Poems as Portals – Session #8 of the CRWP 2020-21 Webinar Series

In our final webinar for the 2020/2021 school year, CRWP’s teacher consultant, former MCTE President, and author, Andy Schoenborn (@aschoenborn), talked about teaching poetry in both virtual and face to face settings. He invited us to consider how poetry is not necessarily a therapy, but it is therapeutic.

In this webinar, Schoenborn blended writing opportunities for participants to build an understanding of the power of poetry in our writing lives as well as our students. He also talked about the importance of making sure there are spaces between all the things we have to do in our English classrooms to allow the sparks of student creativity and writing to become a flame… and not be snuffed out or smothered.

Then, Andy talked about what a week in his classroom looks like and how he makes “spaces between the logs” of the fire to keep the spark of student creativity going. In addition to explaining how he provides students time and space for poetry writing, Schoenborn discussed what he has students do with their writing. Andy illustrated how he has students dig deeper into meaningful metacognitive conversations where they talk about their own writerly decisions and voices.

Andy also discussed the importance of sharing. Not only having students sharing their writing with each other, but the idea that we — as teacher-writers — share our own writing with students and share in those moments of vulnerability with them. He talked about how, despite the differences in your students and their backgrounds, there is poetry that will resonate with them. Schoenborn encouraged all of us to give poetry in our classroom a chance and give the opportunity for our students to experience the magic of words.

Towards the conclusion of the webinar, Andy gave us a strategy to use both with ourselves and with our students to help them “find the poem within themselves.” It’s a strategy any educator could take into one’s classroom tomorrow and use as “space between the logs” for sparks of student creativity as we finish out our school year.

Andy’s grand finale to our series this year is a webinar you don’t want to miss!

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