Te reo pohewa: Engaging primary-school children in writing poetry

Abstract

Prior to the March, 2020 COVID-19 lockdown in New Zealand I was invited to offer professional development on ways that the writing of poetry could be facilitated in a Rotorua primary school. In March/April of that year, I engaged around 18 teachers (including the school principal) in four, two-hour PD sessions using Zoom. A year on, in May 2021, I conducted a small-scale case study with teachers who had participated in all four of these sessions to find out what they had taken away from this PD. In part for my own instruction, I was interested in what “stuck” and what they saw as working in their classrooms. This article offers a brief overview of the shape of the PD that was offered and teachers’ views on its impact one year on.