Though we are all sort of burning the midnight oil by this time of year, at the end of a jam packed week, I thoroughly enjoyed my Friday today.  I thought I'd share this poetry lesson which has gone well every single time I've done it, in every class, for several years, and with middle school students, that's rare :)  The materials are provided below.

We've been studying poetry, paying lots of attention to rhythm, line breaks, punctuation, mood and figurative language.  Students had written and shared some of their own poetry, but it was time to give them more opportunities to generate their own poetry, and at the ripe date of May 27th with seventh graders, it was time for multiple modalities...

I created six stations at tables.  Each station has directions and materials on it.  At each station, students are required to read the directions, explore the materials, and attempt to write a poem.  The goal is really just to get some lines and ideas from each station.  At the end of the day, they choose their favorite exercise(s) to work into a full length poem or poems.  

The stations are as follows:

Station 1: Picture Poetry 

This station is filled with interesting images.  I have a set of postcards with Keith Haring's work (post card collections are great for this).  I have a set of large prints of Chris Van Allsberg's art, a book of photography, a book with photos of military jets, etc.  Students must choose an image as an inspiration for a poem.

Station 2: Listening Poetry

This station has laptops that are loaded with a folder with 8 instrumental songs from diverse genres and all over the world.  I include jazz, classical, drum & bass, Led Zeppelin, klezmer, hip hop scratching, choir music, Fela Kuti, etc.  Students explore the music, listening with headphones, and choose a piece to use as inspiration for poetry.

Station 3: Objects Poetry

This station has interesting, diverse, and curious objects. Today these included a jar of India ink, a squishy rubber buffalo, a Mexican Day of the Dead miniature diorama, a lock with a key, a worn cloth bracelet, etc. Students must choose an object to observe and explore kinesthetically, then use as the inspiration for a poem.

Station 4: Stole Lines Poetry

This station has a bin full of poetry books.  Students must peruse the books, reading through a few poems.  Then they choose one line from a poem to "steal" and use as the first line to their own poem. The can use the mood of the original as inspiration or not.  (Students used their own judgement about whether to put quotations around the line and cite the poet, depending on the nature of the line. In some cases the lines are so innocuous as not to need it; ie "My father always said.")

Station 5: Letter Poems

In this station students are given an example to read of a poem that is written as a letter.  It begins, "Dear tomorrow..."  They must choose a person, object, animal, or idea to which they will address their own letter poem, and then write their poem.

Station 6: Cinquains

Students had already learned about the American form of poetry invented by Brooklyn poet, Adelaide Crapsey, in 1871, called the Cinquain.  It has five lines and they follow the particular syllabic pattern or 2,4,6,8,2.  Students write cinquains at this station.  I have a box full of possible "first lines" with two syllables, for example, "listen" or "If I" or "gray shark." Students may pick these out of the box if they want.

Students rotate through the stations in their table groups (approximately 4 students per group.)  I have found that about seven minutes is an ideal time to spend at each station.  It is always interesting to see how students respond to different modalities.  All students seem to enjoy the day, and many students who resist writing poetry are finally inspired to experiment with language and their thoughts on the page.  Students who are avid poets, but who get stuck in the same time of writing every time usually get some fresh ideas.  It is also a great lead in to revisions of poems. 

Attached below are the printed materials I used today.  

First, a packet which I printed double sided, and double stapled so it opens like a booklet.  It begins with some general directions for the day and is formatted for them to write everything inside.  If your students have special poetry notebooks to write in, there is no need for something like this.  Also attached are the directions I used for each table, designed by me and my co-teacher (learning specialist) Daniel Brink-Washington. (Note: not presented in the order listed above.)  I put several copies of directions printed on colored paper on each table in transparent binder sleeves.  

Download Poetry stations packet

Download Poetry Stations Directions Sheets

If you try this activity, or already do something like it, please share about it!

[image credits~  Keith Haring piece: blogs.hightechhigh.org; headphones: goodhousekeeping.com; inkwell: superstock.com; letters: aldispainters.blogspot.com]

I was stunned to read this article, The High Cost of Low Teacher Salary by Dave Eggers and Nina Clements Calagari, in the New York Times. It absolutely nails the issue of teacher retention and teacher salary for the general public.  I'm so glad people are taking notice.  

