Margin Notes

“’Every day do something that won’t compute’: Student perceptions of a daily poetry practice” by Megan Davis (The Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 2023)

“Grounded in the central question, what happens to student perceptions of poetry when class begins each day with a poem?, this study wonders about the student experience on the other end of a teacher’s (my own) attempt to diverge from a sterilized literary atmosphere seemingly antithetical to enjoyment or appreciation…As a granular and personal look at student experiences with a daily poetry ritual, this study aims to invite its readers to consider the ways in which more expansive and regular encounters with poetry might be a worthwhile possibility for the literacy classroom.”

Summary

In this article, Megan Davis describes how her experiences with a daily poetry ritual as a high school student led her to adopt a poem of the day (POTD) practice as an ELA teacher. When she became a doctoral student at Columbia University, Davis decided to revisit the practice as a researcher:

Simply, I wanted to know how this poetry practice differed from traditional, analytical approaches to poetry and what it meant—if anything—for my students. I was curious how students experienced what I presumed was a significant lacuna of response-based pedagogies within contemporary secondary English Language Arts classrooms, fettered by the kind of literary engagement endemic to and aggrandized by the mechanized, impersonal environment of high-stakes testing and standardization. Was tasking students with doing something other than analysis with a poem as counter-cultural as I thought it would be? What is the effect of daily exposure to poetry in this way? Was it powerful? Did they just zone out?

Davis’ research into POTD as a pedagogical practice includes a literature review, interviews with three former students, and considerations for classroom practice.

Her review of research revealed specific disconnects related to poetry instruction. First, teachers believe that poetry holds an important place in ELA instruction but often do not feel they have adequate knowledge and skill to teach it. Second, teachers’ expressions of personal enjoyment of poetry contrasts with their avoidance or dislike of it in the classroom. Third, teachers express student engagement with and enjoyment of poetry as their goal for instruction, yet they feel this is often overshadowed by traditional poetry practices such as writing detailed analyses.

To explore the impact of a daily poetry ritual, Davis conducted two interviews with three former students. The first round of interviews focused on their experiences with POTD and poetry perceptions throughout their K-12 education. The second round inquired about the participants’ “present-tense poetry engagement” to ascertain the lasting effects of POTD. Davis compiled the qualitative data from the interviews into three categories: history and prior perceptions of poetry, poem of the day, and current poetry perceptions.

Takeaways For the Classroom

• The interviews revealed “pervasive misconceptions about poetry: that it is a teacher’s vehicle to teach literary devices, that it is old and boring, that it must rhyme, that it is for highly uncomfortable levels of self-disclosure, and that is rigid and restrictive insomuch that it impedes creative freedom.” These misconceptions were shaped by the participants’ school encounters with poetry prior to POTD.
• After POTD, all three participants described a “pattern of rewriting their prior judgements as a result or repeated aesthetic transactions with poetry: poetry is not as weird, inflexible, dull, emotional, scary, gimmicky, or nonacademic as they had once thought.”
• In every interview, participants remarked that, because of POTD, they found poems they could relate to. Offering a wide range of poetry in terms of form, poet, era, topic, theme, and style is “a way to provide a host of landing points.”
• Participants’ stories revealed the “potential a non-analytic reading practice has to reshape student perceptions of poetry, reorient them to freedom of expression in poetic language, and invite them into new ways of seeing and engaging in their lives with heightened poetic awareness.”

Conclusion

“Though reading students a poem each day to start class will not solve all resistance to poetry, I am convinced that it opens up an invitation for authentic, wide-ranging, and consistent experiences with poetry for student and teacher. Students are not often afforded the opportunity to enjoy a piece of literature, to spend time with it as human beings, before they are asked to do something ‘school’ with it.”

“The Relationship Between Situated Reading Motivation and Perception of the Learning Environment for Adolescent Students” by Travis VanderVelden and Xornam Apedoe (The Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 2025)

“Reading motivation is defined in this study according to the consensus definitions put forward by Conradi et al. (2014) as ‘the drive to read resulting from a comprehensive set of an individual’s beliefs and attitudes toward, and goals for reading’ (p.154). Motivation to read has been shown to be an important predictor of reading performance and growth and there have been a variety of motivational interventions, specifically targeting reading motivation for adolescent students (McBreen and Savage 2021; Toste et al. 2020).”

Summary

In this article, VanderVelden and Apedoe make the link between reading achievement and motivation while encouraging a more contextualized and dynamic view of reading motivation. Because they consider motivation to be a function of the discipline and/or classroom where the reading event occurs, their research focuses on context-specific reading motivation. For this study, they define the learning environment as “everything from the physical layout of the classroom to the social-emotional components, such as teaching and learning practices, relationships between teachers and students, and the goals and values of the class.”

The authors acknowledge, however, that although the classroom environment provides important contexts for learning, adolescent readers bring with them unique identities, backgrounds, and reading habits that impact their reading habits and experiences. In their view, reading motivation is a characteristic of the reader and is acted upon by the text and context.

Two research questions guided their study:

1. To what extent does reading motivation vary across content areas?
2. To what extent does student perception of aspects of the learning environment influence situated reading motivation within different content areas?

