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Expressing Voice - Poetry Out Loud

By Tim Pappageorge
Significant Learning: Expressing Voice
The homogenizing forces in education seem to abound these days, with standardized testing, teacher evaluation, and politics involved.  I find that my soul sings as a teacher when I find something worthwhile for my particular students and polishing and prepare it for them in particular, adjusting, tinkering and making it real for them.  In this act of curricular creation, I am expressing my voice as a teacher (albeit filtered through Common Core standards and common assessments).
In turn, we need to create the space to allow students to voice their own ideas and concerns and to take the ideas seriously enough that they can be of consequence.  For example, rather than simply an academic study of poetry, students at my high school learn to perform in through poetryoutloud.org.  Such a shift pushes the learning target away from knowledge exclusively toward product, which represents a shift in the ways of knowing and the configuration of the assessment involved.  Stiggins and Chappuis (2011) suggest a range of target types such as KRSPD (knowledge, reasoning, performance skill, product, and disposition) should be used to align targets with formats that suit the intent of the target.  By assessing poetry through multiple choice or even through selected response, we have traditionally in English departments, focused on Knowledge.  By shifting toward performance, we guide students to learn poetry as performance, much as Louise Rosenblatt said in her foundational text that a poem is not the words on the page but the moment during which those words are read aloud.  A poem is evoked, not analyzed or simply contained by the words on the page.  By examining poetry in this kind of matrix, not simply hinging on Knowledge targets, students can show successful mastery in a range of ways.  I would also argue that the skill of presenting in front of a group and mastering the stage fright involved is more directly transferable to the job market than is knowledge of e.e. cummings (I regret to say!).

Where is it, then, that a teacher can evoke a "poem" writ large?  In what ways is our work in the classroom a song of sorts, the dance moves and the chorus to the song an attractive sing along for the students?  I realize that this metaphor seems dopey or even a bit strained, but could we nudge our view of curriculum in this direction even a little bit at the secondary level?  I have been expressing voice in my own lesson writing through cc.betterlesson.com.

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