If they tripled my salary and begged I might consider doing more planning. I may want to plan a little when doing a Movie Talk or something, but not with one of the Invisibles stories. When we work with emergent targets, we are freer to follow a story line that is much more interesting to everyone, and also to be much more present with the class, and connect with them emotionally and intellectually, thus freeing ourselves to focus more energy on checking their comprehension moment-by-moment and just having fun.
Why plan when doing so only tightens the screws around their creativity? I will post the newly simplified Star Sequence for non-targeted CI instruction here soon. Tina and I used it in Louisville a few weekends ago and are very pleased with it as a talisman device for keeping our instruction free and strong. And when I say no planning, I mean 100% no planning. Life’s too short and salaries and benefits have shrunk too much for us to buy into any of that “we must work harder” delusional thinking from the last century.
Some of us can’t work any harder than we are now anyway. We’re maxed out.