Let’s Get Flipped

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Let’s Get Flipped

by Jennifer Guyor-Jowett

Risking an already working poetry unit and turning it on its head became transformative for both my students and me.

Turning Poetry on its Head

The room is buzzing. Classroom energy has leveled up, and students are on the move. Coordinating. Calculating. Creating. 

Our poetry unit had just hyper-drived from zero to sixty, much faster than I’d anticipated. Now I had to catch up. 

Jumping into the first group, I answered their questions, listened as they divided tasks, and stepped out of their way. 

Two students headed to the hallway to make a short film that included a skit and recitation of a poem of their choice. Another launched into a digital magnetic poetry generator to craft a poem. Others worked on substituting onomatopoeia for words in a poem they’d record or chose an onomatopoetic word to represent Jacqueline Woodson’s poem Firefly. 

Options varied and included contemporary and classic poets (comparing Langston Hughes’s Harlem Night Song to Tupac’s The Tears in Cupid’s Eyes, for example).

Depending on their choices and the thoroughness of completion, each task built their team’s score by 5 to 25 points, and students’ energy was palpable. 

Taking a Risk 

When one of my 7th graders recently said it was too much work to google a definition of a word she didn’t know, the alarm that I tried to keep muted but which continually dinged in the back of my brain became a full-on clang. 

I’d been noticing a shift in students in the last few years, a slouching toward passivity, a general meh about learning and curiosity, a give-me-a-button-to-push-for-the-answer attitude, a malaise toward effort that I found myself working harder and harder each year to surpass. Thwarting it before it took a firmer hold had become a constant challenge.

I wanted my students to experience joy as a community of learners. I wanted them to find learning relationships with one another in as many ways as possible. I wanted healing from the anxiety induced by an ongoing onslaught of tech swiping and social media hype.

Looking to make class more engaging while still focusing on content is an ongoing necessity. While down a recent digital rabbit hole, I came across a social media post on fliphunts (if you hashtag this, several will come up), and an idea formed. I’d been looking to update the Poetry Madness unit I’d been using, and a fliphunt sounded like a very intriguing option. 

Curiouser and Curiouser

I began by sifting through all of the poems and poets that I knew held students’ interest (classic poems have held their own against contemporary poems for all the years we’ve been doing Poetry Madness). 

Poet Sampling

• Nikita Gill (An Ode to Fearless Women)
• William Carlos Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow)
• Margaret Atwood (This is a Photograph of Me)
• Billy Collins (Intro to Poetry)
• Naomi Shihab Nye (The Rider)
• Robert Frost (Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening)
• Alice Walker (Before I Leave the Stage)

Links to poems, based on themes of Adventure, Emotion, Words/Imagination, and Nature, could be found in the Mission Directions.

Additionally, I took previously used ideas that caused them to delve deep, added new ones, and compiled everything into 6 days of FlipHunt challenges. Each day held task options with varying points available. 

No two days of offerings from FlipHunts were the same, which led to curiosity building. One of my students later wrote, “I liked the fliphunts because they helped you learn but in a more fun way. I would look forward to the days we did the fliphunts.”

While some tasks were surface skimmers (draw an image that best represents Naomi Shihab Nye’s thoughts on kindness using autodraw). Others, like the Hexagonal Thinking Poetry Poster caused students to use poetic terms or themes to make connections between poems.

When students entered lit class that first day, I shared their teams and explored Mission Directions for the Poetry FlipHunt with links to poetry from the four themes and tools necessary for completing tasks. 

And then they were off. The first day’s tasks were a bit more general, just enough to get their brains ticking and their curiosity expanding. If you want a closer look at the tasks, here is fliphunt 1.

They spent the rest of the class creating and collaborating. Finished work was dropped into a very simple slide deck containing the task title and point value. Each team had its own slide deck (one student on the team took care of sharing it with all group members and turning it in for the group), and just like each FlipHunt day, no two response slide decks looked the same. Below are three different groups versions of a Word River slide.

The next day, we went through each slide deck, reviewing terms, watching videos students had developed, reading poems they’d crafted (examples include an emulation of Williams’s Red Wheelbarrow and a poem generated in the style of Dickinson), and exploring ideas they’d created through hands-on work. 

These review days held an unexpected bonus that I didn’t recognize until a student later shared there was the plus of going “over all the information 4 times because there were 4 groups.” Another stated that “everyone could have different perspectives on the questions and share them.”

Our pacing ended up looking like this:

• Day 1 Intro, teams, FlipHunt 1
• Day 2 Responses Review of FlipHunt 1
• Day 3 FlipHunt 2
• Day 4 Responses Review of FlipHunt 2
• Etc. 

I kept track of points on a scoreboard in my room and it was the first thing kids checked when they came in the next day. 

Were students engaged? You bet, which holds immeasurable value. Not only were they curious about what each day would bring, they were excited to watch and read each other’s work on screen. 

There was a joy that developed as we laughed with a students’ version of Hope is the Thing with Feathers by Emily Dickinson sung to The Yellow Rose of Texas, cracking voice, changing pitch, and all. 

Students found themselves working in new ways and pairing off differently each day. Suddenly, their tech engagement had become less passive and more demanding.

Snippets from Students

• I paid more attention when my team was relying on me to win.
• FlipHunts always had something fun in store for us each new day.
• They helped me learn about the poet and their type of writing because we were motivated to win. It made me gain more interest and respect for the writers.
• They were fun because we talked and helped each other out.
• I liked the fliphunts because we got to understand how the poets wrote and how to write their poetry correctly.
• I enjoyed the fun activities and cooperating with my group members to complete challenges.
• We were with a group and talked and helped each other out.

The Next Flip

I’ll spend the summer break assessing what could be better and working out glitches such as the amount of time a specific task took (some moved faster and others much slower than I’d expected) and reworking task directions that felt unclear (based on questions I received). 

While I had qualms about releasing content to students to maneuver through independently, only one student reported that he learned more through discussion since his focus was more on getting tasks done than understanding a poem. But his takeaway is valid. Next year, I’ll spend more time with a poem’s meaning on response days.

I’ll also be taking time to build fliphunt-style units. While it’s not likely I’ll do this exact plan for another unit (new and different are an essential part of building curiosity), I’ll use what I learned here about engagement and continue designing similar activities. 

(If you’re curious about more details for this fliphunt, please reach out. Often ideas are found without knowing the original source, and this holds true of some of the material shared here – let me know if you originated an idea and I’ll credit you.)