Assessing Students with Poetry Writing Across Content Areas reimagines formative assessment by advocating for a dynamic, poetic approach that delves into students’ meaning-making processes. It is a guide for teachers seeking innovative approaches to formative assessment, promoting a holistic, creative, reflective, and collaborative learning environment. It challenges the limitations of traditional worksheets and quizzes, urging educators to move beyond seeking restrictive answers and embrace students’ texts as pathways to understanding.
The authors put forward poetry as a vigorous tool and writing poetry as an act to foster deep learning across content areas. Practical examples of acrostic poems, haiku, and pantoum demonstrate the adaptability of poetic forms to diverse subjects. Through adaptable lesson plans that can be used across history, math, world languages, ELA, and science, the book encourages intentional poetic writing-to-learn activities and explores how poetry might present itself as a short, creative assessment tool that helps teachers see what their students know and can do while also offering them the space to make new meaning in their original poetry.
This book is a key resource for in-service educators teaching grades 6-12.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 : Humanizing Assessments Foundations and Framework
Sarah J. Donovan
Chapter 2 : Using Visuals and Poetry Writing to Illuminate Student Learning
Anna J. Small Roseboro
Chapter 3 : Poetic Pathways to Comprehension
Sarah J. Donovan
Chapter 4 : Creative Inquiry: The Heart of Learning
Barbara Edler
Chapter 5 : Unlocking Language: Poetry as a Tool for Vocabulary Study
Gayle Sands
Chapter 6 : Summative Assessment: Demonstrating Learning as a Poetry Expo
Kim Johnson
Chapter 7 : Reflecting Back and Moving Forward
Ana J. Small Roseboro and Sarah J. Donovan
