4 poetry activities to unlock creativity in every classroom

In the madness of my first year of teaching, I found myself at a poetry training day at Dartington Hall in the UK. The gothic setting and Hogwarts 'esque towers made it a natural retreat for English teachers. We found ourselves bedraggled and rain-spattered in a cosy room, complete with oak furniture, and atmospheric arched windows, looking onto a graveyard. Our leader for the day was poet Kate Clanchy. She insisted that poetry could unlock the creative potential of any child.

She was right.

Throughout the day, we learnt a range of activities that every child could access, drawing upon their own personal experiences to shape abstract and creative poems that were highly effective.

Lulled into the creative temptations of our atmospheric surroundings, we opened ourselves up to the creative potential that these poetry activities could offer our students - not only for academic purposes, but also for creating an environment of belonging and wellbeing.

So how can poetry inspire an environment of positivity in the classroom?

My return to the classroom from the poetic rural landscape of Dartington brought me a fresh perspective. I had my nurture Year 10 group that morning: ten students determined that they would fail. Their apathy and lack of self-belief radiated from their dejected expressions, crossed arms and graffitied English books. They did not believe they were capable of writing anything worthy of praise.

We abandoned the GCSE curriculum that day. Gone was AO2 language analysis strategies and academic sentence starters, instead I asked them to draw upon their own experiences and write something deeply personal and profound. The results were poignant; each student left having written a poem, entirely independently and utterly personal to them.

I turned these poems into a display - a visible symbol every lesson, that they were seen and their ideas were worth sharing with the world. Carol Dweck coined this idea as a ‘Growth Mindset’ - it is the notion that all individuals can develop their talents rather than talents being innate and fixed gifts. For a brief moment that English lesson, my Y10s believed that they were capable of learning something. The classroom had become a positive place of learning where success was tangible.

What poetic strategies can you employ within the classroom?

A staple from Kate Clanchy - ask students to note down an emotion they are feeling very presently at the moment. Then ask them what that emotion smells like, what it tastes like, how it feels on your skin… The student ends up with an abstract poem, but it also works as a means of unpicking that emotion in their life – allowing them to explore and understand it in more depth.

The perfect game to begin a lesson and get students thinking outside of the box. Ask students to write a series of concrete nouns, abstract nouns and definitions for both. Then mix the concrete noun definitions with the abstract. The students will end up with a weird and wonderful collection of ideas: E.G. When we mixed the abstract noun ‘anger’ with concrete noun ‘parrot’ we got: “anger is a multi-coloured bird that mimics those around it”.

Ask students to Google the etymology of their first name and surname. Create word association maps of these collections of words and synonyms, then piece these words together to explore their names in their full complexity. E.G. Rebecca = ensnare, soil, to tie, to bind and Driscoll = news bearer or messenger. Pieced together you can create sentences such as: I am an ensnaring messenger or I am the news of the earth.

Based on Edip Cansever’s poem, The Table poems offers students an opportunity to physically and mentally unload their day. They can start by writing about physical things they pile on the table when they come home from school, then they can move on to unburden emotions, memories and worries. Finally, they can unpack hopes for the future, aspirations and ambitions. Not only does this create a great poem, but it creates the sense of belonging within a classroom through the realisation that we all have burdens to unpack and explore.

That wonderful day at Dartington Hall, every English teacher there was reminded why we teach our subject. We felt the relief of unburdening ourselves through the collections of poems that poured from our pens as the grandfather clock chimed and the fire crackled merrily. That creative space that had been put together for us brought us together as practitioners, but more importantly, as human beings. It cannot be underestimated what that opportunity for reflection and creativity could offer our students too.

Clanchy, K, (2018) England: Poems from a School. Picador, UK.

Dweck, C (2007), Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Ballantine Books.

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