This is a repost from an article I wrote here a few years ago, after watching John Becker and a few of his colleagues in St. Louis give a textbook example of how to go from an image into a story. (Perhaps textbook is not the right word; it’s more like a perfect example of what I try to describe in ANATS.) John’s comments here today made me remember his tour de force example of how to spin a story out of a one word image. I just wish I had captured it all on videotape because John’s teaching style was just incredibly sharp and crisp what I want to be able to do when I grow up. This long description of the process will have to suffice w/o the videotape. If any new teachers doing ANATS/ANATTY are at all unsure of the process, please do read carefully – it will be worth it:
Sometimes the right sequence of questions we use can lead us seamlessly into a story. When that happens, we hardly even notice that we went from an image into and into and through a story.
Below is a lengthy example, taken from a 2017 workshop with teachers on the Invisibles, of how a one word image character created by the teachers at the workshop flowed seamlessly into a story. Three of the suburban St. Louis teachers at the workshop teamed up to make it happen in the following way:
First, a teacher named Monica developed with the class a one word image of a pickle. She did a great job of making the one word image of the pickle interesting via her voice and manner. We all had fun being in on the creative process. It wasn’t complicated either, because we had the prompts needed to create the image.
While that was happening, over in the artist’s chair behind her easel, Megan was following along, busily making the pickle interesting with her artwork. It was a challenge, even with an image as simple as a pickle since, as we know, the artist’s drawings have to be colorful, visually compelling, big so all can see it, simple and with strong, with bold lines.
As soon as the image of the pickle was created, which took about 15 minutes, we turned the easel around and looked at Megan’s pickle drawing. This was the “Reveal” after Monica had finished building the image with the class. We all clearly loved it. The room was aglow with a kind of energy one rarely finds in schools. Megan had drawn the pickle according to the requirements/prompts, and in the process had given it personality.
It should therefore be said that those teachers who are working with artists to do one word images in their classrooms are strenuously advised to find an artist who can make the image activity “speak” to the hearts of the students in the class. Without a sufficiently talented artist, this work can fail. Who can get excited about an hard-to-see image that is drawn without care, some stick figure?
And yet, when you first begin auditions for the job of the artist each year, you will see that students will hand you scribbled out figures because kids don’t take school seriously anymore. Everything to them is just one big never-ending assignment. The one word image process changes that. When students see that the job is real, and requires real work, and creativity, the tone is set for success.
Back to the creation of the image. The four questions that Monica had asked to make the image compelling were: (1) big or small (our pickle was big); (2) what color (our pickle was green); (3) big or small face (ours was regular sized and happened to be on the lower backside of the pickle, and; (4) sad or happy (our pickle was sad.)
Note that sad is a very good emotion for OWI drawings because kids love to then make the character happy in the Invisibles story that follows the One Word Image process. This going from being sad in the one word image to being happy at the end of the resultant story is exactly what happened with our pickle.
So, upon the “Reveal”, we all gave a round of applause amidst a lot of positive comments from the group and while Monica took that opportunity to discuss the pickle even more, Megan reveled in her triumph. It was a great one word image and everyone was happy to have a new Invisible character as a member of the class. It was destined to go into the class “gallery” on the back of the wall, ready for possible inclusion in a future Invisibles story, but not before Spanish teacher John Becker then got up and said that he was going to try to make an Invisibles story based on the pickle. It was a good decision because I saw from John some of the best CI teaching I have ever seen in my life.
Now at that point the way we had the workshop set up John could have done a fresh one word image or he could have done some story listening or he could have just started a story with one of the individually created characters that we had created earlier that were now in the gallery on the back of the wall. But the energy with the pickle was so good that John made the right decision to try to turn Monica and Megan’s one word image of the pickle (who had not been named yet at that point) into a story.
As an aside, to be clear (because there is confusion on this point): we can create an Invisibles story from (1) a class created image (one word image), or (2) or from an individually created character – a character drawn at home or in class on a sub day by a student. In our St. Louis workshop we worked from a one word image (class created), but had the students been real students in a real classroom, it might have been individually created characters*.