They surveyed a sample of 1939 students at a large urban high school across four content areas: English, Social Science, Science, and Math. Motivation was measured by reading curiosity and reading involvement, and students’ perception of the learning environment was measured by student cohesiveness, teacher support, involvement, and investigation.

The results revealed clear differences between content areas and reading motivation. The authors theorize that this variation in motivation may stem from the different types of texts and purposes for reading students experience across subjects. They also revealed that the most impactful aspect of learning environment on motivation is investigation. The more perceived emphasis on problem-solving and inquiry, the more students felt individually motivated to read.

Takeaways For the Classroom

The results of this study reveal a direct relationship between classroom environment and motivation that has implications for classroom practice:

• Frame texts as tools for solving problems or answering compelling questions.
• Replace or supplement textbook reading with current authentic text from the discipline.
• Develop text sets around thematic inquiries.
• Integrate reading into authentic problem-solving scenarios by incorporating data infographics.

Conclusion

“The present findings show that in all content areas students are more motivated to read in a class when they perceive that the learning environment places more of an emphasis on investigation. This indicates that reading motivation is less affected by teachers and more significantly impacted by the nature of the class and the activities.

As students move into secondary education, reading becomes a crucial skill to succeed in most subjects, and simultaneously more nuanced and difficult to master. For many students who are unprepared to meet those reading demands, motivation is key to ensuring that they remain engaged.”

“A Closer Look at Close Reading: Three Under-the-Radar Skills Needed to Comprehend Sentences” by Heidi Anne Mesmer and M.M. Rose-McCully (The Reading Teacher, 2017)

“Close reading requires unpacking the implicit relationships within and across sentences. However, beyond the close-reading rage, students need to understand the ways writers cleverly use structures to add interest, description, and parsimony to their writing.”

Summary

In this article, Mesmer and Rose-McCully, highlight the impact of sentence-level comprehension on overall reading comprehension. They focus on three specific sentence constructions that can be taught explicitly to support students’ understanding of text.

1. Anaphora is when one word or group of words replaces another within a sentence or across sentences. Pronouns are the simplest kinds of anaphoric relationships. The word(s) being replaced in anaphoric relationships are called antecedents because they come before the replacing words. Authors use anaphora for description, variety, and parsimony in their writing.
2. Connectives explicitly link one clause to another (for example and, but, that, and which) or connect two adjacent sentences (such as however or thus). Because different connectives suggest different relationships, they signal to the reader that they must make a text-based inference.
3. Appositives are nouns, noun phrases, or noun clauses that are set off by commas and immediately follows a noun. An appositive renames the noun and provides more information about it.

Takeaways For the Classroom

The authors provide a variety of practical strategies for explicitly teaching and practicing each structure:

Anaphora

• Model and practice using highlighters to identify pronoun replacements and colour-code their relationships.
• Create Mad-Lib style games for students to fill in nouns or pronouns.
• Provide students with sentences containing pronoun replacements and have them work in small groups to creative descriptive noun replacements for the pronouns while maintaining the anaphoric relationships.

Connectives

• Create cloze activities by giving students a portion of text they will be reading with the connectives removed. Ask them to select connectives from a bank of options based on the context of the sentence.
• Provide students with sentence parts and have them work in partnerships to join them with connectives.
• Practice sentence combining by having students use connectives to combine shorter sentences into a longer complex sentence.

Appositives

• Provide students with sentences containing lengthy or multiple appositives. Ask them to cross out the appositives and see if they can make meaning from the sentence without it.
• Invite students to create a list of nouns they can use to describe themselves and then write a descriptive paragraph using appositive phrases.
• Create appositive poetry by asking students to pick an object and write a four-line poem about it using appositive phrases.

Conclusion

“…we have come to see connectives, appositives, and anaphora as being crucial to sophisticated reading and writing in the upper grades and beyond…students must use these structures in their own writing, transfer their knowledge to authentic materials, and begin to spot the clever ways that writers use these tools.”

“Explicitly Teaching Listening in the ELA Curriculum: Why and How” (The English Journal, 2020)

“We may assume that listening comes naturally from the process of learning other things. However, research suggests that ‘the better one can listen, the more educated one can become, and the more educated one becomes, the better one can listen…Listening leads to education and education leads to listening’ (Rice and Burbules 2740). Unfortunately, we have not focused enough attention on listening as a distinct skill to be taught, learned, practiced, and assessed (Parker 2816). This skill develops and grows more complex as our thinking and learning become more complex—that is, we do not stop developing as listeners just as we never stop growing as writers and readers. Instruction must be ongoing and develop more complexity as students’ skills in this area increase.”

Summary

According to the author, “listening is the foundation of the other language arts and is fundamental to all learning” and is directly linked to reading comprehension and overall school success. As such, we should be explicitly teaching listening in the ELA classroom.

Alford identifies three realities that have led to a diminished focus on listening as part of the ELA curriculum:

• Teaching the act of listening has been an ignored area of research.
• ELA standards prioritize reading and writing.
• These is a lack of resources available to support teaching listening.

