Need ideas for engaging students to compose poetry? 

Do you remember when magnetic poetry was the craze? You’d visit a friend or relative and they would have magnetic words all over their refrigerator door which would be carefully arranged into poetry based on their feelings across the day or week. I wonder what happened to all those magnetic words?

Thankfully, you can still buy magnetic letter kits or alternatively make your own as well as a range of other options which I’ll outline below. The key consideration should be how we can use such resources in pedagogically sound ways to get students excited about writing poetry whilst also providing appropriate support. The benefit of using magnetic poetry is that it supports students to not only compose their own poetry but also provides the vocabulary which can sometimes be a stumbling block for getting started.

Dave Kapell, created Magnetic Poetry in the 1990s, when experiencing writer's block while trying to...

How do I ensure my online teaching has key elements of effective pedagogy?

After talking to several teachers in recent weeks, I’ve been thinking about how the integrity of existing or designed teaching and learning programs can be maintained and transferred to the online learning environment as we learn to live in lockdowns. Effective teaching will always be effective teaching, but I guess it’s about unpacking elements of effective teaching and then thinking about how adjustments to pedagogy can ensure effective teaching occurs regardless of the mode.

To reflect on what constitutes effective teaching, we have numerous sources that outline what this looks like. In the past 20 years teachers have been given a myriad of tools and frameworks for reflecting on and designing learning. This has included the Quality Teaching Framework in NSW (Department of Education, 2008) and Productive Pedagogies in Queensland (Education Queensland, 2002) in the early-mid 2000s....