Poetry Is Alive and Well in Treynor

By Ms.Abbott

After reading and studying sonnets and Shakespeare's poem "The Seven Ages of Man," students are pictured working on their own sonnets to share with the class.

After reading and studying sonnets and Shakespeare's poem "The Seven Ages of Man," students are pictured working on their own sonnets to share with the class.

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After reading and studying sonnets and Shakespeare's poem "The Seven Ages of Man," students are pictured working on their own sonnets to share with the class.

English 9 is currently trying their hand at writing sonnets. Treynor is part of a pilot program with three other schools in the Western Iowa Conference (Riverside, Missouri Valley, and Logan-Magnolia) to create a Professional Learning Community where teachers can work together to improve learning for all students. Each teacher in the pilot group teaches ninth-grade English and since each is the only ninth-grade English teacher in his or her district, creating a PLC among area schools establishes an advantage for all of our students by allowing teachers to work together.

Teachers are able to discuss strengths and weaknesses of lessons and curriculum, create shared units of study, and evaluate student progress jointly. Right now English 9 is in the midst of a four-week shared unit of poetry focusing on reviewing literary devices, analyzing literature, comparing and contrasting classic poetry with modern-day song lyrics, studying multi-cultural authors, and writing our own poetry. The PLC group of teachers has worked together during the entire school year with the shared poetry unit as a highlight of their work. The teachers started by selecting the learning targets they wanted for students, then created a pre and post assessment while crafting lessons for each week of the unit. 

The ultimate goal of any PLC is to improve student learning. One way this works is that when teachers collect data (pre/post test scores) from their students and compare them to the scores of the other teachers' students, teachers can then engage in a dialogue about the teaching methods used in each classroom that might have impacted test scores and learning. A unique feature of the pilot program is that right now all four teachers from four different school districts are teaching the same content at the same time via the shared lessons. They have spent much time choosing poems, lessons, and best practices to create an excellent unit of study.

The four teachers meet weekly through a Zoom meeting, so they are each in their own classrooms yet working collaboratively through the help of technology. They also debrief their lessons daily as necessary through email contact to trouble shoot any problems or give each other advice about what is working well and what is not. For the culminating project of the unit, students will participate in a "Poetry Cafe" where students will read their own poetry or poetry written by authors they love to their classmates, and we all get to sit back, relax, and enjoy hearing some fabulous poetry.