James watched that Helena Curtain video he mentioned here a few days ago. He makes an amazing point below, one that rattled me and substantiated a lot of things that I have thought over the years. Thank you James for sharing this with us:
Ben –
I was watching the Helena Curtain video and found a couple of minutes or so starting at the 28:23 mark. Here’s my takeaway:
Around the 28:23 mark of that Helena Curtain video, she begins talking about what learners need. She says, “They need story form.” She then mentions Kieran Egan’s book (Teaching as Story Telling) and explains that Egan says:
“that we need to teach like stories.” I guess this makes Helena uncomfortable, because she then goes on and qualifies a bit: “And then when I (Helena) heard that, I thought, ‘Oh my God, we can’t write stories for everything we teach!’ But he (Egan) actually made it simpler than that. He said that every activity should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Makes sense! Every unit should have a beginning, middle, and end. Every lesson should have a beginning, middle, and end.”
Helena then goes on and suggests that one of our problems is that we “hang out in the middle” by going through activities one after the other without taking the time to introduce them or finish them. So the fix is obvious: We need better pre- and post-activities for our activities, better “hooks” and more closure.
To Helena, “story form” seems to be “taking the time” to introduce and to finish activities properly. Of course in CI and TPRS, “story form” means using stories to teach stuff. And, yes, we do teach a ton of stuff this way. Except we the teachers don’t create all the stories. Our students do.