Artifact #9 is the complete POU of one student (POU = Performance of Understanding, school terminology for the project students undertake at the end of units for their learning to be assessed). This artifact is specifically a collection of the steps DP completed on his journey from essay inception to completion at the end of our (long!) poetry unit. Prior to the Poetry Unit, other units ended in a combination of project and summative exam, but this unit developed a life of its own and by the time students began this essay, a formal exam seemed neither prudent nor necessary.
Having never taught poetry before, I embarked on extensive research and preparation in order to plan, and one work that was particularly influential in my conception of poetry was Chapter 1 in Linda Christensen's Teaching for Joy and Justice (2009). In it, she preaches about the accessibility and power of poetry for her students, writing, "Students who struggle in other areas of literacy education often succeed in poetry… they learn how pace, line breaks, and allusion work in their poems, so they can take that knowledge and language back to their work when they analyze poetry" (Christensen, 2009, p. 14-16). I took her advice, doing my best to make the classroom a space where students felt safe enough to make personal connections to the poems we read together and eventually crafting their own sonnets. These sonnets truly did seem to show that my students were starting to "know the terms from the inside out" (Christensen, 2009, p. 16).
Thus by the time we began the essay assignment itself, students were ready to embark on an exploration of their poems in a deeper way than I had observed for previous essays. For instance, their last big essay assignment was an argument essay on one of four topics. We did not read these essays together as a class, and the essays students created seemed like exercises in cobbling together ill-fitting phrases into a template they did not fully understand. In designing this assignment, I tried to preemptively engage students with the poems more profoundly before even giving them the template so that they had solid ideas to explore and could them use the template as a tool to help them shape their ideas into an analytic form. I.e., the first assignment was done as follows:
After these steps were complete, students were given a graphic organizer in order to continue to develop analysis before encountering the template. They were asked to name three devices used by the poet to demonstrate a given emotion, in line with the unit's definition of poetry as "language arranged through rhythm, sound, and meaning to evoke emotion." DP's prompt on Ferlinghetti's poem specified that the devices showed the speaker's nostalgia, previously a vocab word. Students must define the device, quote the example, explain why the device was used, and explain how the quote evokes the emotion they are claiming that it does.
DP identified symbol, metaphor, and imagery in this step (#7), which simplified his task as it may have been easier to support his argument with these meaning devices than with sound or rhythm devices (something I observed with other students, as proving, for example, that nostalgia is evoked through caesura or meter is conceptually difficult). To be more specific, it's easier if the student focuses on the meaning of the quote and does not deeply analyze the use of the device itself, something DP did which I did not push him on because the line between the meaning of, say, a metaphor itself and the meaning of the act of using a metaphor is something I did not choose to cross during this assignment. I'd further like to point out that on Step #7, one can begin to see DP making more of an effort to revise and extend his work. Unlike the previous assignment, which he did not finish (writing the questions) and did the minimum annotation, here he first wrote the meaning of each quote and then went back and added the quote itself at my prompting.
In Step #8, students were FURTHER asked to identify their three devices and quotes again, this time adding a statement in which they interpreted the author' intended meaning for each quote as well. They were then given a template for the paragraph with a model for each part of the template. These were written by me--I used a different poem as the subject matter for each step I modeled to help students understand the instructions without being able to copy a full essay from my work. Identifying the meaning of the quote before beginning the template allowed students to construct a complex statement comparing what the author might have written with what they actually wrote using the device in question. This helped students set them selves up to analyze exactly why the use of the device helped show the emotion they claimed.
In his work, DP shifts between referring to Ferlinghetti and the speaker in a somewhat clumsy way, which may be explained both by vagueness in parts of the template, my sporadic mention of this issue instead of a structured lesson on this subject, and DP's nascent understanding of why this matters or what it means. For instance, in body paragraph #2, DP writes, "The speaker paints a picture about his childhood fading away by saying..", which is technically accurate, but he then turns around and immediately writes, "The fact that the author describes the wind…" (Artifact #9), which shifts the action from speaker to author. He perhaps could have written instead, "The author paints a picture of the speaker's childhood…" However, I see it as a coup that students are consistently citing an outside source and negotiating between their own views and the words and ideas of the author, so this is a more a comment about what I'd like to work on more in the future than a negative assessment of the current work.
In Step #10, body paragraph #3, one can see DP further revising his work as he goes in response to suggestions from both myself and the other classroom teacher. However, we got into something of a stalemate here as I took issue with his statement in the paragraph that he claims that the evidence "shows that he misses how she looked." He goes on to write, "Every time it rains he thinks of her…" (Artifact #9), which is pure invention on his part and is unsupported by the text. I explained this to him, but he disagreed with me and was firmly set on keeping this as he had written it. This conversation occurred during class as I was ineffectually attempting to read and comment on everyone's work, and I am afraid I did not do him justice in proving to him why this should be revised, and so I did not mark this off on his final essay grade because it seemed unfair to retroactively deduct points from something I did not address fully originally. Again, this would make good fodder for further lessons on analysis with the class.
