Teacher and student cognitive response levels in secondary poetry teaching

Fifty-six teachers of English at grade 10 level from 14 secondary schools in the greater Hobart metropolitan area were asked to give written responses to a series of questions relating to their opinions and methods of teaching poetry. Twenty of the above mentioned, and their 260 grade 10 students, were then read a poem and asked to give a written response to it on the question, \What does this poem mean to you?\" Each response was analysed by the Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome taxonomy developed by Collis and Biggs (1981). The responses were allocated into 5 categories: prestructural uni- structural multistructural relational and extended abstract and 4 transitional categories. Though there were some differences the general trend was a high correlation between teachers' responses and the responses given by the students they taught. From the responses given to the preliminary series of questions it was found that teachers reporting higher levels of personal commitment to poetry teaching also tended to exhibit higher SOLO levels of response. However in predicting student response levels none of these teacher question variables contributed over and above the contribution of the teacher's SOLO level."