Performing Poetry
from NCTE INBOX 4-3-07

It's National Poetry Month. Take advantage of the celebration by asking students to dramatize poems, both in the classroom and beyond the walls of the school. These lesson plans and classroom-ready resources suggest ways to bring performance to your exploration of poetry.

• A Bear of a Poem: Composing and Performing Found Poetry (E)
  Invite students to look for writing that inspires them -- their favorite words, phrases, and sentences. Using words from their list, students create and perform a class poem with this ReadWriteThink lesson plan.
  
  
• "Audience and Revision: Middle Schoolers Slam Poetry" (M)
  See how a poetry "slam" (a contest in which people perform their original poems and listeners cast votes for their favorites) made vivid for students the need to write for an audience and to revise, as outlined in this Voices from the Middle article.
  
  
• "Performance: Beyond the Boundaries" (M-S)
  Check out Chapter 12 of the new NCTE book Wordplaygrounds: Reading, Writing, and Performing Poetry in the English Classroom, to find poetry exercises that go beyond the walls of academic disciplines and then suggest ways of organizing public performances that take students beyond the walls of the school as well.
  
  
• "Slam: Hip-Hop Meets Poetry -- A Strategy for Violence Intervention" (S)
  Combine hip-hop and poetry with the strategies in this article, from English Journal, which shows students the power of words.
  
  
• "Using Performance as an Interpretative Strategy in Teaching Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess'" (C)
  Use role-playing, dramatic monologues, and tableaux vivant to interpret Robert Browning's poem "My Last Duchess" in a literature class, as explained in this Teaching English in the Two-Year College article.
  
  
• "From the Coffee House to the School House: The Promise and Potential of Spoken Word Poetry in School Contexts" (TE)
  Explore the curricular implications for listening and valuing words and the perspectives of others in this article from English Education.

For more ideas for teaching poetry, see the Poetry Teacher Resource Collection, which includes links to additional articles, lesson plans, and other resources.