The author, forty-five years into a teaching career--seventeen as a high school English teacher, twenty-eight as a university professor--reflects on his career and his relationship with the poet John Keats that began in his second-period English class in 1967.

After several years of tweaking the protocols for a student- led poetry project, the call for this issue prompted the author to share what she and her students have learned and are still learning about reading poetry. This includes a now- eighth- grade student, Grace. Grace considers herself a "good" student, eager to learn, but she also…

This article describes a teacher's willingness to perform an autobiographical spoken word poem in his classroom, which provided an important model for students as they composed and shared their own slam-style poems.

For the duration of the author's fifteen-year career, she has used authentic writing opportunities to engage students. She begins as their teammate, and invites each student to work with her on a poem. In working collaboratively, students realize the author is there not to downgrade their piece, to chastise mistakes or to belittle errors; she is…

In this article, Kate Collins begins by explaining how she discovered that "Hamilton: An American Musical," a Broadway show that incorporates a mix of musical genres: hip-hop, jazz, classic show tunes, and show-stopper numbers based on the life of Alexander Hamilton, could be brought into her teaching as a rich resource for her high…

Spoken word is a performative poetry that combines "words, sounds, and movements that privilege a Black aesthetic" (Winn 60). It has roots in blues, spiritual, and hip-hop music and has been popularized in particular by the slam performances exemplified in the documentary "Louder Than a Bomb." Due to its performative nature,…

In this article, the authors describe how integrating music with reading and writing practices stimulated transmediation to (1) honor musical students' identities, (2) deepen readers' meaning making with literature, and (3) invite writers' memories to generate emotional grist for composing poetry. The authors share examples to inspire teachers to…

Many teachers develop oral communication skills through questioning, discussion, Socratic seminars, think-pair-shares, jigsaws, and small-group projects. To these activities the author has added poetry under the auspices of Poetry Out Loud, a national program that asks students to memorize and recite poems. On its website (www.poetryoutloud.org/),…

Through the careful observation and analysis of a poetry unit that focuses on the work of one poet, Seamus Heaney, the authors provide mindful strategies to make familiar the processes of reading and appreciating poetry.

In this article, the author shares how specifically teaching author's craft can open or allow a space for poetry to emerge from students' writing. The author shares how it is possible to create space for poetry in an educational world filled with strict guidelines and standards. She shares how poetry emerged from students' writing when she taught…

If the average teenager was asked how he or she feels about reading ancient poetry, the response would probably be something akin to an eye roll or grunt of disgust. Young students generally have a visceral response to this sort of curriculum decision; it makes them shudder. One of the biggest challenges facing English teachers is to connect…

The author was invited as a teaching artist into a first-grade classroom in New York City to teach a 14-session poetry residency culminating in an anthology of student writing. They began by sitting together on a carpet by the interactive whiteboard and read aloud several examples of "I wish" poems from Kenneth Koch's (1970) wonderful…

While teaching in Taiwan, Ah-Young Song found that asking students for midterm self-reflections helped them to be more attuned to their distinct educational trajectories and that their comments provided useful insights into adjustments that could be made as a teacher. This article describes how two of those English language learners from the…

Chosen spaces are community organizations and programs, elective classes, and/or extracurricular clubs that students choose to participate in and have the agency to refuse their membership in. The youth's chosen spaces represent an alternate possibility for what English language arts (ELA) education could look like and how it might better sustain…

In this article, the authors questioned how to use the Greek word ekphrasis as a way to teach student readers to transact with a text at multiple levels and then "speak out" as writers and creators of meaning. These teachers use the seminal painting "Guernica" to engage students in a transferable process focused on three key…