering it to a class of young people. This unit was incredibly successful at promoting a high-level of student engagement and teaching curricular outcomes in an enjoyable way.

While this single lesson plan doesn't show the whole picture of what my unit looked like, I hope to explain to you the process of how I planned and developed it so you can glean some information about how I work. The ways I plan a lesson for in-person instruction are very similar indeed to how I plan for an online classroom; in fact, about a quarter of this unit was redesigned for online delivery as a result of school closures from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Who: Designed for use by English teachers, suitable for grades 6-8

The What: A lesson to introduce a poetry unit and to learn about figurative language

The How: GSuite (Docs, Slides)

The Problem

The Alberta ELA curriculum that this plan and unit was designed for is very general in its outcomes. It doesn't prescribe specific units that need to be taught and it doesn't have reading lists. It emphasizes skills over knowledge, and as such it allows for a great deal of flexibility in how you teach. Learning how to write poetry allows for a demonstration of ability in many different curricular outcomes, so I decided that this would be an excellent unit to that end as it offered a lot of opportunity for student creativity.

The Process

Whenever I create a yearly plan, unit plan, lesson plan, or learning module, I rely heavily on the principle of backwards design; that is, identifying desired learning objectives, planning the assessment, and designing individual lesson plans based on what learners need to know to succeed in the assessment.

In this case, I had learning outcomes from the curriculum I needed to teach (some of which were identified in this first lesson plan) and opted for a poetry portfolio as the final assessment. The plan was to allow students opportunities to create poetry throughout the unit, and then to give them a couple classes towards the end to refine and perfect what they have for inclusion in the portfolio. The aim of all of this was to design a highly interactive unit that placed learning in the hands of the students, giving them opportunities to learn by doing rather than by simply reading or listening.

With this first lesson, I needed a "hook" to get my students interested. I recalled Muhammad Ali's famous 1974 "I'll show you how great I am" speech and the way that his trash talk, flow and usage of figurative language inspired the beginnings of rap music. I showed the video to my class and explained all of this to them in order to create a sense of relevance for what we were learning. We would also identify some literary devices in Muhammad Ali's speech and from his comedy album I Am the Greatest, from which I played various tracks throughout the unit for a fun and engaging activity.

In the rest of the unit, I spent lessons on learning how to write various forms of poetry with many opportunities for students to write one themselves, I had the class practice reading and analyzing poetry, I included cross-cultural poems and works telling stories of Canada's indigenous peoples, and relied on both formative and summative assessment to inform the effectiveness of my teaching.