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Brevity Is Key
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63 thoughts on “Brevity Is Key”
I agree with you on brevity, Ben. I find that I can’t go for much longer on a story anyway…I’d rather have a simple, shorter story that I can do lots with then a long complicated one in which I can’t keep track of all the details. I sometimes get more mileage out of pqa than the story…but that’s just me. I know that some people don’t like or want to pqa and I totally get that. I haven’t been on the blog in awhile so I’ve probably missed some key conversations regarding pqa…and I’m on the blog now because my students are testing all week and I’m not teaching any classes.
Did you say that your students are testing ALL WEEK? What the…?
Our MS students have 12 days of testing in April and May…. totally ridiculous!
with love,
Laurie
Speaking of brevity.
“drive the story forward. ”
Yes!
Confession: I have never had a story pour over to the next day. I LOVE mini-stories!
We revisit old characters (Rico’s dog Bruno has been featured so many times in our stories, he got permission and his family brought him in one day). But the stories are new each day.
For the first time ever, one of my 6th grade classes asked that we create a story in which all the characters from the past stories appear – so of course we did a One Word Image with “Fiesta”:) Three students met with me during their study hall to help me plan the story. It’s the only time I’ve let a story go for more than a day!
Cool Fiesta. A rollback/flashback for the kids. I bet they were excited.
It went so well with my 6th graders that I did it with my 7th grade classes also. And we had a good time coming up with the dance moves for the “fiesta” gesture. I ended up teaching them with a chant/gesture “over here, over there, way over there” regarding where the party was taking place. It was also a great opportunity to recycle structures such as “when he got there” and knocks on the door.”
That is really cool, like all the characters had a party? What fun!!
I have been letting a story go more than a day. This is because I have let my reading warm-up go too long (about 10 minutes). I understand kids tuning out a little better thanks to this post. too much detail ruins it.
I used to really subscribe to the bizarre, exaggerated, and personal idea…and my stories were wild thickets of details like exactly how many hairs a character had on their left foot versus their right foot. But that is not really needed because how many actual stories have that level of detail? Unless foot hair is that important in the story…which is not outside the realm of possibility, I guess.
Can anyone recommend a teaching video demonstrating a successful 25-minute or less story? Contrary to other commenters, I have almost NEVER successfully wrapped up a story in one class period. I have learned as I get more experience that one reason is the faulty expectation that a story needs to have some sort of neatly tied bow to end it. But even after I made this adjustment of perception, I still have trouble making detail decisions expediently. I think I let my kids debate too much about what a detail should be… Anyway, I’d love to watch someone skillful at this! Thank you for any links 🙂
I have some Listen & Draw from Chinese 1 last year on video. That lasts about 12-15 minutes per story. It’s more of a scene than a story actually. (The students are drawing instead of having actors, for a simple version of the difference.) I think I captioned the whole thing in English. Would that help?
The way these things end, usually, is that I sense the interest declining, or there is a tapering off of fresh details, or there is fatigue from being in the target language for so long. So we stop and take a break, sometimes to do another scene after a break.
And I agree Diane about the fatigue and the lessening of the interest due to so much input. And we have indeed done our job if we get to that point, to have produced a rich chorus on the TL in class with our kids getting so much great input while focused on meaning. But for me this year it is about getting the story finished. I’m still learning so much about it. It’s weird and new, to be there working with the class to get to a certain corner of my classroom with a solution after failing. It’s like the corners of the room become our goals, to get there physically. Often we get stuck in the “fails to solve the problem” corner and that just makes us want to get to the “solves the problem” corner that much more the next time. But those corners keep the beginning of the story crisp and snappy and much shorter. We have somewhere to go. The big new help is the Story Driver, whose job is to push all of us along. Those kids love their jobs. And must be brilliant to do it, as well.
You move them to corners that have names? That is a darn good idea!
Hi Emily,
My stories almost NEVER have an end when I want them to…So I do one of two things in order to wrap it up so that we can read it. 1) I make up an ending for them so it’s sort of like an embeddeded reading. 2) I type up the story and then leave some space for them each to come up with their own ending which they share in class after we read the story-they really do love this-the only problem with this is that they often don’t have the language to properly explain their ending.