I highly suggest reading the entire piece, which is pretty pithy.  Nonetheless a few highlights:

"We’ve been working with public school teachers for 10 years; every spring, we see many of the best teachers leave the profession. They’re mowed down by the long hours, low pay, the lack of support and respect... So every year 20 percent of teachers in urban districts quit. Nationwide, 46 percent of teachers quit before their fifth year. The turnover costs the United States $7.34 billion yearly. The effect within schools — especially those in urban communities where turnover is highest — is devastating."  

Yes, I see this every year. The idea of "turnaround schools," which is a new buzz word in NYC, holds little promise as far as I can see, because once a school makes a bit of progress, the teachers who have gone way above and beyond the call of duty for little pay and recognition will be leaving. The school will have to start all over again. This simply does not happen in suburban schools, which enjoy better working conditions and salaries for teachers.  Close the achievement gap?  Not like this. 

"People talk about accountability, measurements, tenure, test scores and pay for performance. These questions are worthy of debate, but are secondary to recruiting and training teachers and treating them fairly. There is no silver bullet that will fix every last school in America, but until we solve the problem of teacher turnover, we don’t have a chance."

Agreed. Like this, we make no progress. Thanks for getting straight to the point.

"At the moment, the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender.Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers’ salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible."  

When I tell people I teach middle school students, the most common response is, "God bless you."  It is as if I have chosen a life of charity work, or risked my life joining the army, or something on that level. We do not want our nation's children to be charity work or war zones.  We want them to be well educated by professional teachers. 

"McKinsey polled 900 top-tier American college students and found that 68 percent would consider teaching if salaries started at $65,000 and rose to a minimum of $150,000. Could we do this? If we’re committed to “winning the future,” we should. If any administration is capable of tackling this, it’s the current one. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan understand the centrality of teachers and have said that improving our education system begins and ends with great teachers. But world-class education costs money.

For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of thesavings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way."

Amen. Lots of things cost money.  Education should be a top priority, and educators should be valued not just in empty words, but with professional salaries.

[image credit: chaz11.blogspot.com]

On my last post, My Kind of Teaching, on constructivist pedagogy, I received this thoughtful response from a veteran teacher, who chose to remain anonymous. I appreciate it so much, because it offers some validation some of my thinking and intuition regarding the thorniest of issues  when it comes to teaching methodology right now. It seems like in the push to be urgently focused on short-term objectives and obsessive tracking of student learning toward a measurable goal (performance on standardized tests), we miss some of the point--how students actually learn. Often messily.  

Thank you, anonymous teacher, for sharing your thoughts here:

I've been teaching for about 12 years now. When I graduated from TC, my advisor told me one thing that I took with me and that guides me still: If the kids aren't doing something, the kids aren't learning.  He meant that the kids should never just be sitting there listening to me talk, they should instead be working on meaningful tasks used to facilitate learning and later demonstrate what they've learned.  So I always plan like this: What am I doing?What are they doing? The reform movement, unfortunately, has been very bad for progressive teaching because it is all about standardized testing or "accountability."  It is not always easy to control for what a student has learned.  Sometimes students learn something completely different than what I intended.  Sometimes, a student learns what I wanted to teach days after everyone else.  Does that make me a "bad" teacher?  This is a phrase that gets bandied about a lot lately.  Many times I learn from the kids.  It's an interactive process.  Teaching is messy - that's the beauty of it.  The way kids learn is messy.  I also want to point out that alternative certification programs have brought into the teaching field new teachers who are much more traditionalists overall.  I think this is because there is so much emphasis on classroom management.  There's less focus in these programs on philosophical issues of teaching and learning as well as developing rich curriculum because the teachers have to be up and running in just short weeks.  So at TC we had lots of discussions about what the actual role of the teacher was and what the student brought with them into the classroom.  We were encouraged to let the curriculum take care of the classroom management issues. 

Also, make sure to read Alfie Kohn's new article, "Poor Teaching for Poor Children," in which he argues that "it’s possible for the accountability movement to simultaneously narrow the test-score gap and widen the learning gap." Scary, but possibly true. 

