Six Ways of Poetry

What if words could heal? Poetry has the power to reach into our hearts, untangle our toughest moments, and turn them into something lighter, something shared. In classrooms, it does even more: it builds community, fosters vulnerability, and creates spaces where teachers and students can find both their voices and their strength. Through these poem invitations, we invite you to discover how poetry can transform not only your teaching but also your capacity to connect, inspire, and sustain.

In this post, we share a few of the writing prompts we brought from this Ethical ELA community to Boston to share with teachers. These are all great activities to use in your class today, especially during all the interrupted schedules during the holiday season! Cheers.

Six Poems Ready to Write in Your Classroom (No Prep)

These poem invitations are for teachers and students to experience poetry’s transformative healing power, through writing, reading poems of others, listening, and responding. Each poem invitation is a way to carry that healing into the classroom. These are the handouts from NCTE 2024 in Boston.

1. Sarah:  Something You Should Know
2. Leilya:  When You Need a Break (a walk poem)
3. Kim:  I Remember
4. Denise: The Way I Felt
5. Tammi: If Your Shoes Could Talk/ Teacher handouts for use in classroom.
6. Wendy: What I Want Is…

We believe community is cultivated in the lines and stanzas it crafts together. We share our own poems as well as student models with participants, allowing agency by centering the poetry of our community rather than poems from textbooks and anthologies. Teachers will leave feeling inspired to share poetry within their classrooms. They will have a variety of poetry examples and prompts to cultivate learning spaces that invite literature as well as writing, which positions students to do authentic meaningful work in a way that heals their hearts and offers space to engage with, comment on, and builds a safe classroom community that welcomes vulnerability and sharing. Teachers will have experienced the transformative healing necessary to sustain themselves and their students.

This work leans into the work of Donovan & Boutelier (2023) in Writing and Pedagogy and Donovan et al. (2024) in Research in the Teaching of English around the benefits of teachers writing autobiographical poetry, and our collaborative work as teacher-poets in our own practice and classrooms. Additionally, the poetry processes are grounded in the research on reading and writing poetry for wellbeing (Soter, 2016), writing as a way of being (Yagelski), language as a field of energy in practice, and poetry as autoethnographic and therapeutic work (Custer, 2014).