I was working with a wonderful intern a few years ago who was also having trouble deciding on which details to pick for the story during the story asking so I told her just to pick every third suggestion for each detail. I also usually have a back up detail in mind in case I don’t like what the students come up with.
… pick every third suggestion …
I just ask the Professor 2. The main thing for me is that we all have to “feel it” for it to be accepted into the story. There is like a group mind thing going on. I wrote a post about it once. Piazza alike the term “mind meld”. Interesting stuff.
Emily I am now doing 25 minute stories routinely. I have one on video but have been neglecting to organize it – it’s sitting in my external drive. I’ll get there. The stories are light on the entry data. Very streamlined. What is allowed in better drive the story forward or it doesn’t get in. Most of the story happens in the middle, not the beginning. Can we talk about this more at a conference? iFLT? France?
Ben
Ben, are you doing a “3 location” story? Or just a simple story with problem and (maybe) resolution?
I’ve found that I limit stories to one location the majority of the time, not as a rule but just because I interrupt the story enough with things like individual public dictado/ TPR/etc to already fill an entire class. 25 minutes… I look forward to how this develops.
Do you consider recycling of acquired (for most anyways) language as cluttering?
Jim this is a very subtle question:
…do you consider recycling of acquired (for most anyways) language as cluttering?…
Yes I do. I know that that conflicts with the handed down status quo. But my interest now is in building compelling interest. It is the focus of every story. I would much rather keep them focused on a compelling message than let my teacher side bring in some word because I feel like it “needs to be taught”. I don’t even know what that means any more, “needs to be taught”. I teach French, isn’t that enough? So I avoid doing anything that will take the high level interest that we have going in a story down even one notch.
An example: Today a superstar grammar nerd who keeps telling me how she wants me to teach discrete grammar whenever I can during a story got all happy when I used a somewhat rare form of the subjunctive in a story. She lit up, but just as she lit up everyone else in the room went flat, like the plug got pulled. No L1 here, just a complex odd subjunctive that would only attract about one kid in the class. So in the past I would have broken out a nice ham sandwich, cracked my knuckles and proceeded to teach that one girl what she was obviously so happy to learn, making the other kids wait, but this time I left the sandwich in the box and went on with the story. The nerd was disappointed and I had to give her “the look” because they all know that I am against one or two kids controlling a classroom, which I lecture too much on in English. I did the right thing, though, and that was the second class today that got in under 25 minutes with an incredible story that I am going to have to think about when I go to sleep just to figure it out, like what happened. That was one story that made me realize how much we sell our students short when we give them one size fits all instruction. One size doesn’t fit all. The kids we teach, once unlocked, transform into fantastic light beings. We just need the key. That is what the above post and the new stuff is all about. Unlocking light.
Hi Jim,
I almost never get to more than 2 locations..I find that I get enough reps with pqa and circling the first two locations…I move it onto another location if I think the problem of the one location isn’t compelling enough…
Emily I don’t believe I have ever captured any story that concludes in 25 min. or less on videotape. But in the past week and just today the 25 minutes limit was met and that class walked out of the room as if it had broken some kind of school record. But it wasn’t caught on film. I know what I did, however, how I altered things to get that result, but it is much too complex to discuss here.
Jim I know what you mean by the one location. I just won’t allow that to happen anymore. It is such a big deal for the kids to know what happens. I’ve changed.
Let’s all commit to getting some video up here for Emily and the rest of us! The April challenge! A story in under 25!
OK I should be able to get a 25′ story up here in the next week or two. Sans visible kids though which take a lot out of the images but the brevity pieces she is wanting to look at can be addressed. If anyone else does it, break it into two 12.5′ halves for YouTube as their limit per video is 15′.
Mini-story…25′ time frame…I find this focus helpful. I can always do a good job of wandering off track. But many kids need things to be a little tighter to keep from getting lost.
