Teaching poetry – How to inspire young learners

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Teaching poetry in primary school is a delicate balance of nurturing both comprehension and emotional connection. Here, practising writers and teachers Jonny Walker and Matt Goodfellow share their insights on striking that balance while embracing diverse accents and dialects to inspire outstanding writing.

How to get poetry teaching ‘just right’

Poetry teaching is a game of balance between helping children to comprehend and analyse and getting them to feel something, explains poetry teacher Jonny Walker…

As teachers of poetry, we are a bit like Goldilocks. Not because we commit crimes of trespass and theft, but because, just like that flaxen intruder, we are searching for something that feels ‘just right’.  

We want children to understand poetic devices: what they do, and how they do it. On the opposite end, we have the desire for children to feel something through poetry, to use it to know themselves differently, to leave their own mark on the page and to create something meaningful. 

Too much weight on the first side, and children miss that chance to see poetry, language and writing as a place of self-expression, as something alive that can do things for them.

But make the opposite side too heavy, and poetry becomes just the shapeless transcription of whatever thoughts pop into pupils’ heads. 

And then there’s us, bumbling wildly back and forth, trying to maintain the balance. This, friends, is teaching: making sure the porridge is neither too hot nor too cold – getting it ‘just right’. 

Balancing theory and practice 

Theory needs practice, and practice needs theory. Knowing something about poetry and feeling something about poetry are not separate processes. Each feeds the other.  

Imagine two classes of eight-year-olds are learning to ride bikes. 

The teacher of the first class decides the children should learn through theory. Pupils watch videos of people cycling. They learn the names and functions of the handlebars, the gears, the chain, the saddle and the spokes.

A bicycle is brought in for them to look at and draw. This teacher says to the children: “I love cycling and I hope you will too.” 

But once they actually hop onto the saddles, they quickly find themselves on the concrete weeping over their grazed knees. Knowing what handlebars are doesn’t necessarily help you to steer.  

The teacher of the second class thinks the children should learn through practice alone, so off to the top of a hill everyone goes.

Bums are on saddles before a word is spoken; it’s one gentle push and down they go. Nobody knows that that thing near their hands is called ‘the brake’, and so they cannot stop. The children’s legs are a blur as they go faster and faster. 

“Please clap for Karolina and Abdulkarim, who managed to get to the bottom without falling off. Perhaps we can try and do it a bit more like them when we try tomorrow? And please stop crying, you’ve got a plaster now!” 

The same tool would have benefited both these teachers and their unfortunate classes: stabilisers. Pupils would have been able to pedal with abandon, safe in the knowledge that they weren’t about to collapse into a heap on the floor. 

The stabilisers on a writing lesson allow the children to apply what they know, and embrace the beautiful risk of writing. They can maintain their balance, safe in the knowledge that they won’t completely miss the mark. 

What are the stabilisers in poetry teaching? 

Stabilisers in a poetry lesson are whatever conditions you place on the writing. After balancing theory and practice, the next thing is to maintain equilibrium between constraint and freedom.

If we restrict their creative writing too much, we are essentially ‘stabilising’ them into stasis. They’re not falling, but they’re not moving, either. Does this sound familiar? 

“I want you to do your own work, but remember, it needs to rhyme, and make sure you use your best handwriting, and check your spellings and grammar… and I want you to use all those ‘wow words’ we shared, and make sure it stays on topic…” 

If we apply too much constraint to what children write – this is true regardless of genre – then we should not be surprised when they show a lack of care or interest.

We are essentially tricking them into writing exactly what we want them to write, whilst also trying to deceive them into thinking that this is what they wanted to do. 

I’ll never forget the words of a Year 6 child I taught a few years ago. We were celebrating his writing, which was lively and interesting, and had a bit more of a ‘spark’ to it than other children in the class.

I said to him, “Wow, Eesa. That is really brilliant. Do you like writing?” I was asking this hoping to co-opt him to be my ally in the We Love Writing parade. He replied, “I really like writing, but I hate having to do it the way you all make us do it.” 

