This article reports a project in which two researchers in cognitive psychology, learning, and instruction collaborated with a high school English teacher to develop lessons that contained three scaffolds to facilitate symbolic interpretation when students read poetry. The scaffolds were based on instructional strategies that have shown to be effective in diverse subject areas. This article provides a detailed description of these scaffolds used in teaching a poetry unit to a class of 14- to 15-year-old students. It then provides illustrations of the students' interpretations of a fairly difficult poem after they have completed the unit and compares these responses with those of an equivalent group of students who were not given the scaffolds. (Contains 2 figures.)