Something that has helped me:
1. Get through the plot (problem/solution/min. details).
2. Go back through the plot a few times
In the past I have mired down in trying to add details before getting anywhere. This way the students get a sense of wrapping it up. The idea is that the story can always be extended (time wise) by going back through it again and again adding a few new questions each time. So the time is extended, but the plot is not. It is bulked up from within.
Hey Nathaniel just yesterday I was observing Zach and his class was crisp and sharp and I wish I had it on videotape to share here – and during our debrief he spontaneously said that he felt that the clutter of stories was largely due to all the detail gathering at the beginning of the story.
And then – and I am not making this up – a student in 8th period (right after I observed Zach’s class) said exactly the same thing! Almost word for word. And I have it on videotape – it’s on the 25′ video I made for Emily yesterday. We were trying for a 25 minute story for Emily and this kid just blurts out like he was sad about it that we never get a 25 minute story because of all those early details.
What you say Nathaniel takes this topic to a whole new level, here:
…this way the students get a sense of wrapping it up. The idea is that the story can always be extended (time wise) by going back through it again and again adding a few new questions each time. So the time is extended, but the plot is not. It is bulked up from within….
This is a powerful thing to say. It’s an astounding thing. It made me scratch my head like for real, like in a cartoon or something. It says that if we were to go against everything we’ve ever learned about storytelling in terms of trying to add in details, and instead keep the beast nice and trim and well fed but not overfed, then we will not only get a nice sense of closure on the story during one class period but also end up with a nice sleek and understandable story.
I find that idea amazing. I will include this entire 25 minute story thing in my new April book. The “25 Minute Story”. It has a ring to it.
What you do is challenge the class by asking them if they think they can do a story in 25 minutes or less. Of course they are kids so they get all up in arms and say, “Of course we can!”
And they can’t, because the culture of TPRS stories is to always make the story too fat, especially at the beginning like we said above.
It’s up to us as the teachers to feed the dog right. We have to limit the dog’s food intake at the beginning of the class. If we feed the dog too much at the beginning, it will have too much in its stomach and get worms and fat and shit like that.
Tina Hargaden said this on that topic here yesterday:
…I used to really subscribe to the bizarre, exaggerated, and personal idea, and my stories were wild thickets of details like exactly how many hairs a character had on their left foot versus their right foot. But that is not really needed because how many actual stories have that level of detail? Unless foot hair is that important in the story, which is not outside the realm of possibility, I guess….
Watch the kids get totally into it. The timer will take over and the class will act like they just won the game if they get in under the 25 minutes before the end of the class period. They do the high fives on the way out of the room, the whole thing.
If you do this with your classes please report back here with the results. I’ll be writing my book this month but I bet it is an interesting discussion.
(I will time stamp this 25 Minute Story discussion for August so we can revisit it, and perhaps have healthier and slimmer dogs next year in our classroom. We won’t be in such deep dog doo doo next year if we do 25 minutes stories.)
SO RIGHT. I bet classroom management would be a lot easier if I had always had crisper, cleaner, tighter stories. I am firmly committed to finishing them fast now. The kids need to start to trust that you will wrap them up fast. They have been trained by me to not trust the process of getting a story off the ground, through the storm, and back into the hangar. Because in the fall I was rambling, rambling. NEXT YEAR I will FLY through them and we will all be lots happier.
Well, here I sit in my empty classroom, first week of school starts for me Friday, and really excited to be starting with 25-35 min. stories this year. I am glad that this thread was timestamped to return to us at this moment.
Always telling shorter stories this year from the get-go will make a world of difference, I reckon. I know it did last spring when I started challenging myself and the class (and using the Best Job Ever, the Story Driver) to go more swiftly and leanly through the stories. It just lifted us up to a new level of interest and trust.
I will never forget when I asked the class, about two or three weeks into using the Story Driver and the new artists job and the Invisibles and the levels of questioning, to tell me if they noticed a difference. A couple of kids shyly snaked their hands into the air. “Well, they are faster and, uh, hmm, not as…uh, boring?” I said, “Yeah that is what I am thinking too.” And then it was like the cork was out of the bottle, and they all held forth with great enthusiasm on how much better it is to go faster, that stories with the Invisibles and the artists and the Story Driver seemed much more fun, they are easier to listen to, that they liked it much better.
