Ms. Frick's Teaching Portfolio

This above photos are from an activity I conducted during the 11th grade Gothic Literature (aka "American Nightmare") unit. We studied the poem "Daddy" by Emily Dickinson, and the students were then tasked to blindly draw a stanza number from a container and make a stanza analysis poster for it. They labeled poetic devices and drew conclusions about the contribution of those devices to the overall meaning of the stanza. The students were also encouraged to draw a visual representation of the stanza. The activity served as a formative assessment method to evaluate where they were at in terms of understanding and evaluating the importance of poetic devices. 

 

A big-picture conclusion I drew from this lesson is that the analysis and creativity levels of Bloom’s taxonomy work well together, even though they seem very different. The students began creating visuals as soon as they began analyzing the poem and interwove them along the way in the text (such as replacing letters with symbols), which I found interesting because I expected them to completely analyze the stanza before even thinking about creating the visual part. For such a complex poem, the students seem to have grasped it very well overall thanks to the multidimensional nature of this activity.