Analysing a poem, taught nine ways.

Year 8 have spent two lessons on Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet 'Ozymandias', first published in 1818, and today they write about it alone. The question on the board is: how does Shelley present power in the poem? Each student opens their own Google Doc on a school account and writes three paragraphs: one on the sculpted face with its 'sneer of cold command', one on the boast carved on the pedestal, and one on the ending, where 'The lone and level sands stretch far away'. Every paragraph follows the department's 'what, how, why' pattern: what Shelley shows, how a quoted word or technique shows it, and why that matters for a king who expected to be remembered. Students write in silence for thirty-five minutes with their annotated copy of the poem beside them.

The department set this response in Microsoft Word until the school moved to Google Workspace. The teacher marks it after the lesson against the same success criteria, and opens the next lesson by reading out two strong paragraphs with the writers' agreement.

Tools: Google Docs Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

At the end of the unit, over two lessons, each Year 8 pair takes one of four poems they have studied: Blake's 'A Poison Tree', Tennyson's 'The Eagle', Rossetti's 'Remember' or Shelley's 'Ozymandias'. In Book Creator, in the teacher's class library, each pair builds a two-page spread. The left page holds the poem and a recording of the pair reading it aloud; the right page holds a commentary of about 150 words on three choices the poet made and the effect of each. Pairs decide first what tone the reading needs, such as whether the king's boast in 'Ozymandias' should sound proud or hollow, then record, listen back and record again until the voice matches what the commentary claims. No spread shows a face or a full name.

The teacher checks each spread and combines them into one class book, which the three other Year 8 teachers play to their classes as revision before the end-of-unit assessment. The pairs' own class hears two readings of the same poem side by side and discusses how the different voices change its meaning.

Tools: Book Creator Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Over three lessons across two weeks, Year 8 write for readers who answer back. A Year 7 class at a partner school in another town has read Emily Dickinson's 'Hope is the thing with feathers' without any teaching, and has posted what puzzles them on a Padlet board run by the two teachers, open only to the two classes' school logins, with first names only, comments switched off and every post approved before it appears. There are eleven questions, among them why hope is a bird and not a light, how a tune can have no words ('And sings the tune without the words'), and what the storm stands for. Each Year 8 pair takes one question and posts an answer of about 120 words that quotes the poem and explains one technique. Before the next lesson Year 7 reply with a post of their own in the same column as the answer, saying which sentence lost them and what they still want to know, and some disagree with the reading itself.

Pairs rewrite and repost, Year 7 respond once more, and pairs post a final version. Each Year 8 student then writes in their book what the replies made them change, and what that taught them about explaining a metaphor.

Tools: Padlet Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 know that a sonnet has fourteen lines, and this lesson shows them how one is built. Each pair opens its own FigJam board from the teacher's link, on school accounts. On it are the fourteen lines of Christina Rossetti's 'Remember' as grey sticky notes in a jumbled heap, with the first line, 'Remember me when I am gone away', locked in place at the top. Pairs first recolour each note by the sound its last word ends on, so that 'away', 'stay', 'day' and 'pray' all turn yellow, and find they need five colours. Told that the first eight lines rhyme ABBA ABBA, they use the colours to rebuild them, then argue over the last six, where the pattern stops helping and they have to follow the sense. The teacher circulates, asks pairs to read a doubtful join aloud, and then shows Rossetti's order on the board.

Pairs mark the line where the poem turns, 'Yet if you should forget me for a while', and each student writes in their book what the speaker asks for before that line and what she asks for after it.

Tools: FigJam Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 have read Tennyson's six-line poem 'The Eagle' and can name its techniques, but their comments on effect all sound alike. The teacher opens one Microsoft Whiteboard board for the whole class on school accounts, with the poem in large type in the middle, and pairs join it on their devices. Each pair adds a sticky note beside one of four words, 'crooked', 'wrinkled', 'crawls' or 'thunderbolt', saying what the word makes them picture. Within five minutes fifteen notes are on the board for everyone to read. The teacher takes the notes on the line 'The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls' and drags them into clusters as the class watches: the sea is slow, the sea is tiny and far below, the sea is old, the sea is a living creature. The class decides which readings fit together and which two pull against each other, and each pair adds a second note under a reading it disagrees with, giving a reason from the poem.