So, I learned that day that although I was always just doing my job, just delivering CI, my kids were kind of just sitting there enduring it. That was a day I will never forget, and the day I vowed to get things zipping along as much as possible, every day.
Tina. I am doing more stories that just end the same day. Im doing owi first then spinning out into an untargeted story. There’s lits of creating but sometimes it drags. i do have a story driver. It might be the number of suggestions plus I bring in the actors as well. For my block (80 minutes) we do both a story and a reading in one day. Then I ask for a retell. I do not plan on doing dictee. I want to enter as little as possible in my grade book.
Steven could you break down into sections how you are using those 80 minutes?
Yes yes yes. I also have 80 min. blocks. I like the idea of story and reading in one day, then the retell. I’m only 3 days in, so just playing around with OWI, CWB and giving them sort of a “sampler” while introducing the jobs and such. Team building in English as part of teaching procedures and stuff. “Chair drills” have been going well so far (teaching them to move the chairs from our “team” formation, which is the default, to “circle” and to ”
Would love to hear how your transitions go. Transitions are typically challenging for me, and not just in the classroom. In “real life” I often forget to carve time for transitions, so am very interested to hear how you go from story to reading, etc.
Time for the April Challenge!
I fear 25 min wrapped-up-in-a-class-period stories (I have 30 min classes).
My fear is that the story will wrap up, and what will I do next time? Will I keep having to come up w/new stories for 8 groups/day/39 groups a week? I feel grounded when the kids file in and we continue the story, or the MT, or the novel…
But I can be convinced otherwise, as long as it’s not too exhausting. That’s it – fear of even more on-my-toes intensity. More dancing around, pausing, pointing, getting in their faces and working the room. More of my incessant voice and my dang questions.
But if the story wraps in one class session, then I can follow with oodles of ROA extensions, and not ask/tell another story for a while, right?
Is a good rule of thumb 1 story to 4 follow-up activities WITH that story? That’s your week if you meet every day.
You do what works for you and your students, and deliver the input. You are not the kind of person to fall into a rut and ignore cries of pain from your students. Trust yourself and what works for you, and tinker if you want to. That’s what I say. Different kinds of schedules call for different systems.
Agreed. Do what works for you.
Not in my opinion Lance. I know that we have lots of follow up activities to choose from and it would be tempting to create a routine but I like to go on feel. That is why I like to have Reading Option A lying around after a story.
If I feel like Textivating the story, I do that. Maybe I’m in the mood for some Choral Reading followed by Reading from the Back of the Room. But then I would stop and do a story more often than once a week.
Often, we do five stories in five classes in a row with no testing, no reading, no follow up activities at all. The energy is so up for stories I can’t argue them down. I’m just going with the flow, being my regular irresponsible hippie self, taking care of me first and my job second*. There are no rules in this work.
*because the people we work for don’t know the difference or care.
Wow five stories in a row-that’s badass. I think I would keel over if I did that for five days. I could do it for 5 classes in a row. I think I need to learn how to do stories in a more chill way. Like Angie said earlier, I am exhausted at the end of the day. I keep trying to remember the advice Carol Gaab gave us during her Reader’s theater workshop-let the students expend their own energy especially when acting, not the teacher.
Books are awesome chill time. There are a billion books available for ESL but almost none in French. (Blaine’s books are boring). I love my graphic novels, but they are so much work (coming from a workaholic)! Any book suggestions?
Scratch that -I don’t need any. 🙂
Very few books for German as well. Almost all of them are translated from Spanish as well and that’s not making them very good. I just ordered a set of Robert Harrell’s “Nordseepiraten” but that’s for intermediate. I have my kids stories in folders for reading options but at some point I would love to have more beginner books for SSR. I guess I should start writing them, if only the day had 6 more hours.
Annemarie I know I’m sneaking on here and supposed to be writing that book but what you said about getting tired doing stories is not necessary anymore. We are doing stories that are much more tight and streamlined. We are aiming to do stories now in around a half an hour, never carrying a story over to the next day. Students don’t really want that – they want to know what happens. I’m talking about this in my new book so I’ll go back to it now. The point that made me jump in here is that the idea of the exhausted TPRS teacher from doing stories is jsut a myth. What is really exhausting is to try to teach a grammar class. Now THAT is a tough thing to try to do with a bunch of rude kids who would rather watch paint dry.
