If you haven’t noticed already, many teachers are embracing students’ enthusiasm for the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament and bringing tournament-style activities into their classroom. Since the tournament runs from March to April, and since April is National Poetry Month, many of us have implemented Poetry March Madness activities into class.
But you may be thinking, what do I do with these brackets? How do I implement them in class?
I’ve been doing the March Madness poetry bracket challenge for three years now, with varying levels of participation and student activities. Here’s a list of ideas, strategies, and variations to help you design and implement your own poetry bracket challenge.
Tip 1: Consider instructional time
The main thing to consider when implementing your poetry bracket challenge is how much class time you want to devote to it. Will students be studying the poems during class, doing full analyses of each pairing? Or will it be a quick read-and-vote activity, only taking up 5 minutes of class time? Also, consider that if you’re going to do a full 64-entry tournament, that’s 32 votes in just the first round. The more in-depth you want to go, the fewer poems you’ll probably want to use.
You should select the number of poems to study based on your desired level of in-class instruction. If you’re doing full lessons and studies of each poem, I suggest doing only a Sweet 16 tournament, which still would yield at least 8 poetry lessons. If using them more as bell-ringers, you can do 32 or even a full 64-team tournament. Another way to scale down class time is to allot certain poems to certain classes. For example, if I teach four sections of AP Lit, I could have each class vote down a “division” of poems until we get to the final four, then open it up to all classes to vote.
Tip 2: Be creative with poem selection
Based on the number of poems you use, there can be multiple divisions of poetry. For example, this year our categories are American poems, British poems, AP Faves, and Kortuem’s faves. But you could also do categories like fixed-form poems, free verse poems, contemporary poems, poems about nature, whatever you want!
When I did the poetry bracket challenge last year, I selected the poems. This year, I created a list of all the poems we had studied so far in AP Lit and had my students pick their favorites. Their choices comprise the AP Faves division of our bracket. By making them more involved in the selection, it gives them more buy-in. Next year I’m going to do our Honors/English 10 poetry unit sooner so that my sophomores can also select poems to include.
Tip 3: Identify your objective
Poetry brackets can be used for instruction, inspiration, or just be fun. But be clear to identify the purpose up front. Should students be selecting their favorite poem? The most rigorous? The “best” one in some certain terms or criteria? Also, if there’s homework involved, be sure to set clear parameters and scoring objectives, including examples and rubrics. Remember there is no one right way to do poetry brackets. But it can be overwhelming if instructions are unclear or too much is going on. The clearer you are with your expectations and end goal, the better it will go.
With my students, we’re just doing it for fun. Students pick their favorite poem using whatever parameters they wish. My main objective is to expose them to more poetry without the burden of homework or deep analysis.
Tip 4: Don’t be afraid to change it up
Not feeling poem instruction? Change it up! One year with my sophomores, we paired our regular poetry unit with the bracket challenge. But instead of students voting on teacher-selected poems, I asked them to select a meaningful poem and read it aloud. These student-selected poems comprised our bracket, with one class making up each division. Each class period we voted on which student’s performance we liked best and that student moved forward. This brought a surprising amount of diversity to the class, including poems found on Pinterest, student originals, and even song lyrics. Some teachers may not like this, but I look at poetry units as attempts to get students to see that poetry is everywhere, so this strategy helped achieve that.
I’ve also heard of teachers using bracket challenges with the periodic table, novel selections, favorite movies, and pretty much anything under the sun. If you don’t want to make it instructional, do something silly and use it as a fun warm-up each day for a month. Our middle school loves doing brackets on favorite Disney or Pixar movies, for example! Ultimately, you can use brackets to take some of the momentum from the NCAA tournament to expose students to poetry, one of the hardest forms for students to enjoy.
To help you implement poetry brackets in the classroom, I’ve made some free brackets you can print or overlay into a Word or doc file to use on your own. These files are free for you to use however you wish! I just ask that if you use them in class and share to social media, share them with me @litandmore so I can see how you use them.
