Teachers: you can use the ModPo method of collaborative close reading in your classrooms!

Are you a teacher searching for a way of enable full participation of your students in the sometimes daunting work of reading and discussing a poem? It might seem obvious, especially in a post to ModPo’s site, but still: try the ModPo method! Take a poem, mark off 5 or 6 or 7 words, phrases, lines, passages, and then ask members of your class to take responsibility for saying anything, in turn, about the word/phrase/etc. about which they have been asked to comment. Just this morning we heard from a former ModPo student who has been, at the same time, a teacher of English at a Philadelphia high school. She sent us her notes from the (successful) activity of collaboratively interpreting William Carlos Williams’s Depression-era poem about a destitute person he observed one day. Try something like this and send a report on your results to us at modpo[at]writing.upenn.edu. And don’t forget to consult ModPo’s “Teacher Resource Center,” which can be found HERE.