Ben,
I look forward to reading more about this! I agree that teaching grammar sucks my soul and the soul of my students. Doing stories is by far my favorite thing to do with my students and they certainly prefer them over anything else I do. I need do learn this new way you are talking about.
Ben Slavic just said “No reading.”
No reading!
Months ago this would have shocked my inner reading teacher. How much I’ve learned from you, Ben. You are changing my definition of reading. Reading is no longer confined to the pages of a book. Literacy starts with a good ol’ fashioned silly story. The best books are the books kids make themselves.
The best lesson plans are the ones we throw in the trash when our kids have a better idea.
Thanks Ben for redefining “reading” for me. My advanced kids will keep their (mostly graphic) novels because they aren’t scared of them any more, but my beginners need freedom from the Big Bad chapter book. Non-fluent students need flight and fancy. They need books not yet on paper and stories not yet told.
Don’t respond, you’re busy with your book, but we love you, Ben. See you next May. I hope you enjoy writing your book as much as I know I’ll enjoy reading it. You’ll be missed.
Yeah I definitely need to rein it in so I down keel over after a workday.
I seen kids 3x week, but I agree w/y’all that following the energy is great. SOmetimes my own anxiety abt “what am I doing w/the next class?” drives me to have more of a general plan, especially cuz i’m changing among 4 grade levels.
So Ben when we see you looking at that stapled paper document, is it a print out of ROA that you’re scanning? I’d like to see your crib notes!
I move along from story to story, or rather from class story to movie talk to teacher-written story, (not always in that order) a lot faster than I did last year, because I had so many complaints about how slow-moving the class was. I never get output mastery, but I don’t think I care. What I’m getting is students who calmly accept unfamiliar texts and can increasingly handle reading, discussing, and even retelling or free writing them. And their output skills are building. It’s not the story itself I care about. It’s the language they have to work with when the story is over. I might not care if they can retell it perfectly, I just want them to have a notch or two more language in their systems. This is something I’m playing around with.
I have to admit, I just did Matava’s lazy. It took 45 minutes, and I couldn’t have done it shorter. Something for me to work on.
Those scripts… sometimes there’s tight and crisp sometimes they’re not. I skip pqa and just establish meaning briefly and off we go. You can embedd pqa during a reading class.
I totally agree with this Ben! I am leaving out the clutter and either asking extra questions when we read or just leaving the clutter out all together. The kids want the action and this is what drives the story forward . Plus, it makes it a heck of a lot easier to type up and then I can do multiple activities with just a paragraph or two.
“Don’t finish the story.” There is something rewarding to the human mind to bring closure and my goal is to keep a tighter more focused story.
But I believe that the idea (“Don’t finish the story”) was that it is not about stories or finishing stories. It is about the kids. In other words, it is not about long stories and short stories, as much as it is about the co-creation of the story. Was it enjoyable? If it was not enjoyable, it is time to reflect. (And there may be some other concerns that are important to us.) I just want us to give ourselves latitude from story to story.
Ok, so I see everyone underlines the value of fast stories. But my students are the ones who want all these crazy details. They would let a story drag on for more than a class if I let them. I was actually considering breaking the story into smaller chunks and doing it over the course of the week. But after reading this, I don’t think so. I think I’ll challenge myself and my classes to do mini stories from now until winter break. Our timer and story driver will really need to move us along.
Yes but Dana do keep in mind that those kids are not the average kid. I mean, they invented the Invisibles, right? Out of curiosity, are the real firebrands you describe above 6th graders? In 2015-16, they were the ones who were far more animated and fun to teach. The seventh graders a bit less and the eighth graders were boring. Of course, they had worksheet backgrounds but yours don’t. I think there is some mathematical proportion between number of previous worksheets and ability to unleash imagination in middle school kids.