Good listeners demonstrate three essential skills that we can teach, model, and practice as part of our ELA curriculum:

1. They can summarize what they have heard and identify the most relevant information.
2. They connect what they have heard to themselves, their prior learning, and other texts.
3. They are able to visualize, which deepens their listening in a multimodal way.

Takeaways For the Classroom

There are several ways teachers can embed active listening and build communities that values listening:

• Teach, assign, assess, and provide feedback on listening explicitly.
• Make listening an active process.
• Use wait time.
• Avoid restating what your students say, which reduces their responsibility to listen to one another.
• Encourage students to respond to one another’s ideas.
• Establish listening guidelines early in the year and practice them frequently.
• Model good listening.
• Teach notetaking.
• Create more opportunities for group and partner work.
• Invite students to talk about what they see effective listeners doing.
• Provide models for what positive discussions look like.
• Check for understanding by asking students to rephrase what you have said.

Conclusion

“Listening is a skill to be explicitly taught, practiced, and assessed. It is a political act that, if done well, can foster a sense of agency in our students. When they know how to listen well, they can engage more richly in public debate, and it builds a conscious awareness of all they hear and see in our world. We have focused too narrowly on giving voice to our students, and we have forgotten to provide them with a listening ear.”

It’s not just about skills: Adopting a motivation-informed approach to instruction with adolescents by Kristin Conradi Smith, Bong Gee Jang, and Tori J. Ostot (Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2024)

“Motivation, literally rooted in the Latin word “movere” has to do with what moves us to do something. When we talk about reading motivation, thus, we’re really considering what compels or inclines a student to participate (or not participate) in the reading activity or task. Though some research suggests that adolescents can be profiled as being highly motivated, ambivalent, or having low motivation (Syal et al., 2024), other research suggests the relationship is less clear and more context dependent (Retelsdorf et al., 2024). In fact, it is important to consider the dynamic and context-dependent nature of motivation, rather than relying solely on static categories that might inadvertently lead to deficit-oriented perceptions of students.”

Summary

While motivation-informed approaches benefit all students, the authors center this article on recent research with a particular focus on adolescents who have had struggles with reading and on students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds who have often been ignored in research. This research confirms that students who have struggled with reading tend to avoid reading and perceive it as too difficult. These perspectives are considered “undermining motivation.”

Situated expectancy value theory (SEVT) suggests that students are motivated by whether they expect to be successful with a task or activity and whether they value it. Situational aspects of reading motivation include the purpose for reading, reading locations, text genres, and text topics.

A variety of factors have been identified as fostering adolescent readers’ motivation; however, two aspects matter most when designing and delivering instruction and interventions for adolescents:

1. Interest and Relevance

• In a meta-analysis of over 39 motivation-related interventions, interest played the most important role in improving students’ intrinsic motivation and achievement.
• When students are given choice in reading materials and those materials align with their interests and cultural backgrounds, they are more likely to engage with the text, resulting in higher comprehension and retention.
• Students see the relevance of what they are reading when teachers select texts that reflect relatable topics and themes.
• This is especially important for students who have been marginalized by conventional educational practices—the lack of culturally relevant texts leads to diminished engagement in reading and writing.

2. Self-beliefs

• Students’ self-efficacy (their estimation of whether they can complete a task) and their perceptions of difficulty (whether they believe the task at hand will be too difficult for them) play a substantial role in motivation.
• Teachers can address students’ self-beliefs by:
  • ensuring students feel confident they can access text
  • incorporating goal-setting strategies so students know expectations
  • providing positive and specific feedback

Takeaways For the Classroom

The authors identify four key principles for teachers to keep in mind when working with adolescent learners:

1. Adopt an assets-based approach to classwork and assignments.

• An assets-based approach means recognizing and valuing students’ diverse identities and funds of knowledge.
• Teachers should make it a priority to recognize students’ strengths and potentials and design classroom activities and assignments to create opportunities for success and confidence-building.
• Emphasizing the importance of developing and applying their strengths fosters a growth mindset in students, which increases engagement, perseverance, and academic achievement.
• In an intervention setting, rather than starting the lesson with a focus on what students don’t know, approach it instead by highlighting previous skills mastered and connect what students already know to the new learning.

2. Acknowledge the role of self-efficacy.

• Self-efficacy is a student’s judgement about whether they will be successful with a given task. This expectancy is a major factor in students’ motivation.
• Breaking assignments into concrete steps and providing actionable directions means that students can experience small successes along the way.
• This is further supported by providing growth-oriented and specific feedback.

3. Ground learning in meaningful texts and tasks.

• Organizing text sets around themes or issues that are important to readers encourages them to make text-to-text and text-to-self connections, which increases engagement.
• Incorporating an element of choice related to the tasks students will participate in during and after reading allows students to select tasks that are meaningful or interesting to them.

4. Capitalize on opportunities for language use.

• Relationships influence students’ motivation for engaging with reading.
• Adolescents in particular are motivated when they work with each other.
• Participation in book clubs has been shown to increase engagement and reading comprehension.

Conclusion

“As we consider working with adolescents who still need work on foundational skills, we would do them a particular disservice if we ignored the key roles that motivation will play in facilitating that learning.”