Students then write a 'what, how, why' paragraph in their books on 'crawls' that uses one reading from the board that was not their own.

Tools: Microsoft Whiteboard Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 have studied William Blake's 'The Tyger' and read in the anthology's notes that Songs of Experience is the darker partner of Songs of Innocence. Today they put that to both books. The teacher has pasted every line of the two books, more than forty poems, into a Google Sheet, one row per line, with columns for book, poem and line, and a search cell that counts the lines containing whatever is typed into it, book by book, and lists them (the teacher has checked that it treats a question mark as a question mark). Each pair opens its own copy. Is 'The Tyger' unusual in being built from questions? Pairs search for the question mark and find a rival in Innocence, 'On Another's Sorrow'. Is Experience the darker book? They try 'night', 'weep' and 'joy', find all three in both books, and read the lines to see how each book uses them. Is 'The Lamb' its mirror? They find the words the two poems share, among them 'made', 'thee' and 'Lamb'.

Pairs then follow a word of their own choice from 'The Tyger' through both books, and each student writes in their book how typical the poem is of Experience, quoting a line from another poem as evidence.

Tools: Google Sheets Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 are starting a poetry unit, and the teacher wants a first reading in which nobody can skip to the end. William Blake's 'A Poison Tree', from Songs of Experience (1794), is on four PowerPoint slides, one four-line stanza per slide. The teacher reads the first stanza aloud, stops on 'I told it not, my wrath did grow', and asks what the speaker might do with anger he has kept secret. Students write a prediction in their books, the next slide appears, and they note what Blake wrote instead: the wrath watered with tears, sunned with false smiles and grown into a tree bearing a bright apple. Before the last slide the class predicts what the foe will do now he has seen the apple shine.

With all four stanzas on a final slide, the teacher annotates the first two lines at the board as a model. Students copy two quotations into their books and write a paragraph on how the image of the tree shows what hidden anger becomes, and what the word 'glad' in the last two lines tells us about the speaker.

Tools: PowerPoint Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 have read 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', published in December 1854, about six weeks after the charge at Balaclava, and can say what happens in it. Today is about its rhythm. From YouTube, the teacher plays the wax-cylinder recording made in 1890 of Tennyson reading the poem himself. It is faint and crackly, so students have the text in front of them, and they listen to the opening once without writing. On the second playing they put a mark over each syllable the poet leans on, starting with 'Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward', where the weight falls on each 'Half' and two lighter syllables hurry after it. The teacher replays the opening lines several times at three-quarter speed, using YouTube's playback setting, so each stress can be picked out of the crackle, stopping after the first 'Rode the six hundred', until the class agrees where the beats fall.

Students then write in their books how a rhythm of one heavy beat and two light ones suits a cavalry charge, and why Tennyson might have ended each of the six stanzas on the words 'six hundred'.

Tools: YouTube Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 can spot alliteration in Wilfred Owen's 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', written in 1917, but find it hard to say what the sounds do. The teacher opens the Spectrogram in Chrome Music Lab on the board, switches on the laptop microphone and asks for silence; nothing is recorded or saved. The teacher reads line 3, 'Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle', slowly and close to the microphone, as tried out before the lesson, and the class watches the picture scroll across: the line shows as a run of short patches with dark gaps between them. Then the teacher reads the last line, 'And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds', and the display shows fewer, longer patches that drift up and down as the voice rises and falls. The teacher reads each line twice more so the class can see that the difference holds.

Students sketch the two shapes beside the lines on their printed copy, then write a paragraph in their books on how the sound of line 3 copies rifle fire and how the last line slows the poem into mourning.

Tools: Chrome Music Lab Nine ideas for your own version in Generate