It is a big deal when an individually created character gets chosen for an Invisibles story, and the child who created it beams with pride and then in a very focused manner she answers all the questions we ask about the image. Note: The questions for the individually created images are based on the prompts the students provide on the back page of the character, not the OWI prompts. (The entire ANATS process is like a puzzle. Few teachers bother to master the details, but those who do are richly rewarded.)
The first thing that John did to then start the story was to move Megan’s drawing from the easel to the middle of the white board, where it could now turn into a story, front and center. Megan busily set herself up at her easel to make a panel drawing of the story. She ended up with three panels in the story when it was finished. It turned out to be the right amount of panels for the amount of time it took John to create the story, although most beginning classes only draw two panels.
When John got up there next to the character it immediately became clear to our coaching group that we were watching a superstar in action, with a beautiful Spanish accent and perfect pacing and wonderful command over gesturing and, on top of that, a sense of mirth and mystery about him. How could John’s story be boring when those kinds of ingredients went directly into the pickle soup?
Here is what John did with the one word image:
1. He stood at the front of the room with a sense of confidence and excitement about what the class had created together up to that point. He gave Megan a nice glance of appreciation, which was reciprocated.
2. He looked at the pickle and then he looked at us.
3. Naturally, we all smiled because we loved our pickle. There was a happy feeling of anticipation in the room because we knew that now together we were about to do expansive and creative work with an image that we already loved. We knew that we were going to use our imaginations with no limits as to what we could do.
We knew that we could trust John to keep all of us in the loop about what was happening. John has been doing stories for a long time and it showed. There is nothing like being in a class and understanding everything.
We could tell that nothing about what we were about to do was going to be predictable, reductive or boring, nor was it going to be related to some list that Monica “needed” to teach us. We were going to have a conversation, and we weren’t going to be directed down a certain pathway about what it was going to be!
John didn’t know where the story was going either. How could he? All he had was an image. But look how a conversation might happen from the image without the teacher having any idea where it might go. This is from a definition of conversation I found on some French website:
The characteristics of conversation are: 1. It has a familiar nature (i.e. people who converse are familiar with each other); 2. It is improvised (i.e. not forced – made up as it goes along); 3. It is free (i.e. not limited in scope to any predetermined idea or scripted text); 4. It has pleasure as its goal (i.e. we enjoy the conversation first and foremost); 5. It is made up of a linguistic fabric (i.e. the target language for us); 6. It guarantees a person’s membership in the group.
(We cannot hope to teach a language when there is no community present. For the author this specifically means that the students have jobs and we talk about things that the students – not the textbook – have created and therefore have ownership of).
4. What John was doing, then, was consistent with what language is. Our conversation was unpredictable and expansive, with no agenda except to align with the national overriding standard of Communication by using the ACTFL Three Modes of Communication, in particular the Interpersonal Skills mode, while aligning with the ACTF 90% use position statement. Imagine that – a curriculum not tied to a list of words somewhere, or a textbook, but rather one aligned with how languages are actually learned – via real comprehensible input – and with the research.
This freedom, because the overarching goal is always – or should be – communication – allowed us, under John’s guidance, to enjoy a kind of egalitarian human quality of reciprocal and participatory heart centered sharing where the person who spoke the language drove us in an unknown direction.
Since I had done that kind of reductive teaching myself as a teacher for almost four decades, I felt very happy to learn more about our pickle, about the grand adventure he was about to have, with no agenda or requirement to make me nervous, and without those five to seven people in the classroom who processed language faster than I do to mess up my experience.
In light of the previous points, after the story, I pointedly asked John if all the language he had used had emerged during the story and he said yes. He told me that he experienced less stress when he didn’t have to focus on certain words when building the story. He agreed with me that the fun of the story, its richness, its cuteness, etc. all happened because I had made it clear in the workshop that John was free to go wherever he wanted during the story creation process. We told the teachers that they were there to teach the language, not parts of it.
