Helming the Ship, Climbing the Staircase: Poetry Research and Information Fluency – 7850

TIPC Ratings

This lesson changes a very traditional approach to a whole-class lesson, and forces students to research and “dig” up answers. This is extremely helpful for sixth grade students who often do want a quick and easy answer.

Students were either placed in groups or allowed to choose their own groups, but for the most part this was not a huge factor in the lesson. I was glad that they were able to work in groups, because they were able to support each other and to discuss the concepts. It definitely helped the students become wholly immersed and engaged in the lesson.

Again, student are engaged in trying to figure out the answer on their own. It was astounding how many of the students first responded to the first question “What is the extended metaphor in O Captain! My Captain!” with “It is his [Walt Whitman’s] father.” Thankfully, I was walking around and facilitating, so I could intervene when I saw these responses. “Remember when I said this was a Research and Information Fluency lesson?” I asked the students. “You are not going to get the correct answer if you just put what you think is the extended metaphor. You need to research the answer.” This was a great poem for this activity, because they really had to research the answer to find out if the extended metaphor was really comparing the captain of the ship to Abraham Lincoln. This lesson did push students into figuring out answers and solutions on their own, so I marked it as moving into the developing stage of critical thinking and problem solving.

There is really very little creativity and innovation…the students are primarily researching.