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A lot of teachers get the same look - the sigh, the rolling eye, the slump. 'We're going to be doing poetry in the next few classes!' You cringe through it, they cringe through it.

I like to bring poetry into the classroom because I believe that it is important and motivating for students to work with authentic texts.

This is the second of Fitch O'Connell's two articles for the site as Guest Writer. You can find the first article here.

In this session, Imtiaz Dharker reads from collections of her poems. 

Let us be sure about what we are talking about here. This is not an article examining films that have been made from books or their less common cousins, books made from films. That is another story – as it were – altogether. It is more about the relationship between, say, poetry and film – a relationship which is reciprocal.

Using audio with text is the easiest extension from just using text. In its most effective form this consists of a recording being made of someone reading the narrative or poem. The recording might be made by the author, which gives a satisfying degree of authenticity to the project, but, sadly, not all writers are good readers.  Sometimes, therefore, the voice will be that of an actor. Either way, this is a chance to hear a speaker reading aloud a text that the students have studied.

In this plenary session, poet Roger McGough gives a talk and reads some of his poems.

The 'Text and Activities' method is the most common approach to using fiction and poetry in the classroom. It is low tech in that all we really need are words on a page, but that conceals a problem for many teachers. Where can we find appropriate texts and what about issues of copyright and authorial permission? Once we’ve located the texts, and got permission to use them, how can we best exploit them, especially if our students are reluctant readers.