92 English Journal 101.3 (2012): 92–94 ninth- through twelfth-grade English and ESL teachers. I had been working alongside some of the newer teachers, but this was the irst time I’d stood before such a large group in this school. There were some teachers in the room with decades of experience, and I was hoping to show all of them something they might ind new and refreshing that they might be willing to try on their own. I began by showing them how to make a magnetic poetry kit using index cards and adhesive- backed magnetic tape. By assign- ing each table a different part of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, pronouns, and arti- cles) and each part of speech a different color, we created a tool they could use to teach their stu- dents the structure of English syntax. The teachers responded enthusiastically, combining their words into sentences that read like lines of poetry on the magnetic chalkboard. Already, I could tell this pro- fessional development day was going to be different. No one grumbled or sat in the back read- ing the newspaper. Everyone was engaged. One teacher commented on the potential for this playful, hands-on activity to give her stu- dents a sense of ownership as they learned sentence structure and built vocabulary. Make Room for Our Voices: Using Poetry in Professional Development for Secondary ESL and ELA Teachers Amanda Nicole Gulla Lehman College The Bronx, New York amanda.gulla@lehman.cuny.edu It was the spring of 2001, on a professional development day in a large high school in lower Man- hattan. As in most of the schools in that neighborhood, many stu- dents were English language learners representing such diverse linguistic communities such as the Spanish and French-speaking Caribbean, Africa, China, and Eastern Europe. As the district’s literacy staff developer, the prin- cipal had asked me to design a workshop for ELA and ESL teach- ers on addressing new ESL regula- tions that were soon to be “coming down the pike.” Without wanting to directly point out to the principal how dismal the response to such work- shops tended to be, I suggested that we use this time offering pro- fessional development that might inspire teachers to try new prac- tices that could help their students grow as writers. So it was that we decided to devote a workshop not to rules and regulations, but to poetry. Some of these teach- ers had described how their own experiences of poetry centered on analyzing texts to ind the “right” answers. Given the opportunity, though, I knew that an expe- rience of reading and writing poetry could be made accessible to this group, and that this might entice them to experiment with a genre that so many teachers and students—especially those who struggle as readers and writers— tend to be fearful of approaching. I did not want this to be a work- shop in which teachers did a clever activity and walked away happy to have been amused, however. Willis D. Hawley and Linda Valli describe staff development work- shops in which “experts ‘exposed’ teachers to new ideas or ‘trained’ them in new practices” (134). The last thing I wanted to do was to “expose” teachers to poetry in some supericial way. My goal for this workshop was to demystify poetry so that these teachers might see it as a vehicle to get their ELL students to express themselves while experimenting with playful ways of using language. A Poetry Workshop for Teachers On the morning of the profes- sional development workshop, the library tables slowly illed with Success with ELLs Margo DelliCarpini, Editor Copyright © 2012 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.