The Uses of Poetry in the Classroom

Unit Goals

One of the goals of this curriculum unit is to encourage high academic achievement as students master local and global concepts and skills in Language Arts. In addition to high academic achievement, the lessons in this unit encourage the development of positive self-esteem. Students will critically analyze and reflect both orally and in writing as they study poems about their heritage, their individuality, their emotions, and achieving their goals. Poetry is so eloquent on these themes that it is an ideal means of communicating them and to the objective of increasing self-esteem. I feel that it is inseparable from good teaching.

• Promoting self esteem could in many ways be defined as "good teaching."

• Good teachers learn that students who feel empowered and in control achieve
• more when a certain environment is created from purposeful classroom orchestration. Good teachers realize that they can only be considered "good
• teachers" insofar as they find ways to get students to perform and care about quality. In fact, it could be said that there is really no way to be a good teacher
• without promoting self-esteem, and if one is promoting self-esteem, it will
• lead to effective teaching practices.6

This curriculum unit, "Discovering Self Through Poetry," is a three part investigative unit for grades seven and eight. It is designed to be incorporated in the teacher's lesson plans during an entire school year. Students will investigate poetry under three thematic headings.

• Who Am I? Discovering who I am through my heritage
• Who Am I? Discovering who I am as an individual with emotions
• Who Am I? Discovering my potential to achieve.

I have elected to use poetry as the method by which the goals of this curriculum unit can best be achieved. Poetry is the best means by which I can help improve my students' self–esteem as they investigate relevant themes and develop both their critical thinking skills and improve their basic understanding of the speaker. They will also learn about themes and literary devices in poetry.

• Poetry, it is clear, is not cut off from life, but is basically
• concerned with life—that is, with the lived fullness of the world. It extends our
• own limited experience by means of imagination. By imagination, it sharpens
• our sense of the emotional, intellectual, and moral implications of human
• situations and actions. It accomplishes such tings by imaginative enactment, by
• our sense of living into the world.7

The poems in this unit were selected because of the age appropriateness of each poem's theme, which is an important element in the students' understanding. "Students are immersed in language that has personal meaning for them."8 Secondly, these poems were selected based upon the appropriateness of each poem's theme and content as related to each of the thematic units.