Advice from Cecilia Knapp

Chat with the teacher before your session

If possible, make sure you have some communication with whoever will be with you in the classroom on the day of the workshop delivery.

They will be able to help you with the practical aspects of your session, such as room configuration and equipment. It’s important to know the environment you’ll be teaching in, ideally before you start planning. For example, if you can’t move tables and chairs, you won’t be able to deliver an activity that requires pupils to stand in a circle. If you need to show a video or some slides, you’ll need to ensure that the facilities are available. You can also ask for additional materials at this point such as coloured pens, flip chart paper and anything else you might need. Teachers are always super busy and overworked so make sure you do this way in advance if possible, so they don’t have unnecessary stress on the day.

A teacher knows their class better than we do as external facilitators and may have some objectives in mind. I always ask teachers if they have any things they particularly want to achieve in the session and do my best to incorporate them. Most of the time, a teacher will leave you to run the session how you’d like, but sometimes they might like you to touch on something that will build on what they are working through on the curriculum. Perhaps they want their pupils to improve their confidence and their presentation skills by reading out their poems at the end of the session. Perhaps they would like you to talk about the editing process. Sometimes they suggest a Q&A segment of the workshop so pupils can ask about what it’s like being a writer. Many English teachers like to encourage this as a way to promote creative careers.

A teacher also knows any specific needs a pupil or class might have. I always ask about this so I can make my workshops accommodating and accessible to all pupils. Are there some pupils who struggle with reading aloud or with their writing ability? Are there pupils who might need more regular breaks? Make sure you plan your session around the needs of the pupils.

Make sure that the teacher you are working with will be in the room with you at all times.

I like to encourage the teacher to join in with the writing too. Teachers work so incredibly hard for their pupils and it’s nice for them to be able to experience the freeing feeling of creative writing alongside their pupils and to be able to be an active participant, to share in that moment of fun and creative achievement with their class. Participating in an exercise also helps to teach it later on; they know how it feels to do the exercise and what is essential to explain.

Create a safe creative environment where pupils can try, play, write, fail and have fun

A couple of years ago, I was standing outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London about to step in for the very first time. I was delivering a poetry project there as part of my year as Young People’s Laureate, working with local schools. It struck me; despite living in London for over a decade, I had never even considered stepping a foot inside. I asked myself why. And then I realised – I was intimidated to step into a building so big. Would I look silly, go through the wrong entrance, conduct myself in the wrong way? The building was so old, so reverent. It wasn’t a space for me. I think poetry can be a bit like this. A huge, old, towering and very significant building with so much history, so many rules. It’s no wonder young people feel scared of stepping a foot inside, especially young people for whom writing is a bit more challenging, or who have never seen someone like themselves in a poem.

A lot of what I do when I first get into the classroom is about making poetry seem less intimidating for young people so they can explore it on their own terms, in the way that feels right for them. I will often do some ‘myth busting.’ I will ask them things like:

• ‘Does poetry have to rhyme? They will often say yes, and I’ll tell them that no, a poem doesn’t always have to rhyme. If rhyme is not your thing, you don’t have to adhere to it.

• ‘Does a poem have to be factual? Does it have to be true?’

Of course, it doesn’t.

• ‘Can you write about anything in a poem?’ Of course, you can.

And then I ask them if a poem has to ‘make sense.’ Which of course, it doesn’t! Poetry is a dream world where we can leap from image to image, without the need to explain ourselves. Metaphors can be wild and exaggerated. We can travel through time. We could be a bird. We could summon a door in a poem that opens onto a staircase down into the sea where our memories live.

This leads to an interesting discussion about poetry. We are so often bogged down in what a poem ‘means’ that we forget to think about how it makes us feel. When we reframe our analysis of a poem to think about the sensations, memories, thoughts and feeling it activates in us, and how the poet chooses to achieve that, it’s a much more expansive conversation with much more potential for discussion. After all, a poem never just means one thing: it is different for every reader. Framing its effect as a subjective one can be more productive and help us get deeper into how a poem operates.

