Super Sonnet World

I was faced with a dilemma that many teachers can relate to: staring at stale materials that didn't work last year. This time, though, I had the time (and emotional energy) to fix it. This time it was Sonnets, and I had an idea.

In my Creative Writing classes, I can pretty much teach whatever I want. I don't consider myself a poet, but of course I'm going to teach poetry and I'm going to teach the most famous poetic form in the English language. Also, the district exam asks them to be able to identify the difference between sonnet rhyme schemes.

My approach that I've used for years is antithetical to my whole ethos as an educator. I was just showing them examples on PowerPoint slides while I lectured and they took notes. Predictably, the results weren't great. Students were not walking away knowing much about sonnets, despite threats of quizzes (also something I do very rarely and a clear symptom of ineffective teaching), and they certainly weren't appreciating the form, much less capable of writing sonnets of any quality.

My idea for rectifying this: decenter the classroom. There's a lot of stuff out there about decentering the math classroom and a lot of creative folks doing more to translate those methodologies into other academic settings. Here's my contribution to that effort. I call it Super Sonnet World.

Inspired by video games, the need to differentiate and let students work at their own pace, and the fact that I'd be okay with some students walking away with a basic understanding of sonnets, while others get more advanced, and others still look closely at iambic pentameter, I broke sonnet understanding into 4 levels.

• Level 1: a sonnet is 14 lines
• Level 2: a sonnet has a volta
• Level 3: most sonnets have a rhyme scheme and classically those rhyme schemes are either English or Italian (I see you Spencer, but this is a HS class, not a 3000-level British Lit seminar)
• Level 4: many sonnets are written in iambic pentameter

I made each of these levels into a worksheet. All groups started at level 1. When they were done, they came up to me. I checked it and gave them the next level or sent them back to try that level again. This method was TOTALLY student drive. I sat at my desk like the great and powerful judge of all things poetry. I gamified it by giving them 3 hearts (like in a video game) and that was how many times they could ask me for help. I had some students beat all four levels and make it to "the boss" (a sonnet to mark-up and analyze) and others just barely got past Level 2. That's fine. They achieved according to their ability.

The next day, they wrote their own sonnets and identified what level of sonnet they had written. It was easy, fun, and engaging. If you'd like the lesson materials, which I beautified with a Mario-theme, they are on Teachers-Pay-Teachers here. It includes 5 worksheets (both simple b/w version and full color video game aesthetic version) + PowerPoint instructions and an answer key.

I'm quite proud of it. Enjoy!