The idea of milking certain sentences to let the story have more freedom and thus more interest is one that challenges us to step outside of our comfort zones. We pretty much have to let go of control if we want the story to be charged with interest. We can’t just let our own internal ideas drive the story. We have to listen for new ideas from our students that lay buried in the complex group interaction during the creation of the story. Once I heard a TPRS “expert” (there are none, there’s just us) refuse a really clever suggestion in a story. The adult (it was a workshop) who made the suggestion was crushed and the presenter then told them a far less interesting answer. Her agenda, not the group’s, was driving the story. Her ears couldn’t hear the suggestions coming from the class because her heart seemed closed to anything but her own greatness as a teacher*. I will continue in the next few days to focus on this very difficult concept that fundamentally defines NTCI (freedom/open heart) vs. what TPRS has become (too rigid, stuck in the mind, far from what Blaine originally had in mind and far from the core ideas found in Krashen’s research).
This article is from A Natural Approach to Stories (ANATS):
Insight Moments
Insights that create higher quality action in a story can come at any time from a student or the teacher. Such moments can make good stories great. Since we cannot predict them, all we can do is ask our students to be open to when they might occur. I call such moments “insight moments.”
An insight moment can be de ned as a whimsical cute suggestion representing the collective intuition of the class but expressed through one particularly focused student who sees something possible in the story that others may miss.
What we describe here, working together as a group in a class to solve a problem with a shared mindset, is not the way most schools operate. Most schools operate by separating students, or, if they are grouped, it is for some fairly useless activity that, at least in a second language class, provides next to no comprehensible input and so is of very questionable pedagogical value.
But when we all try to figure out how to solve the problem together, laughing a lot, amazing things can happen. In this kind of setting students who look bored often suddenly become really creative people. This is ample testimony to the imaginations of our students as long as they are left unfettered, and free from the burden of having to memorize things, and free from focusing on boring things all day.
Making a story with the Invisibles is truly a team effort. So remind your students to be on the lookout for those little insight moments that, in a second, can improve the quality of the movie being made in the minds of your students via a catch phrase.
*Of course she wasn’t a great teacher because she thought the class was all about her. A great teacher really listens to the kids, for real. About 20 years ago my entire concept of TPRS opened up immeasurably when I read this one statement by Blaine Ray:
…I believe people who are the most effective at TPRS don’t tell stories. They ask questions, pause, and listen for cute answers from the students. The magic is in the interaction between the student and teacher. TPRS is searching for something interesting to talk about. That is done by questioning. Interesting comprehensible input is the goal of every class. If we are there to tell a story, we will probably not make the class interesting. We will be so focused on getting the story out that we won’t let the input from the kids happen….