In creating these lesson plans and student portal pages geared toward high school teaching, the education team takes a student-centered approach. Our goal is to create historically and culturally relevant content to cultivate student interest in both African American poetry and the Furious Flower Poetry Archive. We believe that African American poetry is rich and vital to every high school English curriculum, as it includes multiple voices of Americans that resonate nationally and internationally. For far too long the poetry taught in high school classes has been almost exclusively white-authored. Now students desire to read poetry that speaks to issues of injustice, provides multiple perspectives, and is relevant to their own lives as well as the lives of their classmates. Acting as a mirror, connecting to African American students’ own experiences, and a window, opening students’ minds and hearts to understand those who are different from them, African American poetry adds to students’ culturally diverse reading and writing tapestry. Along with other American literature read in high school, African American poetry addresses such essential questions as, “Where do people look for truth?” “What makes poetry sing?” “How important is culture?” “How can people honor their heritage?” “Can America achieve equal rights for all people?” and “What does it mean to be American?”

The lesson plans center on one of the three themes of the Furious Flower Archive: Timeline: History, Witness, and the Struggle for Freedom in African American Poetry; Language, Music, and the Vernacular in African American Poetry; or Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Each theme-based lesson begins with relevant background information about the poet, a video of a poet reading a poem, the printed version of the poem, and follows with four question-based topics to drive instruction. The topics follow: Reader Response, History and Culture, Craft and Structure, and Reading and Writing Connections. The reader response questions engage students’ interest by asking them to draw on their personal experiences and beliefs before moving on to questions focusing on relevant history and culture, and craft and structure. The last section, reading and writing connections, acts as the formative assessment for the lesson. Students should draw from their own personal experience as well as the themes, skills, and concepts discussed in the lesson to complete either of the two questions. Each lesson plan includes aligned reading, writing, and language Common Core Standards for English/Language Arts and the Virginia Standards of Learning as well as relevant information that can be used to enrich the lessons.