Excessive constraints

Ask an honest question, you get an honest reply. Speaking to him more about it, this was a child who wrote for fun, for meaning, for self-care, in his own time.

For him, the excessive constraints and limitations of ‘schooled writing’, were an intense frustration. 

But here is something interesting: most children, in my modest experience, prefer too much control to too much freedom.

If children feel as though they are floating in the uncertainty of our expectations, not sure in even a small sense of what they are being invited to do, they experience a real sense of fear. 

Put yourself in their shoes: imagine you come along to one of my workshops, and I share a poem with you: let’s say Ted Hughes’ poem Hawk Roosting.

I read it aloud for you, we chat about it for five minutes, and then I say, “OK, now it’s your turn. Write a poem inspired by it. I’ll be asking four of you at random to get up and share your poems to the class in 20 minutes before breaktime. Let’s go, poets! Crack on!” 

It’s too much freedom.  

Children and adults alike want to know the parameters. They are stabilisers that help those of us who need to rely on them, but do not inconvenience those of us who are confident and skilled enough to race ahead. 

Freedom liberates, but so can constraint. 

Four tips for teaching poetry 

Balance freedom and constraint 

If you limit one aspect of pupils’ writing, liberate another. So, if you’re focusing on their ability to use rhyming couplets (limiting the form), let them write about a topic that interests them (liberating the content).

If you want to task children with writing meaningful poetry about emotions (limiting the content), allow them to write poetry in whichever forms most appeal (liberating the form). 

Talk is comprehension, talk is writing 

The poetry classroom should be a place of free-flowing discussion. Poetry is about interpretation – what you take from a poem may be different from what I take from it. Let’s talk about that.

Poetry is social – expecting something great to grow in silence is like expecting a houseplant to grow without sunlight. Talk nourishes thought. 

The figure of eight 

Often, our poetry teaching follows a linear path. We read, then we write, then we perform. Interrupt that: instead of a straight line, think of there being a figure of eight weaving around reading, writing and talking. Performing it aloud might help a child to edit their writing, for example. 

Be a poet with them 

Don’t just whack a model text on the whiteboard. Write alongside the children, as a writer. Join them in the joys, pleasures, frustrations and challenges that poetry writing can engender. 

Jonny Walker is a children’s writer and specialist teacher of poetry, mythology and creative writing, working in primary schools worldwide. He created the teaching notes for 12 new Big Cat Poetry books with Collins. 

Embracing diverse accents when teaching poetry

Poetry ain’t half fun, and celebrating diverse accents and dialects is one of its pure joys, allowing pupils to produce some truly mint writing, says poet and former teacher Matt Goodfellow…

I was a full-time class teacher for eight years. Back in those days, before I left teaching to embark on my current career as a poet, I worked in a deprived one-form entry school in East Manchester.

The children I taught were bright, sparky and often streetwise kids, who used their natural northern dialect to express themselves. Like every other teacher in the country, though, I was under pressure from Ofsted to model and expect the use of standard spoken English in the classroom.

The children I taught would ask: “Mr Goodfellow, can I go toilet?”, or in answer to a question about what they’d done over the weekend, might respond: “I went town with me dad.” I, of course, was obligated to correct them: “I think you mean, ‘Can I go to the toilet?’, and ‘‘I went to town with my dad.’” 

Early on in my first year as a teacher, a lad in my class asked me a question that stopped me in my tracks: “Mr Goodfellow, how come you tell me it’s wrong to say, ‘Can I go toilet?’ when my dad says it, and my grandad says it?”

I got what he meant immediately. The way we talk is part of our cultural heritage. It’s full of the musicality and nuance of our history and experience of life. So why aren’t we allowed to fully embrace and celebrate this our diverse accents and dialects?

Talk proper

Well, like a lot of things, the notion of a ‘proper’ way to speak stems from the British Empire. The ruling upper-middle classes of a few hundred years ago decided that the way they spoke English was the only way to speak it. And anyone who didn’t speak English the ‘proper’ way was somehow inferior and uneducated.

