This article provides a description of three seventh grade English teachers' attempt to augment creativity, reading, and deep understanding, and the standards they used to come up with five essential questions surrounding an eight-week unit on poetry. Each of these questions helps to address the school standards and the Common Core State Standards (RL 7.4, 7.5 7.10) in reading, analyzing, and interpreting poetry (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, 2010). As customary school practice, all teachers teaching the same subject in a grade were required to use the same standards and curriculum, but each could deliver instruction based on her/his preference. As a result, one of the teachers decided to use formative assessments to guide her instructional lessons throughout this unit. She used the following guiding questions to do so: (1) What is the poem about? (2) What is the mood or atmosphere of the poem? (3) What poetic devices have been used and what is their effect? Please discuss at least one poetic device. (4) What is the message in the poem? What does the poet want us to think about? (5) What is your opinion of the poem, and why?