Overall, there is a staccato and redundant aspect to essays written with this template, despite my varied attempts to address this problem on this assignment For instance, via the points mentioned above as well as a lack of sentence stems provided on parts of the template, such as the evidence sentences and intro and conclusion. DP along with a number of other students met this freedom with some trepidation and adapted by stealing pieces of the model sentences I provided on intro and conclusion and crafted their own sentence stems. Compare my restated thesis model to DPs: "Taken together, all of the devices that Brooks uses to control the rhythm of the poem expose the speaker's feelings of guilt…"; "Taken together the symbol, imagery, and metaphors that Ferlinghetti uses to control the meaning of the poem expose the speaker's feelings of nostalgia…" (Artifact #9).
However, unlike in the previous essay, DP's adaptations of the template to his needs with the material demonstrate an increasingly sophisticated understanding of both the poem and the template. For instance, a number of other students who took my phrasing of this sentence as well did not change the word "rhythm", even though I was referring to three rhythm devices while they were not, likely because they copied without processing the meaning of the statement. DP's careful use of the template consistently showed that he has a strong understanding of the underlying meaning of the poem's meaning and structure and used it to effectively explore the complex idea of nostalgia in an idiosyncratic, layered beat poem. I was sufficiently impressed by this feat and called his grandma upon grading his essay to share this with her. I had spoken to her in the fall at parent teacher conferences about my suspicion that DP was actually a creative and independent thinker and an inventive writer despite his D in the class and self-professed hatred of English. It felt great to be able to say to her that months later, DP had written an A essay and brought his grade up from a D to a B+ and rising.
Having never taught poetry before, I embarked on extensive research and preparation in order to plan, and one work that was particularly influential in my conception of poetry was Chapter 1 in Linda Christensen's Teaching for Joy and Justice (2009). In it, she preaches about the accessibility and power of poetry for her students, writing, "Students who struggle in other areas of literacy education often succeed in poetry… they learn how pace, line breaks, and allusion work in their poems, so they can take that knowledge and language back to their work when they analyze poetry" (Christensen, 2009, p. 14-16). I took her advice, doing my best to make the classroom a space where students felt safe enough to make personal connections to the poems we read together and eventually crafting their own sonnets. These sonnets truly did seem to show that my students were starting to "know the terms from the inside out" (Christensen, 2009, p. 16).
Thus by the time we began the essay assignment itself, students were ready to embark on an exploration of their poems in a deeper way than I had observed for previous essays. For instance, their last big essay assignment was an argument essay on one of four topics. We did not read these essays together as a class, and the essays students created seemed like exercises in cobbling together ill-fitting phrases into a template they did not fully understand. In designing this assignment, I tried to preemptively engage students with the poems more profoundly before even giving them the template so that they had solid ideas to explore and could them use the template as a tool to help them shape their ideas into an analytic form. I.e., the first assignment was done as follows:
- Read and discuss the poems together as a class; though students had a choice of poems, they were not left out in the woods to grapple with the poems alone as happened during the last essay assignment.
- Choose your poem--students were given free choice between a diverse grouping of poems, autonomy I think is essential--diverse in terms of gender, race, style, subject matter, tone, age focus, etc.
- Describe the speaker's persona--it is essential for students to distinguish between the poet and the speaker they have created early on in this process, from my view. DP identifies the somewhat complex timeline here, writing that the speaker is "older, but he was talking about his past self" (Artifact #9); also points out his tone and diction.
- Summarize the poem's plot, which DP interpreted chronologically, staying in the action of the poem and not referring to the fact that the speaker is remembering something from long ago here, as he did above.
- Annotate the poem, which students have access to a wide range of meaning, sound, and rhythm device terms and definitions in order to do. Some students fully dissected their poems, others identified the minimum of three devices, as DP did.
- Come up with four questions about the poem--sentence stems are given. This was assigned for two main reasons: to keep continuity between the question types students have been previously working with, and to allow students to craft questions for their classmates to answer to help each other make meaning of these poems. The most relevant student questions were assigned in class the following day and a selection of questions and answers were shared aloud to give me a reason to point out excellent analysis and disabuse students of misinformation early on without lecturing.
