Poetry is often neglected in high school English courses, so I am planning an entire four-week unit devoted entirely to the study of poetry.  This unit has a distinct place within my ideal curriculum, and serves the purpose of introducing my students not only to poetry, but also to my unique classroom methods.

The unit featured here reflects the theme of identity.  The theme of the unit in reality will reflect a theme that we as a class will be considering throughout the year.  Under the theme identity we will examine gender identity, family identity, racial identity, and individual identity.  Each sub-theme will offer opportunity for students to read and write poetry.

Besides exposing students to our yearlong theme, this unit will introduce students to a wide range of poetry--they will experience poems and poets from various historical periods, countries, and groups.  I am hoping that through this wide exposure, many students will come to enjoy poetry, and begin to gain an appreciation of different voices in literature.  I plan to use each of the methods in Language and Reflection in order to expose the students to the variety of ways we can look at a poem.  Many of the features of poetry are not genre specific, so students can gain and use knowledge of symbols, figurative language, voice, and tone throughout the school year.  Our final project is a hypertext poem.

Besides the introduction to my teaching methods, I hope that my students establish a sense of group unity.  Students will learn to trust each other by sharing original poetry within their groups, performing poems, and learning to interact helpfully within their small groups and in the class as a whole.  Ideally, I would like my students to trust each other as writers, technology tutors, audience members, and peer revisers.

Here, this unit will span four-weeks, but flexibility is key in a unit in which learning is student centered and there is a major technology project. Time taken in this unit, at the beginning of the school year, will save time later as the students acquire the reading/writing workshop and technology skills necessary for the other projects of our school year.  This unit will also get the students used to working together, choosing their own projects, and reading and writing extensively.

The performance requirement of this unit will improve students’ public speaking skills.  Students will keep a journal that asks them at different times to consider their responses to a poem as a text (language as artifact), dividing a poem into its parts to better understand the components of a poem (language as development), and their personal response to a poem (language as expression).  Writing poetry requires each of these things (concentration on text, development, and expression) and I would like students to compose two original poems about themselves…THEIR identity.  I will ask them to take a language as a social construct approach with their poems, writing in their language on topics that affect them or are important to them.