5. So, looking at the pickle there in front of the class, John started asking questions in very crisp fashion using very “light circling”. Light circling can be defined as just touching on a word with a few repetitions to help the students understand the story.
6. John’s first question was “Class, what is the pickle’s name?” (Pepe) The question had not been asked by Monica, because we had wanted her, as a beginner with one word images, to ask only the four questions mentioned above of size, color, size of face, and emotion. We wanted to name the pickle, not the artist. It had to come from the group.
7. At this point, with sufficient – not too many and not too few – facts inherited from Monica, having only asked the pickle’s name, John ramped everything up by asking what I call the power question that is Invisibles Story Questioning Level 3: “Class, where is the pickle?” (Why is it a power question? Because whenever we ask “where” in a story, we feel the interest in the story ramp up. The movie now has a place in which to happen. It happens as well with the other power question (asked in QL4): “with whom”.)
8. John immediately got three quick suggestions: on the beach, in a jar, and in Los Angeles. So, happy to be learning Spanish is such a fun way, I put those three ideas together in my mind and suggested to John that Pepe was in a jar on a beach in Los Angeles. John immediately lit up and smiled and said, “Correct, Ben, it’s obvious! The pickle is in a jar on a beach in Los Angeles!” I felt so good that I could contribute to the class. John made me feel happy about being in his class. At that point,we were in vintage Blaine Ray storytelling mode, and there wasn’t a target to be seen for miles.
9. Note carefully that by asking only two questions (the pickle’s name and where it was), John had gotten a story cooking with gas in less than a minute from the time he stood up. Why is this important? It is because the students need and want closure within one class period about what happens in a story. They don’t like it when the story doesn’t finish in one period, so quickly getting all the way up to QL3 (of 7 levels) in the Invisibles protocol by asking only a few questions guaranteed a short and snappy story, well under the 25 minute window that we were looking for in our training session there in St. Louis.
10. John now asked for possible answers to Questioning Level 4, “With whom is the pickle?” (The power questions of “where” and “with whom” were proving their great value once again in yet another story – you will see.) The answer John went with was “with A Toaster”. Of course, other things had been suggested but John chose the toaster, and we went with it and that was that. Of course, had he wanted to he could have always consulted with his Profe 2.
(The toaster was a one word image that had been created the previous day in this workshop by another teacher, so two more people in the class were brought into the group as valuable members because one had created the image of the toaster and one had drawn it. Everyone was invested to some degree. It wasn’t Chapter 9 on Possessive Adjectives. As soon as the toaster was allowed into the story, the kids themselves who created it became part of everything. In this way we build community in our classrooms.)
11. So then at that point John had a pickle in a jar and a toaster on a beach. The problem presented itself instantly. The pickle wanted to go swimming! Now all that John had to do was ask what happened next (Questioning Level 6) In this case, the class all agreed that the toaster broke the jar with her fists – Megan had given the toaster two small fists coming out of each side of the toaster, so later when we did the Great Reveal of Megan’s artwork, there was this toaster with a determined look on its face in the second panel hitting the jar. Then in the third panel the jar had been successfully broken and Pepe was getting ready to head happily down to the water on his little pickle legs. Pepe jogging happily down to the water with the broken jar behind him remains indelibly imprinted in my mind as one of my favorite top ten stories of all time. It seemed so real! And John had started and ended the entire story in around 17 minutes, which is an accurate measurement because I was timing it.
12. For those curious, the next questioning level (7) in this Invisibles process, which we didn’t do, would have been the filming of the “Video Retell” video, just a short (5 to 7 minute) repeat/re-enactment of the story put on film for the archivist and documentary filmmaker to use for the end of year projects described in ANATS.
We all thought it was a great story. Short, snappy, fun, great art work, a clever problem with a clever ending. We all had a good time and the experience brought us more together as a group.
Megan’s drawings:
*I would have gone with one of the ICIs in the gallery bc in my own NTCI world, at least, I always seem to have better luck with stories made from ICIs than from OWIs.
(OWI = One Word Image; CCI = Class Created Image which is the exact same thing as an OWI, just another way to say it)
(ICI = Individually Created Image)