Using Poetry: Deepening Conversations

Using Poetry with Each Other

From Teaching with Fire, here’s a description of how using poetry can expand and deepen conversations.

Intermixing poetry into faculty meetings, school discussions, and other forums can enhance and expand the quality and depth of conversations. Judy Mayne Wallis, a language arts administrator from Houston, Texas, includes poetry at the bottom of every meeting agenda she creates. She said, “In my role as a language arts administrator, I often need to soften a message; enlarge a purpose for action; calm, comfort, or encourage colleagues; or use the aesthetic quality of poetry to help myself and others make sense of local or world events.”