News Brief

01/15/13

When Poetry Meets the Common Core

Education Week (01/15/13) Curran, Ben

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have schools and teachers concerned about their curriculum, particularly the emphasis on informational texts under the standards. Educators working in literature and with poetry are particularly concerned, but Center for Teaching Quality's Teacher Leaders Network member Ben Curran says poetry is a perfect fit and should play an important role. He says the standards that can be met with poetry under CCSS include making inferences, citing specific textual evidence to support conclusions and answers; determining and analyzing the theme of a text; analyzing the way ideas develop over the course of a text; interpreting words and phrases; analyzing connotative and figurative meanings of words; analyzing how word choice shapes a text; and analyzing the structure, shape, and how two texts can address the same theme. When selecting poems to teach to students, Curran suggests choosing a poem the teacher enjoys and is most familiar. Before teaching a poem to students, he says that keeping the CCSS in mind, some general questions should be prepared ahead of time using the ELA Reading Anchor standards, such as what message does this poem convey to you; what comparisons does the author make; how are the sentences and stanzas connected; and after you read the poem, how does it make you feel and where does the poem change and what effect does that have? Other considerations to bring up include finding what parts or words in the poems are confusing or surprising, which words do the students find important and why, and whether there some words that have multiple meanings and how those different meanings impact the poem. Curran also suggests starting with a shorter poem for dictation purposes, reading it one line at a time and allowing students to copy it down into a notebook, which he says allows them to think about the words and structure as they write. Teachers also have to remember that when discussing poems, there is no one correct answer to the questions, and students must be trained to cite evidence within the poem when drawing their conclusions. Curran says poetry and literature are "one of the best tools we have for teaching critical thinking, depth of understanding, and analysis," which is at the heart of CCSS.

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