Teaching Poetry: Helping Your Students Prepare for Discussion

Teaching poetry is simultaneously one of the most rewarding and most challenging things we do as English teachers. Its compactness means it is rich with literary devices, creating powerful effects that speak to significant human truths and experiences, and formulating a puzzle for us to work out and appreciate. However, this can also make it seem indecipherable upon first (and sometimes second) glance, which often leads students to dismiss it as boring because they aren’t getting the instant gratification of immediate understanding. And we don’t just mean for students! As teachers, we too have felt lost the first time (or two or three) we encounter a new piece of poetry.

When we’re thinking about teaching poetry, we also need to think about preparing our students for the discussion that must go along with it. So, how do we best help our students prepare to discuss a poem? We all know it takes several reads to truly understand what a poem is saying, much less what it means. And for short stories and novels, we don’t hesitate to provide guided reading questions and structured assignments that help students navigate the text and focus on what’s important. But this approach doesn’t work quite as well with a poem. If you start adding questions in every line or so, you lose the experience of reading the poem and seeing it laid out on the page, which affects its impact. Students often don’t know what’s going on, and asking them questions that are too specific can lead to either Googling or crazy answers that get them off on the wrong track (something we’ve definitely learned from experience!), both of which again detract from the experience (and if we may be so bold as to say, joy) of reading a poem. And, ultimately, we want to give them tools that are going to help them decipher poems on their own, whether it’s for future English classes or for the AP Literature exam. Or even, for students who are not going on to be literary scholars and need more practical tools, the ability to persist in the face of frustration or approach a complex task systematically.

For many years, we simply assigned our students to complete the questions in the textbook that came with each poem. They were good questions, and we used them to structure our discussions, but they didn’t do a whole lot to help students independently figure out what the poet was doing. More often than not, students either produced a response that was basically a rewording of the question, or again, went to their favorite classmate, Google, to see what they could cobble together. We started experiencing far more success when we stopped assigning these questions and instead asked students to complete three tasks before coming to class discussion.

First, we asked students to define key words we had bolded in the poem ahead of time. As the most compact form of language, poetry requires its writers to make maximum use of every single word. Words are important in any form of writing, but in poetry, you can lose so much meaning from assuming what a word means or making your “best guess” based on context. In our own preparation to read poetry, we started looking up almost every word in each poem, and it added so much to our own understanding, even (and especially) when we looked up words we “knew.” It was because we started this practice for ourselves and realized its power that we decided to ask our students to participate as well. Sometimes a teacher’s favorite colleague, Google, disappoints but leads us to something good anyway. ? Of course, we would love for our students to be this intrinsically motivated, but we’re realists, and we know our busy AP students are going to “already know” a lot more words than they do if left to their own devices. We tried this initially, and the majority of students looked up too few words (especially words that seemed easy but had a poetic definition, an archaic definition, or 25 definitions, the 23rd of which the poet actually intended). So after we looked the words up ourselves, we bolded any that we didn’t think students would know or that relied on multiple or less common meanings. We encouraged students to use Collins Dictionary because it clearly indicates both the American and British definitions of the word, which can make a significant difference in understanding a poem’s nuances of meaning. (Helpful Hint: Have your students identify the poet’s nationality and either when the poem was written or the poet’s birthdate and date of death.)

Second, we asked students to paraphrase the poem, line by line. We wanted students to come to class familiar with the literal, surface-level meaning of the poem, and once they had looked up key words, this should have been a relatively easy exercise. At the beginning of our discussion of each poem, we would call on students to share their best attempt at a paraphrase, providing corrections and further explanation as needed. Not only did this help us clear up misunderstandings, but once students felt comfortable with what the poem was saying literally, they were often far more successful at analyzing the ways in which the poet used literary devices or structure to convey meaning. They were better able to recognize figurative language, and they were more active participants in the richer discussions of what makes poetry so fun and so beautiful.

Finally, we asked students to take a first stab at identifying the speaker, occasion, and purpose for the poem. We emphasized that the speaker is a fictional construct saying the lines of the poem, not the poet, and we asked students to describe the speaker to the best of their ability (naturally, the level of detail varied based on the poem). We also wanted students to understand the difference between the occasion (why the speaker was motivated to say the words) and the purpose (what the poet was trying to accomplish by writing the poem). Of course, many students made revisions to these during discussion (especially the purpose statement), but it gave them a head start and allowed us to have them do more of the work in class to figure out the ways in which the poet conveyed that purpose. Instead of the classroom being a place where we enlightened them with all they missed, it became a place where we were able to work out that meaning together.

Something that made the assignments even more helpful is that when they were due, we just checked for reasonable completion. When we graded them, however, we were focused on students’ engagement with the poem and our class discussion: did they make revisions based on class discussion? Did they add to their notes as we discussed definitions and literary devices? Did they demonstrate a growing understanding of the poem beyond what they noticed on their first read? (Helpful Hint: We asked them to use a different color pen or pencil to make any additions or revisions to their original work. This made it easy for us both to see what they learned through the class discussion.) Certainly, there were students who did the bare minimum on these assignments; however, those students who truly engaged in the process improved significantly in their analysis of poetry (and their ability to write about it and discuss it meaningfully) as the year progressed.

Of course, this approach takes a lot of the “fun” out of just reading a poem and appreciating the experience. And there is certainly a place for students to engage in uninterrupted reads. But in order to appreciate what they read, students need to develop their analytical skills, and that’s what we’re here for as English teachers.

How do you prepare your students to discuss poetry? Do you have your students prepare to discuss poetry, or do you just tackle it cold in class? If you’re like us, teaching poetry is intimidating, it’s hard to teach something we may still be grappling with ourselves, and the more strategies we have in our tool belts, the more strategies we’re able to help our students develop theirs. Reach out to us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works to continue the conversation!