Charlotte Bourne, Head of Learning and Engagement at Poetry By Heart

When it comes to finding credible resources to support your teaching of poetry, it can be hard to know where to start. Even more difficult? Finding resources that treat a poem as a poem, rather than a problem to solve, and use enjoyment and accessibility as their starting point. 

This is just the kind of challenge we love at Poetry By Heart! We’ve created a digital anthology of every poem taught at GCSE level, with a host of extra resources to support each poem. 

In this blog post I’ll introduce our 14+ GCSE timeline digital anthology and explain how it can support your teaching of Cambridge OCR GCSE English and your students’ learning.

About Poetry by Heart

Poetry by Heart is a national poetry speaking competition for schools and colleges in England. Taking part is all about developing confidence with poetry in an enjoyable, accessible and engaging way. It’s free for schools and colleges in England to register, participate and enter the competition. 

Our website is full of resources for teaching and learning about poetry, with lots of scope for young people to explore poems and find the ones they love. 

The 14+ GCSE timeline is just one of our resources. It brings together every poem taught at GCSE, across all exam boards, with recordings, videos, background information, suggested activities and more. Take a look at the website while you read this blog and you can follow along.

Navigating the poems

The poems are arranged chronologically from ‘A Song’ by Helen Maria Williams (published 1786) through to the most recent poem, ‘Thirteen’ by Caleb Femi (published 2020). You can use the slider underneath the poems to move backward and forwards in time. Click on any tile to open the page and view the poem. 

If you choose the red ‘filter’ icon just above the timeline, you’ll find filters for themes, exam boards and clusters. Choose your OCR cluster, such as OCR Confict, and click ‘Apply’ to view the 15 poems from your cluster in the same timeline format. 

Above many of the poems you can toggle on ‘OED links’. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a historical dictionary: as well as present-day meanings, you can trace the history of individual words – sometimes as far back as the 11th century. This is fantastic for encouraging word curiosity. For example, see what you can discover about Wordsworth’s ‘pinnace’, Plath’s ‘effacement’ or Kay’s ‘heralding’.

Video and audio

Under the poems you’ll find carefully chosen video and audio resources (use the ‘audio’ and/or ‘video’ filters to only see poems with these resources). These include high quality recitations from sources like the British Library and The Poetry Archive. Videos are often performances from our competition, so young people can see how their peers have interpreted the poems. Watching and listening to these videos can be a brilliant way to introduce the poems. 

Each student video offers an ‘informed personal response’ to the poem, because each young person had to make choices when speaking it aloud: ‘Should I pause at that enjambment, or not? What happens if I emphasise that word instead?’ Each choice about the writer’s craft (AO2) affects meaning (AO1). And where there are several performances of the same poem, you’ll see young people making different choices – a really vivid way to show that there can be multiple interpretations of a single poem. These videos can be a great way to deepen understanding: your students will naturally integrate AO1 and AO2 in their discussions.

Explore the poem… and the poet

Each poem page has a section titled ‘Explore the poem’. These invite students to reflect on a specific aspect of the poem with a focus on bringing it to life. Written in unfussy language and rich in insight, they help young people inhabit and really enjoy their GCSE poems. We model how to integrate references, and we use questions to invite a personal response. 

Underneath this there’s a section about the poet. These biographical details might reveal something about the poet’s motivations for writing it or give a greater insight into their themes. They are designed to interest students in the lives of the poets and often include quotes from the poets themselves to show them as real people whose contexts influenced their writing.

Teacher resources

When teachers are logged into the website they get an extra ‘for Teachers’ box on every 14+ Timeline Anthology poem page. This section contains poem-related resources that will feed your subject knowledge, provide great material for teaching the poem and save you trawling the web for relevant material. You might find a Ted Talk, a Guardian interview, a podcast, an audio essay or a carefully chosen academic article. 

We showcase archival material like a walk-through of Keats-Shelley House in Italy or excerpts from Wordsworth’s handwritten drafts of The Prelude. There’s also lots of content from living poets, too, like the Spotify playlists that Raymond Antrobus listened to while writing poems.

Unseen poetry

The 14+ timeline can also support you with the exam question comparing an anthology poem with an unseen poem. For example, if you were studying the OCR Conflict cluster, Femi’s ‘Thirteen’ is in the anthology. If you open the filters you can see the themes Religion, Protest, Racism, Soldiers and more. If you select ‘Racism’, all the poems with this theme are selected from all the GCSE anthologies. You can then choose one that isn’t in the OCR Conflict cluster to contrast with ‘Thirteen’, creating the basis for a mock question.

A final challenge...

Poetry By Heart is all about developing a lifelong enjoyment of poetry by encouraging people to speak poems, listen to them, share them and take them into their hearts. Why not ask your students to learn one of their anthology poems off by heart, and share it out loud in class? It makes a great half term homework, guarantees you a lesson (or more!) of enjoying your cluster ‘live’, and gives your students a different way into their chosen poem. You could even film their performances and enter them into our national competition, with a chance to perform on stage at Shakespeare’s Globe. What have you got to lose? 

If you have any questions about Poetry By Heart, email info@poetrybyheart.org.uk or call 0117 905 5338. You can also register to receive newsletters, Poem of the Week email and resource kit – it’s all free.

Stay connected

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About the author

A former English teacher in state schools, Charlotte Bourne is Head of Learning and Engagement at Poetry By Heart. Prior to joining Poetry by Heart, she was Deputy Head of Learning at Shakespeare’s Globe, and before that a Training Lead at a large multi-academy trust. Her interests include active approaches to learning, inclusion, and detective fiction. She also has two young children who keep her on her toes.