Teach a Poetry Writing Workshop for Teenagers

Teach a Poetry Writing Workshop for Teenagers

Teach a Poetry Writing Workshop for Teenagers : Multi-thousand tips to make your life easier.

Teaching a poetry writing workshop for teenagers will unearth a lot of potential poets, because teenagers are at the stage of life when they become an endless source of emotions and experiences. Writing poetry can be a good avenue for teenagers to express their thoughts and feelings about their own journey to adulthood. As their teacher, helping teenagers learn how to write poetry can help them channel their energy properly, and who knows, along the way, you might even find a Frost or a Shakespeare in your class as well!

• Prepare a syllabus. The first thing to do is to create a syllabus, or at least an outline of what the workshop will be like. Formulate objectives and find out what the class's goals will be. At the end of the workshop, your students will have to produce a final output. It can be a class book of poetry, a night of poetry reading in front of an audience, or both. The class should be aware of this right from the start. This will put everyone on the same page.
• Prepare reading resources. Determine which genres you are going to include in your class. There are many, and you can discuss as many as three genres in a session. Provide a good variety to suit the many tastes of teenagers. Don't forget to research particular poets and poems that would represent each genre—the more, the better. Create a reading list that students can peruse during their free time. Provide resources, if not actual copies, to your students. Briefly discuss the poets before the poems. Poets' lives can be fascinating, and their experiences hold the key to their written work. Your students will surely be interested in these bits of information as well.

You can use the flow of workshops suggested below. However, it is always your prerogative to employ the schedule that would best work for your class:

• Discussion. This includes defining the featured genre, identifying the poets and poems representing the genre, and analyzing the forms, structures, and interpretations of the poems. Allow one to two sessions.
• Assignment. Give the students an assignment. They should write a poem that belongs to the genre just discussed in class. Depending on the class schedule, this can be given as homework, or class time can be used for writing. Allow one session.
• Workshop. This is the fun part. Depending on the number of participants in a class, you may employ different ways of featuring your students' work. If it is a small class, you can devote 5-10 minutes per student to critique their work. If it is a large class, you may ask for volunteers, or you may assign several students per genre. Remember to give the class guidelines and to ensure that constructive criticism is followed. Facilitate the discussion, and always end each discussion on a positive note. It would be best if all students are given copies of the featured works during class. Allow one to two sessions.
• Project. About three to four sessions of the workshop should be devoted to finalizing the class project. Guide your students, but let them do the work. They should feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of the workshop.

You can also include talks from resource people, or even attending poetry reading sessions, in the lesson plan.