One of the biggest buzz words in education right now is The Science of Reading. Without going into too many of my soapbox issues about SoR research, I want to tell you that this information is just as important for secondary teachers as it is for our elementary school counterparts.

Reading is one of the most complex skills the human brain learns to master. Thanks to decades of research, we know the intricate processes our brains go through. We don’t just decode, but also comprehend, and connect with written language. It’s not just about learning letters and sounds in the early years—reading involves building a foundation of skills that grow and evolve throughout our entire lives.

Learning to read never truly ends (maybe I will get on a soapbox, after all). As we encounter more complex texts, specialized vocabulary, and abstract concepts, we continue refining and expanding our reading abilities. This isn’t just true for students in the early grades; it’s true for everyone—including secondary students and even adults.

That’s why the science of reading isn’t just for elementary teachers. Secondary teachers play a huge role in helping students strengthen their reading skills. This is especially true as students engage with challenging content in subjects like history, science, and literature.

For more information on how content area teachers can utilize the Science of Reading research, go read this blog post.

For now, though, let’s explore how secondary ELA teachers can integrate the components of the science of reading research into ONE single lesson. That sounds like a dream, right? How can we possibly do ALL of the things in one lesson? The key thing that you need in order to be able to do this is… (drum roll, please) …a really good poem!

One poem and a knowledgeable teacher can help students navigate this ongoing journey to becoming better, more confident readers in a single lesson. Whether you teach middle or high school, this approach will empower you to meet your students where they are and guide them toward deeper understanding and success.

So let’s get started.

First, Choose a Poem:

For the purposes of this blog, I’m going to talk about Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost. If you’re already sold and don’t want to read the rest, grab the freebie here.

This is a poem that I use when teaching The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton because Ponyboy and Johnny discuss it at length. It would fit well into any curriculum though because it is perfect for discussing the changing of the seasons, something of which happens regularly throughout the school year. =)

Second, Choose a Method for Teaching Poetry:

There are several acronyms that secondary teachers use to analyze poems with their students. If you already have one that you like, great. Use it. However, I really like using TP-CASTT, which stands for:

• Title
• Paraphrase
• Connotation
• Attitude/Tone
• Shift
• Title(Again)
• Theme

I learned about the TP-CASTT method from ReadWriteThink many years ago and have been using it to help my students comprehend poems ever since. It is wonderful! And it really helps to see how we can structure our instruction to include all of the components of skilled reading in one lesson. So let’s move on.

Prepare the Lesson with these things in mind:

Scarborough’s Reading Rope (2001) tells us that we need to hit on the following components to ensure that our students are able to become skilled readers.

• Background Knowledge
• Vocabulary
• Language Structure
• Verbal Reasoning (or Inferential Thinking)
• Literacy Knowledge

And a poem is a bite-sized chunk of literacy so let’s take a look at how we can hit all of these in Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost.

• Background Knowledge: There are two points in this poem that are great opportunities to point out, and potentially teach, background knowledge. First, students need an understanding of how seasons work and change to be able to understand the poem. And secondly, there is an allusion to Eden in line 6 of the poem. Without the background knowledge of the Garden of Eden, this allusion doesn’t make sense.
• Vocabulary: There are four words in this poem that it is likely your students will not know. You can explicitly teach them that they need to stop and think about the fact that they will not grasp the meaning of the poem without first looking up the words. We cannot teach all of the vocabulary that students will encounter. We CAN, and should, teach them to stop when they need to though.
• Language Structure: POEMS ARE SO GOOD FOR TEACHING LANGUAGE STRUCTURE!!! …because they don’t necessarily follow traditional language structure, they’re more like how we talk than how we write formally. Look at Nothing Gold Can Stay and paraphrase it in relation to complete thoughts instead of line by line. Then, TEACH the idea of complete thoughts as parts of sentences. Seriously, teaching grammar through poetry is THE BEST! In fact, it is how I sell my students on caring about grammar in the first place. Ha!
• Inferential Thinking: This poem has opportunities for teaching local inferences and global inferences. First, students have to infer who the “her” is in lines 2 and 3. Then, making an inference about the allusion to Eden in line 6 is so important to the theme of the poem. The Garden of Eden represents perfection to a lot of people so if nothing gold can stay, does that also mean that nothing perfect can stay?
• And finally, literacy knowledge. This poem is short so the use of punctuation is really the only part of literacy knowledge that I hit on with this particular poem. However, if you are using the TP-CASTT method, as I do, the Shift part is a great place to talk about transition words. In this poem, that shift occurs in line 4.
  • Other poems can provide even more lessons about literacy knowledge. A narrative poem is clearly going to follow a beginning, middle and end structure. Longer poems might include more stanzas and, even, columns. These are all things that we need to explicitly teach in order for our students to comprehend fully.

Get the Lesson for Yourself

This lesson usually takes me one day but, in that short amount of time, I have hit on all of the above, which explicitly teaches all of the components of skilled reading! How amazing is that!? Get the lesson for free and check out my other poetry resources.

Happy Reading!