In the world of pandemics and online teaching, teachers welcome any resource they can use to help augment their instruction with clear, effective methods. Poetry On Fire Teacher’s Workshop is such a resource. The host of the video, Sam Pierstorff, has taught a local community college for over two decades and dedicated creating the video to help students overcome their challenges of learning to read and write poetry.
Pierstorff believes that poetry is a powerful vehicle to get students to open up and speak their truths, to share their world views, and to build an unbreakable bond with their peers. His hope is that, through his short video, he can remove some mistaken preconceptions about poetry and break down the barriers to writing effective poetry.
Pierstorff demonstrates two strategies for a writing workshop: The Emotion Card, and the Epistolary Poem, or “Letter Poem.” The first activity focuses on Pierstorff’s three rules of poetry, emphasizing the “show, don’t tell” rule as a hallmark of excellent descriptive writing. Students describe an emotion through a descriptive scene, and the documentary shows helpful sample clips of successful student poems.
In Pierstorff’s second activity, students write a “Letter Poem” to an activity, person, or thing they hate. The “Letter Poem” activity showcases students’ emotional reactions to their own poetry through student examples of poetry, highlighting the success of the second strategy. In addition, the documentary helpfully delineates the steps for each activity, providing clear steps for teachers to follow if they want to implement the activity in their own pedagogy.
Overall, the writing workshop strategies are well informed and well implemented, and the filming is brief but clear. The two activities are used in a college classroom, but they could be adapted to a high school classroom with some minor modifications. While the strategies which Pierstorff employed are effective in his college class, the price tag for the DVD is a significant deterrent to a potential buyer, especially given the short length of the workshop. The video also presumes the viewer has a general background in poetry and does not explain terms in-depth, such as “imagery,” “slam poetry,” and a few other technical terms.
In all, this would be an excellent supplementary resource for a high school teacher or college professor for teaching poetry in a clear and relatable way to students. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P.