How to Teach Poetry Analysis in AP Literature: A Student-Centered Approach

For thirteen years, our primary strategy to teach poetry analysis in AP Literature was heavily discussion-based and teacher-focused. We focused on one set of literary devices each week for most of second semester, lecturing on techniques and using a combination of lecture and guided discussion to analyze dozens of poems with our students.

As much as “teacher-focused” and “lecture” feel like dirty words in the 21st century classroom, this way to teach poetry worked for us. Poetry was hard for our students, many of whom were second language learners (though poetry is hard for most students and us if we’re honest!), so they needed more support than they did with short stories or novels. And with this approach, we experienced many years of rich discussions and saw many students grow in their poetry analysis skills over the course of a semester.

But then. 2020.

We taught virtually for the entire 2020–2021 school year, and, as we learned in the spring of 2020, our discussion-based approach was not going to work. No matter what strategies you employ, Zoom does not allow for the kind of fun, free-flowing discussions and think-pair-shares we were used to. How would we teach poetry in a way that provided students with support, ensured all students were experiencing growth, and engaged remote learners?

There’s a Google Doc in our files called “Poetry Problem” that reflects our very messy attempts to solve this dilemma when “teach poetry” rose to the top of our curriculum to-do list. Messy as it was, however, our greatest ideas are often the fruit of our biggest dilemmas and messes, and we figured out a way to teach poetry in our remote AP Lit class that resulted in the most tangible growth, in both writing and analysis, we’d seen in our careers.

Trying to teach poetry through Canvas discussion boards allowed us to monitor individual participation in a way that Zoom breakout rooms did not, but it created a lot of extra work on our end. So we’ve adapted our approach here to reflect how we would implement it in an in-person setting where group work is much easier to manage and monitor.

Have we captured your interest? Ready to teach poetry in a more student-centered way? Let’s get into it.

Week 1: Literary Terms 101, Poetry Edition

Over the years, we found it harder and harder to devote enough weeks to poetry to continue the “one set of devices per week” approach that we’d started with. We had to take a more holistic approach, but our students still needed a review of poetic devices (we’d tried leaving it out, assuming students “already knew them,” and wow, was that a bad idea).

In the last week of our Macbeth unit and the first week of our poetry unit, we assigned students a series of five Nearpods that reviewed the poetry terms from our need-to-know literary devices list. In each Nearpod, we embedded a screencast in which the two of us went through a series of lecture slides reviewing the key terms, their value in poetry, and examples of the terms in action.

Nearpod allows users to create an “interactive video,” in which questions are embedded at key points in the video. We used this function to ask students to complete practice exercises that, when the video resumed, we would go over. (Pro tip: You can accomplish the same thing using Edpuzzle if that’s your preferred platform.)

At the end of the video, we added a short multiple-choice quiz to hold students accountable for having viewed the video. This was followed by a “Collaborate Board” on which students could ask questions that we would answer in class.

Here’s how we divided the terms into five videos:

Once students had completed all five Nearpods, they took a matching and multiple-choice exam to demonstrate their basic understanding of the literary terms covered.

Teaching through the pandemic convinced us of the many benefits of a flipped classroom model, and we like that this approach both allows students to have a reference they can go back to throughout the unit and allows us to see how all students are coming along with their mastery of the terms, not just the most active participants.

For the final element of our introduction to poetry, we modeled for students how to approach the study guide and discussion board activities they would be completing throughout the unit using A. E. Housman’s “Is my team plowing.” After years of seeing our students struggle through (or Google their way through) analytical questions about poems they didn’t fully understand, we changed our strategy for having students prepare for discussion. Before coming to class, they completed a study guide in which they:

• Defined words we had pre-identified as being important to determining the meaning of a sentence or poem as a whole
• Paraphrased each line of the poem
• Identified the poem’s speaker (who was saying the words of the poem)
• Identified the poem’s occasion (what fictional event prompted the speaker to say the words of the poem)
• Identified the poem’s purpose (why the poet might have crafted the poem)
  • If students are struggling with this task, they might find sentence starters like these helpful: The poet is encouraging readers/listeners to _____; The poet is reflecting on _____; The poet is trying to convey _____, etc.

This simplified approach cleared up many misconceptions about what was happening in the poem and left the work of analysis for class time, where we could struggle with students instead of watching them turn directly to the Internet.

