Simple Poems, Powerful Teaching: Experiencing Poetry in Content-Area Classrooms

by Allison L. Baer

Roses are red, / Violets are blue, / Sugar is sweet, / And so are you―a simple poem that most of us first heard when we were little. We made up variations involving stinky feet and other sordid body parts as we learned to play with the language of rhyme. But what about the learning involved in these thirteen words? We learned about flowers―roses are red and violets are blue (albeit on the purple side). We also learned about the taste of sugar―it is sweet. A lot was learned without our even knowing it. Mixing content learning with poetry can be a powerful way to synthesize information as we delve deeply into meaning while squeezing out extraneous words and composing a few well-thought-out lines. This article first presents a brief overview of content-area reading and the power of poetry and then discusses ways that we can lead our adolescent students into creating poetry that not only is beautiful in form but seeks to inform as well.

Reading and Writing in the Content Areas

According to Moore, Moore, Cunningham, and Cunningham (2006, p. 2), there are three compelling reasons to teach reading and writing in our content-area classrooms:

1. Reading and writing are tools for learning.
2. Literacy requirements continually increase in school and society.
3. Content-area teachers can teach content-area reading and writing best.

Whether through textbook or thematic text sets, content-area teachers continually ask students to read for understanding and then do something, such as write, draw, compute, etc., with the information they learned. Increasingly, mandated assessments like the Ohio Achievement Tests require students to show their learning in all subjects through writing. Gone are the days of simply figuring out the answer to an equation as students are now asked to explain their thinking processes as they worked their way through the problem. Effective content-area teachers, rather than lecture about isolated facts, try to help their students inquire into the big ideas of their subject (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998). They get their students thinking about the why more than just the what and who. Ideally, students are involved in discovering the major themes and concepts and how they are related to each other (Allan & Miller, 2005). Classrooms are filled with active reading and discussion as students struggle with understanding how scientific hypotheses are connected, identify the flaws of historical thought, or find real-life applications of the Pythagorean theorem.

Recently, the International Reading Association (IRA), National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) designed Standards for Middle and High School Literacy Coaches (IRA, 2006). This document calls for educators to be prepared to "develop content knowledge at the same time that they improve student literacy" (p. 2). Paying close attention to the needs of adolescent readers and writers, these professional organizations assert that high school graduates need to be expert readers, writers, and communicators, and it is our responsibility to make this happen (IRA, 2006). Knowing that middle and high school teachers choose their profession mainly because of their love of a particular subject area (Daniels & Zemelman, 2004), we nonetheless need to reach beyond our particular subject and teach our students to be readers and writers.

The Power of Poetry

Contrary to my previous personal belief, poets do not have to think deep, troubled thoughts, have long hair, and wear bulky sweaters and Birkenstocks. Poets come in all ages, races, genders, and emotional states. Poetry can be as simple as "Roses are red..." or as inspiring as Maya Angelou's (1993) Life Doesn't Frighten Me. Karen Hesse taught us about the hardships of life in the Dust Bowl through free verse poetry in Out of the Dust (1997). The life of Danitra Brown is vividly described through multiple poems (Grimes, 1994), and images of teenage angst ending in violence are shown in The Brimstone Journals (Koertge, 2004).

Graves (1992) states, "Poetry brings sound and sense together in words and lines, ordering them on a page in such a way that both the writer and reader get a different view of life" (p. 3). Each poet mentioned above did just that for the reader. Poetry squeezes the essence out of an idea and presents it in far fewer words than we would find in a textbook. For example, a metaphor, a common poetic device, makes the writer think in terms of image making as she or he sees things in new and surprising ways (Strong, 2006). Writing poetry also forces the poet to the upper levels of Bloom's taxonomy (Learning Skills Program, 2003) as the writer analyzes and synthesizes concepts, creating poetic verse. It exposes students to precise language, gives them a sense of diction and syntax, increases students' language awareness, and reinforces or introduces figurative language (Heitman, 2005). Poetry also allows students to create word pictures as they express concepts and topics through original means (Maxim, 1998).

According to Templeton (1997), "Poetry turns a unique lens on the world, making the ordinary special" (p. 9). Taking these words to heart, let us now turn that lens on content-area reading and writing and explore some effective ways to combine content learning and the language of poetry.

