This is further information about Readers’ Theatre, provided by jen after a recent Carol Gaab workshop. I publish it pretty much verbatim here as an article so we can include it as another article on RT in the RT category. When we have enough articles on RT, we’ll organize it, put it up as a hardlink, possibly with video, so that we can have a clear step by step RT template full of sufficient detail to refer to. I know that RT is going to be a good building block for us as we continue to widen the umbrella of CI. Here’s jen and thank you for this high quality run down of what Carol provided in your session with her:
I just got back from Carol’s Boston workshop! And I was in the RT demo! It was a super short scene from the Felipe Alou book, where Felipe tries to sit in the front of the bus and the bus driver yells at him. I didn’t understand initially that RT could be a very short scene, but it makes total sense. We’re not trying to create a theatre production, just trying to get more reps and energize the group! She did the “is this acceptable?” question and then had the actor do it over a few times AND in conjunction with this question to engage the rest of the group she asked: “Can anyone yell more furiously?” (using the structure “yell furiously” and giving someone else in the class a chance to act. I can see this being really effective in a middle school class, although for me this year my 8th graders cannot control themselves, so I don’t think I could do this.
She gave a few examples of when RT is particularly effective: 1) to get reps on advanced structures 2) to bring an action-packed scene to life, just for fun 3) to bring awareness to (without giving away) subtle innuendos in a text that will prove to be important later in the book.
The timing of this workshop could not have been better for me. Last week or 10 days ago when Ben started posting all the RT stuff I had just barely started novels in all four of my groups. I am doing Esperanza with Spanish levels 2 and 4, Houdini with level 1 French and Nuits Mysterieuses with level 2 French. Based on the blog posts I actually tried a short scene from Houdini with French 1 and it kicked ass! So I was very excited to get to experience RT for myself by participating in it. Super cool! And so easy (meaning you can do it on the spot, in the event that you don’t spend lots of outside time preparing. That would be me. Props are good, but if you don’t have any I don’t necessarily see a problem).
She kept using the phrase “it gives the illusion of novelty” when she talked about different ways of delivering CI, most of which were basically variations of PQA but with the variety coming from voice inflection, pausing, personalizing, making the questions physical (example was what kind of car do you want to drive: give 4 choices, put tape down on the floor to make quadrants and kids stand in the quadrant of their choice…gets them up and moving AND provides automatic statements that you can then compare, contrast, etc).
She used a great analogy to talk about circling: it’s like salt; it can enhance the flavor of food but if there is too much it can ruin the dish!
Obviously I have not fully processed everything since I just got back, but I definitely got a big boost today, in the form of a few more tricks and also in the form of affirmation and confidence in what I’m doing. I also felt useful to some of the brandy-new
Carol emphasize over and over that we need to cut ourselves some slack. She used awesome baseball analogies like for every home run there are three times as many strikeouts, and also the most important thing statistically is the on base average, so the home run average has relatively little importance over time. It is the small things we do daily and consistently. I also recently read something about neuroplasticity where it says the most profound changes in the brain are made by subtle changes over a long period of time. I am all about cutting myself some slack, so yay for that!
Oh one more thing. For people who are under the microscope from whomever, re “use of English” and “translation” (when referring to the quick step of establishing meaning)…technically what we do in our classes is called “linking meaning.” I had never heard this before or even thought about it. Carol reminded us that “translation” is something that is done by a person who is already bilingual. What we are doing when we establish meaning and also when we do the choral reading in L1 is “linking meaning.” She used the term “guided reading” to refer to “choral translation.” Maybe everyone knows that already but it was new to me and I like the distinction. It will come in handy tomorrow night for me during parent conferences!