A standard poetry selection for GCSE, IGCSE, A Level or IB exams can be anywhere from ten to thirty poems. I often see teachers working through these in the order listed by the exam board, or occasionally from their least favourite to their top choice so that they can get the rubbish ones out of the way first.
If you group your poems thematically, it’s much easier for students to make links between the big ideas and concepts – even if they’ll never have to compare two poems on an exam. As a starting point, I always read through all the poems in the collection and make some brief initial notes (a full analysis of each poem would be ideal, but an overview is a good starting point if you don’t immediately have the time). You’re looking for common threads, even in a collection based around a theme. In a classic conflict poetry unit, you might start to divide poems by their eras, or you might consider the focus of each poem instead: soldiers, victims, politics, weaponry, the natural world, death, etc.
For example, here’s my very brief overview and tracker for the Cambridge IGCSE Songs of Ourselves collection. I know that this is going to look painfully boring for those of you who prefer big graphic concept maps – and by all means go in that direction instead / as well if it suits you! I just find a table easiest to manage.
Why bother? Well, I find it helps especially when students are tackling the writer’s big ideas or messages – AO2 for the Cambridge IGCSE. Looking at poems such as ‘Funeral Blues’ and ‘From Long Distance’, students’ early AO2 points are often narratively obvious: the speaker is sad because someone has died. When you push students to compare two poems on a similar theme, however, their analysis immediately becomes more astute. Here’s a simple example of a table (yes, I do need to branch out into other graphic organisers) that I’ve used to prompt questioning, revealing one box at a time after giving students some time to think and talk through points of comparison.
In the same way that comparative judgement is a much easier way to mark work than just assigning it a score, it’s much easier for students to tease out and express the big ideas in a poem if they’re comparing it to something similar. This also paves the way for big discussions and plenaries that students can get their teeth into. For the poems above, for example: is there a right or a wrong way to mourn?
It’s very easy to make your own planning template for a thematically-grouped poetry unit. If you’d like to adapt my table-heavy version, it’s linked below.
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