Latest Lesson Plans
Writing a contrapuntal poem: tools gathered from even-odd project elevators
Poet and teaching artist Trace DePass riffs on the contrapuntal as a poetic form and a way of looking at…
The Backward Prompt: Using Great First Lines from Literature to Invent Your Own Way Forward
The following article was originally published in print by Teachers & Writers Magazine. by Kim Stafford As Donald Graves once…
My Self-portrait / My Secret Self-portrait
lesson by Sheila Maldonado as told to Azka Anwar There are some lessons that I rely on as a teacher…
The Parent Poem Project: Using Photographs to Take a Closer Look at Our Parents and Ourselves
By Vince Puzick One of my favorite writing exercises is to have students create poems inspired by photographs. I find…
My Self-portrait / My Secret Self-portrait
lesson by Sheila Maldonado as told to Azka Anwar There are some lessons that I rely on as a teacher for their success with students at many different levels, usually with minimal adaptation required. The lesson below is one of them; students take to the prompt quickly and with little resistance, possibly because the prompt…
The Parent Poem Project: Using Photographs to Take a Closer Look at Our Parents and Ourselves
By Vince Puzick One of my favorite writing exercises is to have students create poems inspired by photographs. I find that working with these images allows them to observe a moment in time, focusing on small details while also exploring the broader context of the photo, extending and speculating beyond what the camera captures. For…
Building a Queer Canon
the featured image is from electricliterature.com by Annabel Paulsen “[Queerness] is not something to be ashamed of, and I’m coming from a place of privilege because I was not ashamed. I want [my students] to feel the same freedom, and that’s why in my teaching, in my writing, in the artists I have picked for…
Writing Our Names
by Madison Stuart Teachers are keepers of names. Some corner of my brain is cluttered with Alexanders and Amanis and Keanus and Kylies. That first day of school, working down the roster, teachers wield a great appellative power; how many Pomaikaimaikekukunaokalamekahos who go by Po, Zhijias who go by Roy, Shar’lynnruths who go by Shari?…
Life, Death, and Twine
Writer Suzy Rigdon shares how using technology as part of storytelling “presents a radical shift in thinking about how language can tell a story.” Students use a program called Twine and find new possibilities to writing non-linear or multi-linear pieces.
Black Nikes in Red Weather: A Lesson Plan for “Dream Poems”
T&W writer Matthew Burgess brings us a new poetry activity which uses the poems “Black Nikes” by Harryette Mullen and “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” by Wallace Stevens as mentor texts that encourage wordplay, imaginative leaps, and experimentation with form.
Season of Virus: Poems Written During the Pandemic
The following poems were written during our year in quarantine, from 2020-2021, by older adults in virtual creating aging programs through Teachers & Writers Collaborative and our partners. The first set is from participants in the oral history and storytelling program with Visions Services for the Blind and Visually Impaired, a workshop led by Dave Johnson…
How a Spider Web Can Untangle Memoir Writing
by Kendra Stanton Lee “All I have are Iggy Pop and dirt-biking before I got locked up,” one student shared with the class. That sounds like plenty of material to me, I said, as I began to jot some of the student’s memories on the board. First, I drew a large rectangle box in dry…
A footprint on our hearts
Over the last few weeks, we at T&W have lost two poets near and dear to us. We mourn their passing and send condolences to their families, friends, and readers. Gary Lenhart, 73, was Associate Director of T&W in the late 1980’s & early 1990’s. He was the person who wrote the grants that kept…
Teaching Whitman in High School
The following article was originally published in print by Teachers & Writers Magazine. by Bill Zavatsky My first sustained reading of Whitman took place in the fall of 1965 or the spring of 1966. It was his “Song of Myself,” a good chunk of which I read while sitting in a lobby at the New…