Education is at the heart of the Poetry Archive. While the whole resource is, in the broadest sense, educational, it offers particular benefits to teachers (including opportunities to improve their confidence in the teaching of poetry and to enhance their IT skills) and to students. It is a versatile, entertaining, interactive teaching aid: starting from the poet and the poem, visitors are taken to biography, related poetry, interviews with poets, a guide to poetry events and a wealth of interpretative material which allows students and teachers not only to address specific curriculum demands but also to be led into a wider landscape of writing where their own creativity is stimulated. Until now, poetry has been taught in schools primarily through text. The Poetry Archive enables a new approach, taking poetry off the page and into a visual and aural context relevant to young people. Hearing poets speak makes them seem present and vivid and allows students to understand their intentions more clearly. The Archive’s education sectors are continually expanding, offering teachers and students a wealth of practical help in the form of detailed, downloadable lesson plans and classroom activities as well as tips on making the most of listening to poets reading their own work. Transforming Poetry Teaching Poetry features at every stage of the primary and secondary curriculum in the U.K. but research has consistently shown that many teachers lack confidence in teaching it. The Poetry Archive is ideally placed to respond to teachers’ anxieties in this area. It is already making a fundamental difference by offering a bank of specialist subject knowledge and advice in the form of the recordings themselves and the educational material which surrounds them. The next step is to offer teachers the tools to create their own materials, share them with colleagues and use them to breathe new life into their classroom practice. We want to set up a dedicated, password-protected area within the Archive website so that teachers can plan their teaching and can communicate with one another about the teaching of poetry. Membership will be free of charge; registered teachers will have access to a space where they can design and build their own lessons, using resources available within the Archive and from the wider Web. Nothing like this exists on other sites and the concept has been greeted with terrific enthusiasm by teachers themselves. Recent developments in the technology available in schools make this the perfect time to offer this cutting-edge feature. A teacher will be able to browse the entire Archive, search for relevant items and bring them into the design space. These items may include: · recordings of individual poems · video clips from interviews with poets · images of poets · pieces of text (eg a paragraph from a poet’s biography, a quotation, a sentence or two of critical commentary, and extracts from our model lesson plans) The teacher will be able to organise these items, add his or her own text to the design space, and enter links to other relevant resources elsewhere on the web, such as text or images or video clips, which help define unfamiliar vocabulary or concepts or which contextualise a poem historically or geographically. This method can be used to plan a single lesson or to design a whole scheme of work, and will be ideal for use with a data projector or an interactive whiteboard. Teachers will have access to advice and support from Poetry Archive staff, and model lesson plans to get them started. Once lessons are created, they can be saved and retrieved for use in the classroom. Teachers may also choose to share their lesson plans with online colleagues. In this way, a rich new fund of resources will be developed by teachers for teachers. Registered teachers will be able to view one another’s work, borrow it for use themselves, adapt it to fit the needs of their own students, and add ideas of their own. The lesson plans shared in this way will go on evolving indefinitely. Registered teachers will be able to share not only their lesson ideas but also their experiences of teaching poetry. A Discussion Forum will enable them to post their questions, concerns, ideas and advice, and this structured yet informal dialogue will enable the sharing and spreading of good practice. This ground-breaking feature will make a real and significant difference to teachers’ ability to bring poetry alive for their students and will be a model for educational practice across the curriculum.