Jim Asher's Blog - Posts Tagged "professional-development"
Using Poetry for PD for Teachers
I am an administrator at a middle school near Charlottesville, Virginia, and an on-going focus at some of our faculty meetings has been "culturally relevant teaching" (i.e., using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences and performance styles of diverse students to make learning more appropriate and effective; teaching to the strengths of the students).
At one of the meetings I presented E. E. Cummings' poem "old age sticks” (that poem and my approach for leading a discussion on it is noted in my Goodreads.com blog entry dated June 13, 2012). Following the discussion of the poem, I showed a picture of a rather complicated Venn diagram, and we had additional discussion about the numerous and complex factors involved with establishing and maintaining positive relationships with students:
• Age
• Race
• Heritage
• Gender
• Economic Class
• Residence
• Social Class
• Affiliation
• Level of Education
• Language
• Dress
• Music
• Interests
• Etc., Etc., Etc.
Next, I displayed four quotes by E. E. Cummings:
1. To be nobody but yourself in a world that’s doing its best to make you somebody else is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight.
2. It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
3. We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
4. I would rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.
Teachers then broke into groups of four to discuss each of the quotes. For each, they were to consider the following:
A. Regarding the meaning of each quote, what is the implication for teachers and their delivery of instruction?
B. Which specific student(s) could they associate with each of the quotes?
Following the group work, we reconvened as a faculty to consider the individual students that the teacher groups discussed in relation to the four Cumming’s quotes – and finally in relation to one other quote, this time from Howard Gardner: “The biggest mistake of past centuries in teaching has been to treat all children as if they were variants of the same individual and thus to feel justified in teaching them all the same subjects the same way.”
I’ll post additional information about how I’ve used poetry with profession development in future blog entries, and for more on curiosity/wonder (see quote #3 above), see my blog post dated June 9, 2012.
At one of the meetings I presented E. E. Cummings' poem "old age sticks” (that poem and my approach for leading a discussion on it is noted in my Goodreads.com blog entry dated June 13, 2012). Following the discussion of the poem, I showed a picture of a rather complicated Venn diagram, and we had additional discussion about the numerous and complex factors involved with establishing and maintaining positive relationships with students:
• Age
• Race
• Heritage
• Gender
• Economic Class
• Residence
• Social Class
• Affiliation
• Level of Education
• Language
• Dress
• Music
• Interests
• Etc., Etc., Etc.
Next, I displayed four quotes by E. E. Cummings:
1. To be nobody but yourself in a world that’s doing its best to make you somebody else is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight.
2. It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
3. We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
4. I would rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.
Teachers then broke into groups of four to discuss each of the quotes. For each, they were to consider the following:
A. Regarding the meaning of each quote, what is the implication for teachers and their delivery of instruction?
B. Which specific student(s) could they associate with each of the quotes?
Following the group work, we reconvened as a faculty to consider the individual students that the teacher groups discussed in relation to the four Cumming’s quotes – and finally in relation to one other quote, this time from Howard Gardner: “The biggest mistake of past centuries in teaching has been to treat all children as if they were variants of the same individual and thus to feel justified in teaching them all the same subjects the same way.”
I’ll post additional information about how I’ve used poetry with profession development in future blog entries, and for more on curiosity/wonder (see quote #3 above), see my blog post dated June 9, 2012.
