K-16:
Ingrid Wendt: language play with reluctant writers, meeting standards with poetry instruction, teaching diversity through poetry, reading and writing poetry in an age of anxiety
K-5:
Katherine Bomer: genre studies
Middle-Secondary:
John S. O'Connor: reading, writing, and performing poetry
Ernest Morrell: Hip-hop and poetry
Sample Workshops
“Meet IRA/NCTE Standards, Teach Character Counts, Through Poetry Writing in the Classroom”
“The attempt to write poetry is a way to find your relation to the world you live in, and a definition of yourself you can live with. You’re trying to find out what capacity you have to live, and what you find worth living for.”
— Robert Penn Warren, poet and novelist
Workshop Description
Poetry in the classroom: frill or tool? This hands-on session for elementary and middle-school audiences will support your hunch that what is learned while writing poems does carry over into all areas of Language Arts, and across the curriculum, actually fulfilling IRA/NCTE state-mandated standards
Poems You Didn’t Know You Could Write: Language Play with Reluctant Readers and Writers
“A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” —Robert Frost
Workshop Description
Looking for new ways to “snag” students into writing? This hands-on workshop will help non-writers lose their dread of teaching poetry writing in the classroom through engaging activities that bring out the poet in everyone. Participants begin by looking at “writer’s block” and ways to get around it. Then, with the pressure removed to produce whole poems, they experiment with some of poetry’s building blocks: figures of speech, musical language, rhythm, parallel structures, and repetition.