After these steps were complete, students were given a graphic organizer in order to continue to develop analysis before encountering the template. They were asked to name three devices used by the poet to demonstrate a given emotion, in line with the unit's definition of poetry as "language arranged through rhythm, sound, and meaning to evoke emotion." DP's prompt on Ferlinghetti's poem specified that the devices showed the speaker's nostalgia, previously a vocab word. Students must define the device, quote the example, explain why the device was used, and explain how the quote evokes the emotion they are claiming that it does.
DP identified symbol, metaphor, and imagery in this step (#7), which simplified his task as it may have been easier to support his argument with these meaning devices than with sound or rhythm devices (something I observed with other students, as proving, for example, that nostalgia is evoked through caesura or meter is conceptually difficult). To be more specific, it's easier if the student focuses on the meaning of the quote and does not deeply analyze the use of the device itself, something DP did which I did not push him on because the line between the meaning of, say, a metaphor itself and the meaning of the act of using a metaphor is something I did not choose to cross during this assignment. I'd further like to point out that on Step #7, one can begin to see DP making more of an effort to revise and extend his work. Unlike the previous assignment, which he did not finish (writing the questions) and did the minimum annotation, here he first wrote the meaning of each quote and then went back and added the quote itself at my prompting.
In Step #8, students were FURTHER asked to identify their three devices and quotes again, this time adding a statement in which they interpreted the author' intended meaning for each quote as well. They were then given a template for the paragraph with a model for each part of the template. These were written by me--I used a different poem as the subject matter for each step I modeled to help students understand the instructions without being able to copy a full essay from my work. Identifying the meaning of the quote before beginning the template allowed students to construct a complex statement comparing what the author might have written with what they actually wrote using the device in question. This helped students set them selves up to analyze exactly why the use of the device helped show the emotion they claimed.
In his work, DP shifts between referring to Ferlinghetti and the speaker in a somewhat clumsy way, which may be explained both by vagueness in parts of the template, my sporadic mention of this issue instead of a structured lesson on this subject, and DP's nascent understanding of why this matters or what it means. For instance, in body paragraph #2, DP writes, "The speaker paints a picture about his childhood fading away by saying..", which is technically accurate, but he then turns around and immediately writes, "The fact that the author describes the wind…" (Artifact #9), which shifts the action from speaker to author. He perhaps could have written instead, "The author paints a picture of the speaker's childhood…" However, I see it as a coup that students are consistently citing an outside source and negotiating between their own views and the words and ideas of the author, so this is a more a comment about what I'd like to work on more in the future than a negative assessment of the current work.
In Step #10, body paragraph #3, one can see DP further revising his work as he goes in response to suggestions from both myself and the other classroom teacher. However, we got into something of a stalemate here as I took issue with his statement in the paragraph that he claims that the evidence "shows that he misses how she looked." He goes on to write, "Every time it rains he thinks of her…" (Artifact #9), which is pure invention on his part and is unsupported by the text. I explained this to him, but he disagreed with me and was firmly set on keeping this as he had written it. This conversation occurred during class as I was ineffectually attempting to read and comment on everyone's work, and I am afraid I did not do him justice in proving to him why this should be revised, and so I did not mark this off on his final essay grade because it seemed unfair to retroactively deduct points from something I did not address fully originally. Again, this would make good fodder for further lessons on analysis with the class.
Overall, there is a staccato and redundant aspect to essays written with this template, despite my varied attempts to address this problem on this assignment For instance, via the points mentioned above as well as a lack of sentence stems provided on parts of the template, such as the evidence sentences and intro and conclusion. DP along with a number of other students met this freedom with some trepidation and adapted by stealing pieces of the model sentences I provided on intro and conclusion and crafted their own sentence stems. Compare my restated thesis model to DPs: "Taken together, all of the devices that Brooks uses to control the rhythm of the poem expose the speaker's feelings of guilt…"; "Taken together the symbol, imagery, and metaphors that Ferlinghetti uses to control the meaning of the poem expose the speaker's feelings of nostalgia…" (Artifact #9).
However, unlike in the previous essay, DP's adaptations of the template to his needs with the material demonstrate an increasingly sophisticated understanding of both the poem and the template. For instance, a number of other students who took my phrasing of this sentence as well did not change the word "rhythm", even though I was referring to three rhythm devices while they were not, likely because they copied without processing the meaning of the statement. DP's careful use of the template consistently showed that he has a strong understanding of the underlying meaning of the poem's meaning and structure and used it to effectively explore the complex idea of nostalgia in an idiosyncratic, layered beat poem. I was sufficiently impressed by this feat and called his grandma upon grading his essay to share this with her. I had spoken to her in the fall at parent teacher conferences about my suspicion that DP was actually a creative and independent thinker and an inventive writer despite his D in the class and self-professed hatred of English. It felt great to be able to say to her that months later, DP had written an A essay and brought his grade up from a D to a B+ and rising.