Margo DelliCarpini, Editor
Success with ELLs
Make Room for Our
Voices: Using Poetry
in Professional
Development for
Secondary ESL and
ELA Teachers
Amanda Nicole Gulla
Lehman College
The Bronx, New York
amanda.gulla@lehman.cuny.edu
It was the spring of 2001, on a
professional development day in
a large high school in lower Man-
hattan. As in most of the schools
in that neighborhood, many stu-
dents were En­glish language
learners representing such diverse
linguistic communities such as
the Spanish and French-speaking
Caribbean, Africa, China, and
Eastern Europe. As the district’s
literacy staff developer, the prin-
cipal had asked me to design a
workshop for ELA and ESL teach-
ers on addressing new ESL regula-
tions that were soon to be “coming
down the pike.”
Without wanting to directly
point out to the principal how
dismal the response to such work-
shops tended to be, I suggested
that we use this time offering pro-
fessional development that might
inspire teachers to try new prac-
tices that could help their students
grow as writers. So it was that
we decided to devote a workshop
92 En­g lish Journal 101.3 (2012): 92–94
Copyright © 2012 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
EJ_Jan2012_C.indd 92
not to rules and regulations, but
to poetry. Some of these teach-
ers had described how their own
experiences of poetry centered on
analyzing texts to find the “right”
answers. Given the opportunity,
though, I knew that an expe-
rience of reading and writing
poetry could be made accessible
to this group, and that this might
entice them to experiment with a
genre that so many teachers and
students—especially those who
struggle as readers and writers—
tend to be fearful of approaching.
I did not want this to be a work-
shop in which teachers did a clever
activity and walked away happy
to have been amused, however.
Willis D. Hawley and Linda Valli
describe staff development work-
shops in which “experts ‘exposed’
teachers to new ideas or ‘trained’
them in new practices” (134).
The last thing I wanted to do was
to “expose” teachers to poetry in
some superficial way. My goal for
this workshop was to demystify
poetry so that these teachers might
see it as a vehicle to get their ELL
students to express themselves
while experimenting with playful
ways of using language.
A Poetry Workshop
for Teachers
On the morning of the profes-
sional development workshop, the
library tables slowly filled with
ninth- through twelfth-grade
En­glish and ESL teachers. I had
been working alongside some of
the newer teachers, but this was
the first time I’d stood before such
a large group in this school. There
were some teachers in the room
with decades of experience, and I
was hoping to show all of them
something they might find new
and refreshing that they might be
willing to try on their own.
I began by showing them how
to make a magnetic poetry kit
using index cards and adhesive-
backed magnetic tape. By assign-
ing each table a different part of
speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives,
prepositions, pronouns, and arti-
cles) and each part of speech a
different color, we created a tool
they could use to teach their stu-
dents the structure of En­glish
syntax. The teachers responded
enthusiastically, combining their
words into sentences that read like
lines of poetry on the magnetic
chalkboard.
Already, I could tell this pro-
fessional development day was
going to be different. No one
grumbled or sat in the back read-
ing the newspaper. Everyone was
engaged. One teacher commented
on the potential for this playful,
hands-on activity to give her stu-
dents a sense of ownership as they
learned sentence structure and
built vocabulary.
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