Showing What They Have Learned Through Poetry

In many content-area classrooms, we frequently assess or ask our students to show what they have learned through some kind of test or essay-type written assignment. What I am proposing in this article is that we expand our students' choices about how they will show us what they have learned through writing poetry. The important thing to remember when doing this is that the poem must show what the poet has learned about his or her topic. Differing from other types of poetry, content-area or nonfiction-based poetry is a teaching tool about a subject area. In essence, the poet is using the poetic format to teach the reader something. No matter what kind of poetry you choose to use in your classroom, remember that the reader must learn something about the topic from the poem. When assessing the poem, I suggest that this simple guideline be a large part of your grading rubric. In this section, we will explore a few poetic formats that work well with content-area learning, adolescent students, and their teachers.

I Am Poem

The I Am poem (Me, 1987) format is simple in design and easy to use as students complete a series of short prompts (see Figure 1).

When using it in a content-area classroom, the students must show what they have learned about a person by understanding what that person fears, wants, needs, worries about, understands, dreams, etc. They can change the prompts if need be to include other aspects of the topic. Completing these prompts shows an in-depth understanding of the person researched. Another way to conceptualize this poem is through giving voice to some thing, place, or event. Looking back at Bloom's taxonomy (Learning Skills Program, 2003), the poet who creates an I Am poem for a thing (or a person) is synthesizing and analyzing information to describe or imagine its fears, hopes, dreams, and so on. This kind of poetry also demands that the poet present information from a totally different perspective, thereby asking the reader to think of this topic in a more sophisticated way. I am including two examples of I Am poems that do just that. Catie Reeve, when researching multiple sclerosis, wrote an I Am poem describing what happens to the human nerve when it is diseased, and Ann Scotti wrote one from the perspective of heroin (see Figure 2).

What did you learn about the effect of multiple sclerosis on the human nerve? What happens when the nerve gets scarred? What did you learn about the effect of heroin on the addict? How does the addict feel when using heroin? How does the addict actually use heroin? Both authors maintained the integrity of the poetic form; yet each used it to teach the reader about her chosen research topic.

Poems for Two Voices

Paul Fleischman (1988) developed the format for the poem for two voices in which two (or more) characters speak to and with each other, having a poetic discussion. The voices can put forth different viewpoints, perspectives, or feelings about any chosen subject. When writing a poem for two voices, it is useful to choose two different voices and then construct the poem side by side, one line at a time. When the voices speak separately, they are on different lines; when they speak together, they are on the same line. In doing this, the poet needs to understand the different characters, viewpoints, etc., well enough to portray how she or he would really respond. In addition, the poet needs to understand the relationship between the characters so the poetic discussion maintains the integrity of the multiple voices. When researching Japanese internment camps, LaQuita Timberlake chose to write a poem for two voices from the perspectives of an American and an interned Japanese American (see Figure 3).

The poem speaks in the voices of two American citizens, both afraid of what has happened to the country they love. Do you hear their fear? What did you learn about where many Japanese Americans lived? What happened to their families? Their possessions? What was the feeling of these two people? By setting up this conversation between two conflicting parties, the poet shows a depth of understanding about this difficult time in our history and teaches the reader through giving voice to multiple perspectives.

Class Poems

Similar to list poems in which the poet uses simple lists of words or short phrases, a class poem is constructed by a group of people, each contributing one sentence to create a poem. I frequently use this poem format on the first day of school to get my students used to the idea that we will be writing, reading, and performing poetry on a regular basis. Introducing the writing of poetry using this format eases the new poet into the process by writing one simple line, with the end product being a multiline, well-written poem. There are many ways to introduce the class poem. When using it in a content-area class, I begin by reading an informational picture book aloud to the class and then put a writing prompt on the board. I give each student a sentence strip, a dark marker, and a piece of masking tape and ask students to finish the given prompt. When they are finished, they roll the tape onto the back of their strip and tape it to the board under the prompt. After all lines, including mine, are up, I read the poem to the class. I then ask them if there is anything they would like to move around or change and use this time to discuss the idea of stanzas and grouping. When they are finished making any revisions, I read the poem again, number the strips, and remove them from the board. The poem is then word-processed, and copies are made for each member of the class. The class poem in Figure 4 was written by a class after reading the book Rosa by Nikki Giovanni (2005). The prompt was "Rosa Parks taught me..."