This article speculates that it is possible to over-train teachers, to the extent that there remains little room for creative approaches to teaching and learning in their classrooms. Responding to the pressures imposed on them to deliver a seemingly overwhelming curriculum in schools where the normal teaching day may be subjected to interruptions and lost teaching hours, teachers frequently resort to straight 'chalk and talk' delivery in the interests of time, rather than engaging in a mutually beneficial process of creative discovery and learning with their students.

Former taken-for-granted approaches to the teaching of literature and by extension the teaching of poetry in the Caribbean classroom are no longer stable. Concerns over low student achievement in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examination in key areas such as poetry, create considerable debates over how teachers of English in the Caribbean should both respond to and be prepared for the teaching of poetry in the English classroom.