Assessing Students with Poetry Writing Across Content Areas: Humanizing Formative Assessment for Grades 6-12 [Hardcover]

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.

'Each subject in school is built upon words that bring forth meaning to students and our communities. At the center is vocabulary  language used to make communication possible. Assessing Students with Poetry Writing Across Content Areas promotes the power of language in poetic forms to formatively and summatively assess content knowledge within the classroom. Through mentor texts and models across a variety of poetic genres (acrostics, pantoums, free-verse, sevenlings, hy(na)kus, etc.), Donovan and her team demonstrate that poetry encourages young people to think, to rationalize, and to reason. Each chapter honors student voicelsÁ