The Poetry of Tupac Shakur

In today's video, I afford teachers a glimpse into my classroom so that they can see the following:

1. How I gamify a student-led discussion known as a Plato's Play-Doh Discussion
2. How I teach students the necessary questioning skills to tear apart and deconstruct a poem
3. How to construct a literary analysis from start-to-finish while pulling the strings of my heuristics

Typically, I do brief author studies with my students in which we explore five cross-sectional poems by that particular poet.

For this particular lesson, the spotlight is on Tupac Shakur.

In the video, you can see the types of questions my students are asking of the following poems:

Ambition Over Adversity

And 2Morrow

Fallen Star: Dedicated to Huey P. Newton

I Cry

In the Depths of Solitude

And from here, you'll see how we gamify the discussion (which is super cool and super engaging).

To model how to write the essay, I selected a different Tupac poem ("The Rose that Grew From Concrete").

Beginning with the introductory paragraph, I "paint" a number of inverted theses then move on to spotlight how to construct body paragraphs with the syllogistic method template.

All the slides featured in the video (game questions and even the writing workshop) are available for download in the video's description.

Click Here!

Over the coming weeks, I'll be doing the same for Mary Oliver and Billy Collins (among others).

Happy teaching and happy writing!