Week 2: Group Poem Analysis

Prior to class, students completed their study guide for a set of six poems: 

1. Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” 
2. Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” 
3. Billy Collins’s “The History Teacher” 
4. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” 
5. Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” 
6. William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138

Why these poems? They offer a bit of challenge to students but, compared to poems we would look at later in the unit, were fairly straightforward. They were a good starting point for students, were roughly equal in length and difficulty level, and covered an interesting range of themes and topics. (Plus, we think they’re pretty outstanding poems!)

Students then worked in groups to analyze one of the assigned poems. In order to hold all students accountable for participating, we assigned the following roles and tasks.

Once students completed these tasks, they composed, as a group, a paragraph according to the following structure:

• Topic sentence including speaker, occasion, and purpose
• Summary of 2–3 sentences
• Literary Device #1 (with properly integrated quotation)
• Explanation of how literary device #1 reinforces purpose
• Literary Device #2 (with properly integrated quotation)
• Explanation of how literary device #2 reinforces purpose
• Conclusion sentence connecting the topic sentence to analysis

We recommend assigning due dates for each part of the task to keep students moving forward in a timely manner: you could either have students complete a worksheet that they can turn in at the appointed time or a Google Doc that you can access throughout the process.

As challenging as it feels (particularly in an in-person setting), it is essential to the success of the activity that you avoid stepping in to answer questions or redirect groups as much as possible. What made this activity valuable for us and our students is that they had to learn to work out together and for themselves what was going on in the poem without turning to us every time they encountered a challenge. It was the process of doing this over time that enabled us to see so much growth in our students.

This is not, however, to say that we never stepped in, but we tried to empower individual students to step up rather than to make the corrections ourselves. If a shy student had the right idea but was being overpowered by a louder student, we gently encouraged the quiet student to stand their ground. If a group was completely on the wrong track and headed toward disaster, we stepped in with a few pointed questions. If a loud student was dominating with completely inaccurate ideas, we asked individual group members what they thought of those ideas. We didn’t want our students to fail, but the growth our students experienced was because we refused to “tell them the answer.”

Another challenging part of the activity was that students had to learn to stop complimenting one another and say something if a classmate was incorrect. Many students struggled with this, particularly if the “wrong” student had been known for years as “the smart one in the class,” but it was a crucial skill for students to learn and so empowering for our quieter students to learn that sometimes they, in fact, were the ones who “got it.” This is especially valuable when you teach poetry because, in our experience, it’s our quieter, perhaps more artistic students who tend to “get” poetry while the standout “star” students tend to be more STEM-inclined and struggle with the figurative aspects of poetry.

Once each week, we gave students a released AP multiple-choice practice. It only took about 15 minutes but provided them with repeated practice throughout the semester.

Week 3: Review of Poems

The week after students prepared their paragraphs, we inserted each group’s paragraph into a Google Slide presentation without student names. We considered recommending that students present their own paragraphs to the class, but we found the process of providing feedback on the paragraphs to be essential, and we don’t want to provide critical feedback directly to students in front of their peers.

For each poem in the set, we reviewed some background information on the author, provided feedback on the group’s paragraph, and added a few comments about any literary elements that were key to the poem but not addressed in the paragraph.

As we reviewed the poems, students revised their study guides, asked questions, and added additional comments. Students who submitted the study guides with no revisions based on class discussions did not receive full credit.

Once again, we incorporated a 15-minute multiple-choice practice.

The final day of the week, students took a quiz on the batch of poems, which included multiple-choice questions about the poets’ backgrounds, definitions, paraphrases, speaker, occasion, purpose, key literary devices, and how at least one of the paragraphs could have been improved (based on our comments). We also included one short-answer question in which students would write a structured 5C paragraph that explained how X literary device conveyed meaning in one of the poems (we selected the literary device and the poem).

Weeks 4 and 5: Group Poem Analysis and Review

Students, placed in new groups, repeated the same process as in Weeks 1 and 2, but this time, there were only three poems (two groups were assigned to each poem) because the poems were particularly challenging and long:

• John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”
• Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”
• John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

The only other difference in this two-week unit is that we had students write their first timed poetry analysis (Q1) essay. Because we spent a lot of time first semester introducing the prose analysis essay (Q2) and the two essays are so similar, we didn’t “teach” the essay before assigning it. (Looking for materials to use in introducing the prose analysis essay to your students? We’ve got you covered.)

