Using Poetry to Refine Students’ Collaboration Skills

Earlier in this school year, we used an assessment built into our Career and Life Readiness curriculum to identify a student-self-assessed goal. The students felt they needed more practice with collaboration skills. Collaboration is a complex skill, involving speaking, listening, cooperation, coordination, patience, and perseverance. Students vary hugely in these capacities, both intrinsically and throughout the day, depending on what else is happening in their lives. In addition, since the pandemic, students have needed additional support with developing emotional intelligence and social communication skills.

To support this, I have collaboration routines built into the learning, which include having “learning partners” in different subjects, so that my students have a chance to work with different peers. These partners are generally at the same skill level, which then allows me to design partnerships for small group work. I have mixed skill-level groups for other work, such as reading comprehension activities around the same texts. But where does poetry come into this?

The Basics of Haiku

Recently, our school librarian invited me to participate in a national student poetry writing competition that could lead to publication in the Young American Poetry Digest. The competition has a special focus on haiku poetry, a form that is easy to do badly and hard to do well. I speak from experience, as a published poet who has written far more haiku than I’ve successfully published. At this point, my guess is you’re thinking about the rule of haiku that it has three lines with a syllable count of 5/7/5. After all, that’s what is taught in schools. However, it’s wrong.

That so-called rule applies to its writing in Japanese. However, Japanese and English syllables do not correlate, so writing haiku in English does not need to always abide by this. Haiku Society of America provides more context on this. More important is the juxtaposition between two different yet complementary images that somehow form a deeper third, overall image. Classic haiku always connected to a season, with key season words, and were laden with Buddhist symbolism. This is not the case for English, though the form remains popular for evoking experiences in nature. For more on haiku, I recommend Robert Hass’s The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa and Jane Hirshfield’s The Heart of Haiku.

Poetry as a Collaboration Tool

Fortunately, we had already looked at some haiku during our morning meeting. I picked out poems that connected to our literacy curriculum, such as Basho’s famous poem about a frog jumping into a pond when we were studying frogs. So the class was familiar with the form. However, writing haiku (and poetry in general) isn’t currently in my curriculum, so I was only able to squeeze a few lessons in.

The key was collaboration, and I developed the following eight-step mode:

1. Working in groups, the students shared ways in which they had collaborated with people in their lives, from any part of school with a teacher or at home with a parent; with a sports coach or a grandparent; with a pet or an inanimate object. I prompted them with verbs such as learned/helped and modeled how I have been both the giver of the help and the receiver of it.
2. Students created a T-chart, which contains two columns, in their books. In the first column, they wrote a series of single sentences that expressed what they had discussed in step one.
3. As they wrote their sentences, I helped them with counting syllables. I made this first sentence be the dominant image of the poem, so I set a maximum limit of 12 syllables. This required plenty of partner teamwork—reading lines aloud and counting out syllables, which is a phonological skill they had learned in our phonics curriculum.
4. Having said that 5/7/5 is not a golden rule, haiku’s form is one of brevity, so it does not exceed 17 syllables. Therefore, I told the students not to go over 17 syllables, and 5/7/5 serves as a helpful guide for students doing this for the first time. Some students significantly underwrote this first line, so for this I encouraged using the full 12-syllable capacity, so that their image was fully described.
5. The hardest part, I thought, would be finding a complementary image for the poem. We collaborated as a class about what nonhuman helpers do in nature: trees reaching for the sunlight, birds feeding their chicks, inspiring stars in the sky.
6. Working in pairs or small groups, students then selected an image that connected with their dominant idea. This was where the magic of collaboration helped. Some students discovered an intuitive ability to do this poetic matching, and they helped others. The second image could only be a maximum of seven syllables long, so this needed practice and editing.
7. The final step was to publish the two lines as the three-line poem, with the dominant first sentence split over lines one and two. The poems were then ready to send off to the publishing competition.
8. Not every student wanted to take their poem to the competition, which was fine. They had improved their collaboration, writing, and phonological awareness skills throughout the process.

The Final Collaboration

At our school, we have a weekly student-led school news video called The Marten News. Our librarian filmed my students reading their haiku, and each week two of them appear in the news. This was to go on until our next school assembly, in which we would award school certificates for the current theme: Collaboration!

Here are a few examples of the student haikus:

My Kindergarten

Teacher taught me to read.

Best win ever.

—Cece

The stars taught me

To shine blindingly bright.

The world is spinning.

—Ruby

I helped Grayson build

stairs in the awesome Minecraft.

Together we rise.

—Benson