I think pupils need to feel free to explore and just write about what they want, before they start thinking about formal tropes of poetry. So every workshop I teach begins with a discussion that centres these rules:

1. There’s no wrong answer in poetry. Respond to the exercises in the way that feels right for you and no one else. That can never be ‘incorrect.’

2. Have fun and let go while you write; don’t think about what you should do or say, just allow your own voice to take you to where you need to be.

3. Trust your story, your voice and your life. So many pupils think their own lives aren’t interesting or worthy of a poem, but encouraging more young people to write is so important.

It’s about widening the lens of what stories we choose to tell.

Sometimes I share this Steve McQueen quote to show them that everyone’s story matters, not just the poets of the past:

‘We can only learn about the world if we look through the eyes of everyone concerned.’

Once pupils are empowered and free to write with no pressure hanging over them, they can produce really interesting work. Of course, then you can go on to talk about editing, craft, form and improving their work through specificity, improved choice of language or metaphor or simile, but they need to be uninhibited in the first instance, to just create.

I also talk about how there are certain rules and constraints in poetry, and we can try them out if we want to (for example, writing sonnets or Golden Shovels) but that poetry belongs to the people: we can break the rules and invent new rules if we want to. This democratises poetry and makes us active in it. A fun exercise is to try to invent a form together as a class. What would our rules be? Poetry, like language, is always evolving.

Exercises to make poetry engaging

Once you’ve established the foundation for pupils to write freely, I would do an icebreaker or a physical activity, something silly to elevate the mood and take the pressure off even more. It’s good to try something that allows you to hear from every voice in the room, such as distributing a few ‘conversation starters’ (for example, cats or dogs? Sweet or savoury?), which pupils can discuss in groups and share back. You can use this to discuss how we are all different, and our poems will be too. After this, try some fun and generative exercises listed below!

A note on this: plan and time your whole session but be prepared for activities to take longer than anticipated; you may not get around to it all. You might have to skip some exercises to make sure you get onto the main writing task and so pupils get a good chance to write and share. It’s good if the warm up can lay the groundwork for your main writing task. For example, if your main writing task will explore identity, could the lead-up exercises involve finding interesting metaphors to describe yourself? Some classes might be smaller and quieter than anticipated, so I usually have back up exercises or games in case we whizz through what I have planned.

Free writing

Let your pupils write freely for two minutes on a prompt of your choice (I remember, if I were a tree, I can’t believe, I am running towards…) without the pressure to be perfect or create a finished poem. Tell them not to hesitate, cross out or stop writing. Allow the ideas to flow without judgement. Allow them to be messy. Tell them they will not have to share with anyone. This is often where the best ideas come out.

You can also free write to images or to music. You could take pupils on a walk and pause at various points to free write what they see and feel. There are endless variations.

Cut up poems

Make poems using lines from other poetry books or even newspapers. This takes the pressure off writing but is still incredibly creative and can lead to interesting combinations of language or image that might not have otherwise been reached, which can in turn lead to a discussion about how language can function differently when we are writing a poem.

Modelling through contemporary poems

There is an abundance of poetry out there that responds to our current moment. Pupils might engage with this more deeply because it connects with their own lives and they might see themselves reflected. Showing a poem like this is one of the best ways to get pupils excited about poetry but also practically create a template through which to generate a poem.

Show pupil poems you have found, either printed out or via video. Discuss the poem (how does it make you feel? What image stands out? What is the poet passionate about? What is the mood of the poem?) Ask pupils how it functions and how it does its work (is it through storytelling? Do the images stack together to create a feeling or transport us somewhere? Are there any poetic techniques like metaphor and why might the poet be using that?) Then use the poem as a template on which to transpose their own individual ideas or use one of the lines as a starting point with the class.

Some poems I use in the classroom:

• And if I speak of Paradise by Roger Robinson • Glory Be to the Gang Gang Gang by Momtaza Mehri

• My Heart by Kim Addonizzio

• Here Too Spring Comes to Us With Open Arms by Caleb Femi

• Rookie by Caroline Bird

• This YouTube Channel from Apples and Snakes with a huge range of spoken word videos