[image credit: sophiemazingarbe.com]

This month I'm very excited to have my TLN colleague, Lana Gundy, sharing some posts here at On the Shoulders of Giants.  She will be one of several teacher bloggers that will be posting at a new group blog called TransformED! Stay tuned!  Following my last post on what's missing from teacher prepartion, Lana discusses what worked in hers...

Three Reasons Why Teacher Internships Work

I nearly fainted when I read the National Council on Teaching Quality “Ed School Essentials:  A Review of Illinois Teacher Preparation”.  My very own Illinois State University’s “review” was not very good.  In fact, it was deplorable: F!   I know from my own experiences, as an ISU grad, the university has an outstanding Professional Development School (PDS program) and the proof is in the internship. 

*Provided a significant amount of time in a classrooms working with students in an urban environment

The PDS program provides essential classroom experiences for interns.   This allows interns practice dealing with situations that arise when working with a group of urban children.  The intern “takes over” the teaching responsibilities in a cooperating teacher’s classroom for thirty-two weeks.  These responsibilities include: lesson planning,  grading papers, behavior management, parent/teacher conferences, staff meetings, board meetings and any other responsibility their cooperating teacher would have.   

*Great Professors and mentors that know how to support and encourage new teachers

The PDS program changed my life and allowed me to do much more than I ever expected to during my first few years of teaching.  What really made a difference for me during the internship was my professor. The instructors are the variables that the NCTQ’s study didn’t account for.  What the instructors bring to the table is invaluable to the student teaching experience.  Not only did my professor teach my group of interns our university courses, but he taught us how to apply what we learned. 

*Opportunities to “team” with other interns

The opportunity to work in a “team” setting allows interns to expand their horizons.  Interns are able to discuss what was happening in our classrooms, which allowed us to learn from each others’ mistakes and successes.  Student teachers work together to improve the culture of the school.   Teams of student teachers can achieve more together, than they can independently.

It is not clear from NCTQ’s study what was evaluated to determine that ISU student teaching program was a failure.  I do know that I was prepared for my first year of urban teaching.  I would not give my experience an F.  In fact, I would recommend that all student teachers be required to complete a thirty-two week internship.  So, if NCTQ’s evaluation of ISU’s program is incorrect, I wonder what other programs were incorrectly evaluated also?

Here is the link to see ISU’s video about the PDS program.  Check out Bill Ferriter’s The Tempered Radical post to read more about NCTQ’s Study.  Also on the subject of alternative student teaching experiences take a look at Dan Brown’s Get in the Fracas post.

Lana Gundy teaches fourth grade in a primary school in Peoria, IL.  She is a member of the Universal Leadership Team and is the Gifted Coordinator at her school.  She is also a member of CTQ's Illinois New Millennium Initative, an effort supported by the Center for Teaching Quality to cultivate accomplished, early-career teachers as leaders of practical, effective teaching policy innovations at the state and district levels.

Today I "caught" a student whom I would characterize as a reluctant reader reading the walls of my classroom to another student, who has also struggled a lot with reading this year.  Mind you, they were both supposed to be doing a different assignment at their tables.  While one part of me was about to redirect them both, I realized that this was a great moment I had no interest in interrupting.  They were reading together out of a genuine interest for the information on the walls.  Voluntary reading--the best kind. 

What was on the walls?  Students have been studying the history of the English language and how words get their meanings and how they change across time and place.  It has been fascinating.  One night for homework, I asked them to research their own names.  Where do their names come from?  What do they originally mean? How did they get their names?  What do their names mean to them?

The written responses shared with one another in class were wonderful. They beautifully reflected the diversity of the students and shared something special about each of them.  From a linguistics standpoint, it was illuminating to see the myriad ways that people name arrive at names for their children, where these names come from and what they mean.  These stories echoed the word etymologies students had been studying in class at the same time.  

Finding the two boys reading the walls was a great reminder to me that for every student there is a way to voluntary reading. Sometimes the wall is the perfect medium for repackaging something from class--especially student voices--to reach more students.  Sometimes the timing is just right for reading, and the wall is a way to catch a child on a whim and create flexible opportunities for reading.  Finally, this reminded me that, though it takes time to update classroom bulletin boards, it is so worthwhile.