MCELA Matters

Essential Conversations with Penny Kittle

By Bre Allard, MCELA Secretary

Literacy Coach, Lewiston Middle School, Lewiston, ME

On October 21, 2022, I had the privilege of attending a Penny Kittle conference at UMO. Approximately 80 ELA teachers, instructional coaches, and admin were in attendance. Penny shared teaching strategies from her newest book, 4 Essential Studies: Belief and Practices to Reclaim Student Agency (co-authored with Kelly Gallagher). This text focuses on Teaching the Essay as an Art Form, Book Clubs: The Best Teacher of Reading is the Reading, Poetry: The Potential for Unexpected Things, and Digital Composition: Crossing Genre Boundaries. Throughout the presentation, Penny shared examples of struggling students in her high school senior and college freshmen English classes over the years and how she helped each student shift their thinking, engage in their learning, and take charge of their academic success. 

After attending this powerful conference, my thinking was both affirmed and challenged. I was affirmed in my teaching practice to bring in more diverse books for students to select to read in book clubs or in my classroom library. As Kittle and Gallagher wrote, “We must change the dominance of white voices in English curriculum and expand the literary canon to include a broad range of experiences written by people who have lived them” (55). I will continue to look for ways to bring in more diverse voices into the ELA curriculum in my school. 

The topic of poetry challenged my thinking during the conference. Poetry is tough to teach and tough for student engagement. Kittle and Gallagher challenge educators’ thinking about teaching poetry by first considering how teaching poetry has traditionally been done. They explain it by comparing teaching poetry to the food pyramid. What we do the most is on the bottom. Traditionally, this has been analyzing one poem and then another, and so on. Very little time (the top of the pyramid) is spent on students creating original poems. Kittle and Gallagher state, “We think the pyramid is upside down. Instead of grounding our unit in analysis and literary criticism, we fill the widest part of our poetry curriculum with reading, listening, and creating: standing immediately on the shoulders of poets. We start with playing, wondering, freewriting, reading, and listening to poems, creating notebook lists and phrases, and imitating” (82). I’m challenged to take some of the creative strategies Kittle and Gallagher suggest implementing in the classroom to help students see the potential in their own poetry creations, like making poems from the titles on the spines of books, finding words around them to create their own found poems, creating blackout poems, or lyric mash-up poem writing. 

Penny Kittle wrote this message in my book when she autographed it, “Bre - I know you know the essentials… I hope this might push your thinking in new ways.” I can attest that it is and I highly recommend this book to all ELA teachers.