Every time I teach Poetry Writing, I put together an online anthology of student work (they submit their favorites and I post them). This term's class wrote several poems on four shared themes: "Birth | School | Work | Death"

I used to have just one theme ("school", inspired by Maggie Anderson's wonderful anthology, Learning by Heart, which we used as a textbook), but students told me that they got tired of writing about the same topic all the time, so I expanded it. Why these four themes? Blame a rock song by The Godfathers.

I like showcasing student writing as the formal outcome of a term's length of study... it functions differently than a blog, but the onus of writing for an audience beyond the classroom walls still helps the students grow. It's more work for me to have to design the page, but once you get a template, it's easy enough to keep going. The students usually like sharing their "published" class work with family and friends; I, too, get a sense of accomplishment by showing the world what's been going on in my class all term. I recommend this technique for all creative writing teachers!

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