And here we are in 2023, hundreds of years later, in a beautifully culturally diverse UK, with our classroom practice still dominated by a set of language rules designed to repress the incredibly varied and beautiful range of accents and dialects spoken throughout the country.  

As long as Ofsted expects standard spoken English (SSE) to be demonstrated by teachers across the UK, it seems teachers’ hands are tied.

But are they, really?  

I believe that even within the constraints of outdated language expectations in the current education system, there is a space for children and young people to fully explore their own voice: and that space is poetry.  

Teaching poetry

I call poetry ‘rebel writing’ when working in schools. It’s a space free from the linguistic and grammatical constraints piled on both teachers and children. Rebels don’t follow rules.

When reading and writing poetry, children can express themselves in their own voice and talk about their life. And this voice has a power; to carry the music and language of their own cultural heritage – to validate their life, their words, their thoughts, feelings and ideas.  

So how can we get this free space up and running in the classroom? The answer is incredibly simple: teach poetry on a daily basis.

Read a poem a day, or watch videos of poets reading their work aloud and talking about why poetry matters. Free resources like The Children’s Poetry Archive (childrens.poetryarchive.org) and the CLPE’s bank of over 500 videos of an incredibly diverse range of poets reading poems and discussing poetry (clpe.org.uk/poetry/videos) can be beamed into the classroom easily.

What does this do? Quite simply, it lets children, young people and adults see that poets come from all sorts of backgrounds – with different accents and skin colours. They revel in using their own voice to express themselves.

Simply by exposing children and young people to a wide range of poets and poems, a teacher can start the process of subverting the idea of a generic standard spoken English. In turn, this allows pupils’ cultural heritage to shine through and be celebrated. 

Take, for example, the work of poets like Val Bloom, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Benjamin Zephaniah. Why not discuss how poets can push language around like playdough to change the spelling of words so the reader is forced to speak in the poet’s own accent and dialect?

This can tie into lessons on phoneme/grapheme correspondences, too. It’s incredibly empowering for children to explore, for instance, in Zephaniah’s beautiful poem ‘I Luv Me Mudder’, why he chooses to write:  

I luv me mudder an me mudder luvs me  

We cum so far from over de sea 

Public ownership 

I think it’s important for children, young people and adults to understand that nobody owns language. This is why, when I’m working in schools across the UK, I encourage children and young people to write in the voice they think in, the voice they use with their mates and parents.

Because this is their real voice – and it has power. I often talk about the fact that as a child growing up in Manchester, my mates and I would never say: ‘magnificent’ or ‘wonderful’. We’d say things like ‘proper good’ or ‘mint’. Whereas my mum, who was born and grew up in Sheffield, would say: ‘reyt good’. One of my best mates, who grew up in Liverpool would say ‘boss’.

Teaching poetry is the perfect way to revel in these kinds of phrases. And to celebrate the amazing differences that make the UK such an interesting tapestry of language.  

So, next time you’re teaching poetry in class and writing your own verses, encourage your children to discuss the way they speak outside of school. Gather together words and phrases that show who they are and where they’re from to include in their compositions.  

Let the beautiful voices of your community find a place at the centre of your curriculum. You won’t regret it. It’ll be mint. 

Four steps to embracing diverse accents and dialects

• Allow space for pupils to hear poetry on a daily basis. Each teacher needs to have a range of poetry collections on their desk to run alongside the class reader; this will open up the conversation that poetry does an infinite amount of things outside of telling a story.  
• Use resources like the videos on the poetry section of the CLPE website, and the Children’s Poetry Archive, to expose pupils to a range of poets. Let the children hear and see that poets come from all around the world and speak in their own accents.  
• If possible, I would avoid teaching poetry around topics. My advice would be to use the PSHE curriculum to allow children to talk about their own thoughts, feelings and ideas, instead. 
• Find poems that have a strong pattern to them. Perform the poem, have fun with it, get drama in. Then use a shared writing session to show how children can borrow the pattern of the starting-point poem. Finally, smash that pattern to create something new.  

Matt Goodfellow is a poet and former primary teacher. His first middle-grade verse novel, The Final Year (Otter Barry Books), is out now.