Lessons By Design

I like expanding the condensed meanings in poetry, especially with the help of my students. But my students don’t always feel the same way. For some, poems  — and poetry lessons —  are like labyrinths with pathways to nowhere. Which is why, after teaching a poetry survey for nearly two months, and listening to various complaints, a colleague and I decided to put a design challenge to our high school seniors: to build a better high school poetry lesson.

The challenge we set our students to solve was actually twofold: learn Design Thinking (not easy, actually) and use it to design a better way to teach poetry (not easy, at all). In groups of 4, students had about a week to design a 10 minute lesson on a 21st century poem that would be better than or different from the traditional lessons on traditional poetry that we gave them in the fall.

I gave myself a challenge as well: to watch and monitor rather than teach or participate during this time. I saw groups that immediately got to work and others that sat in prolonged silence. There was one that, at least at first, bickered back and forth. I really wanted to intervene. I mostly didn’t.

I’m glad I held back because given a little space, they got more and more comfortable with the project. They conducted interviews of others students to learn what their experience learning poetry was like. Then they brainstormed ideas. Then they prototyped, revised, and finally delivered their lessons. Voila, Design Thinking!

Were their poetry lessons better than the gold standard method I and other teachers tend to use (assign poems for annotation, read aloud, listen to others read aloud, break things down by line and stanza, look for figurative language, consider author’s purpose, etc)? I don’t think so. All of their ideas and lessons were sound. But none of their lessons resulted in the class really understanding the poems they taught, and they all recognized that fact.

As many of them wrote in their reflection, the 10 minute time limit was, in the end, the greatest challenge of all. It wasn’t nearly enough time to teach a poem effectively, no matter how innovative they had been in the attempt.

Understanding poetry, like so many other challenges we face in our daily lives in and out of school, takes time. But what my students learned during the Design Thinking challenge transcended all of these particulars. Through working together, listening to one another, delegating tasks, meeting deadlines, and speaking publicly, they came to a better understanding — not of poetry — but of themselves and their teachers. That’s what the project was ultimately about.