Weeks 6 and 7: Group Poem Analysis and Review

Students, again placed in new groups, repeated the same process as in Weeks 1 and 2. It was the frequent repetition of the same exercise that forced our students to really grow over the course of the unit, in their ability to both analyze and write about poetry. This batch of poems was shorter than the previous set but more challenging than the first set:

• Marge Piercy’s “Barbie Doll”
• John Keats’s “Bright Star”
• William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130
• John Donne’s “The Flea”
• William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18
• Richard Wilbur’s “The Writer”

Weeks 8 and 9: Class Poem Analysis and Essay Revision Activity

We planned to repeat this process a final time, but we had an idea that ended up being a huge success. For the final batch of poems, students completed their study guides, we reviewed the poems (similar to the way we did in weeks 3, 5, and 7 but without the student paragraphs), and then students revised their study guide and took a quiz on the poems. This batch of poems included:

• Katharyn Howd Machan’s “Hazel Tells LaVerne”
• Pat Mora’s “Legal Alien”
• Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror”
• W. H. Auden’s “That night when joy began”
• Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”
• W.H. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen”

Depending on your personal level of comfort with poetry, we would recommend using this unit to introduce contemporary poems. While we primarily relied on the poems in our textbook (in part because we wanted the resources that came with them), those poems tended to be older and less representative of diverse voices. Additionally, the poems in our textbook tended to be well-known, which meant our students could easily find analysis online. By swapping in more contemporary poems in this final unit, you can address contemporary issues, introduce more diverse voices, and force students who have been relying heavily on the Internet to carry a little bit more of their own weight.

Instead of working in groups to write an analytical paragraph for one of the assigned poems during these two weeks, we assigned students to work in groups to revise an essay one of their peers (anonymous and not in that group) had written. Following this activity, students wrote their final timed poetry analysis essay before the AP exam.

Week 10 (optional): Sound Devices

You might have noticed earlier in the post that up to this point, we didn’t make a point of addressing sound devices (rhyme, alliteration, consonance, assonance, onomatopoeia, rhythm and meter). While we certainly discussed any notable uses of these terms as they came up in poems, this was intentional.

In our experience, students gravitate toward the literary devices they most readily recognize when it comes time to write their poetry analysis essays. Unfortunately, this often means they recognize rhyme or alliteration and attempt to write an entire essay about how the use of two alliterative or rhyming words supports the poem’s purpose, a strategy that, needless to say, doesn’t work well. After years of frustration, we started downplaying the use of sound devices in poetry and focusing instead on those devices that are more likely to carry meaning.

Additionally, understanding rhyme and meter (in particular) is hard. In past years, it was a lot of work for students to, perhaps, answer 1–2 multiple-choice questions on the exam. In recent years, the College Board has moved away from including questions about rhythm and meter. While they still encourage helping students to understand the ways in which predictable patterns in structure, rhythm, and meter can aid in developing relationships between ideas, the Course and Exam Description specifically states, “The AP Exam will not require students to label or identify specific rhyme schemes, metrical patterns, or forms of poetry.”

That being said, however, we did develop a week-long introduction to rhythm and meter that relied on interactive activities with music and some stomping and clapping to introduce students to the basics. In years that we had the time to squeeze it in, we did, explaining to students that this was something to be familiar with if they fully wanted to understand poetry but not essential that they understand for the exam; in years we ran out of time, we left it out. At the end of the week, students took a short quiz to see what they had learned.

Speaking of “optional” things: in some years, we ended our poetry unit with a poetry final exam that tested students’ knowledge of literary terms and ability to identify and understand the effect of these devices in poems we had discussed throughout the semester. But because we had included the biweekly quizzes, we felt comfortable letting this go in years that we just didn’t have any time to spare.

Conclusion

Early in our careers as AP Literature teachers, we found it super intimidating to teach poetry. Over time, however, we came to really enjoy it. Not only did we get more proficient in our understanding of poetry over time, but we saw which strategies worked and which didn’t, refining our unit so that we could teach poetry most successfully to our students. We also came to love it because poems are so short that even a student who didn’t do the homework could participate in class discussion: we had some great class discussions that incorporated students who didn’t always participate in our short story and novel discussions.

We’re growing our poetry resources, both on our blog and in our store, and we’d love to know which of these ideas and resources you’d like to hear more about. Let us know at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works.

And in the meantime, if you’re looking for a solid list of literary devices to use with your AP (or even non-AP) students, we’ve got you covered with a student-friendly list (and examples), review Kahoots, and a matching test.