My 6th and 7th graders love these stories. They are awesome with it and the enthusiasm is so high. My 8th graders are great and still want to do the stories but they get so off-track and are too hard to settle down and stay focused. I’ve done one story with them and it was way too hard! They aren’t at all apathetic like most 8th graders I’ve taught so that’s great. But I need really structured activities to keep the class manageable. Otherwise, I lose my patience and get grumpy and tired. They’re honestly like my own kids and we had so much fun with stories last year.
So, do you think I should strive to cut down on the details? Or let them go with it?
I still can’t believe that the school brought Helena Curtain there. I can’t think of an adjective. Weird? They should have just had you walk across campus to present instead of flying her half way around the world. Upper school is still closed off in WL, it seems.
It’s our director in the Office of Teaching and Learning. She knows HC from way back and must like her. I think she brought her here to force us to get curriculum documented. However, we could have done that without paying HC the big bucks. Give us some release time and we could write it. It is what it is. I’ve come to terms with it. However, I won’t forget how she treated me and how she made me feel. I will never work with her collaboratively again. They can forget that idea. I will not allow myself to be treated like that again.
…I will not allow myself to be treated like that again….
And you won’t be, because the HCs of the past have been in the process of becoming like billboards flying by in the rear window down the road of our new direction in teaching. I have worked with you and HC has NOTHING on your creativity, energy, kindness and overall expertise in this field.
The high school there in Delhi will be forced at some point to recognize that the kids coming to them from you are FAR better prepared than before. Zach is doing a great job keeping the rudder from being turned aside there. The American Embassy School should be writing you daily letters of thanks, because their IB scores just got a lot better bc of you and they know that on some level.
If any new readers here wish, they can find a lot more discussion on how WE in this group have felt for some time about Curtain, just by searching her name in the search bar here.
No longer will the old intimidate the new. That game is over. I am so happy that you chose to come to Philadelphia in 2017, when only a few weeks later you had to move your entire family to India. That is strength!
Thanks, Ben. Things have shifted at the school these days. It’s all about making things “clear and transparent”. Our director of T&L hasn’t been into my classroom once so she has no idea about what goes on in there. She wants curriculum documentation to be completed so that if someone new we’re to come in, they would know where to begin. They want it packaged and parcelled neatly. You know, Zach and I were trying to take what we do with stories and get it down on paper. It wouldn’t be a format we’d follow because we do it all at once, not broken into units. However, when we got to tying it together and creating a unit on what makes a good narrative, she lost her sh*! on us again.
Themes allow for language teachers to package what they teach into clean little boxes. However, they don’t enhance student learning because engagement isn’t guaranteed. I don’t understand what the issue is with letting us write down what we do how we do it. But it’s different and they don’t want that.
I think the Star Sequence completely supplants all that 80’s thematic mapping. The thematic planning was really appropriate for gen ed classrooms – a way to insure the content could incorporate other disciplines so that the learning could feel connected. But it, too, was very contrived in the language classroom – how to incorporate math? Count up the days or the widgets. Sorry but after kindergarten or 1st grade counting isn’t really math. Social studies – cultures and communities. Usually concepts way to complex and requiring way too much language to deliver in L2 – for novices. Science? What about it? Call me crazy but I don’t think someone who’s not solid on the Super 7 can successfully take in an L2 science lesson.
The Star allows us to go from node to node deepening the language; and each node is about extending and developing meaning. It can be used for any content – a song, a painting, a newspaper article, a video clip. I think about Krashen’s quote about each exposure to a lexical item revealing another 5% of the word’s meaning; the star is shimmering and twinkling – as we pass from node to node meaning is emanating from it. It’s also a much more practical document cuz it can list the actual lesson plan (or options for it) for that day/week/cycle.
Old habits and paradigms die hard. But in retrospect I don’t think (classical) thematic planing was ever appropriate for the Novice to Intermed/low language student.
So, I tried my challenge today. Take an OWI and create a story in less than 30 minutes. Both my foundational class and intermediate class did it! Granted, we had already determined the character so it wasn’t as heavy on that side. But we pushed through the story parts where normally we get hung up because we all were in on the 30-minute challenge. Maybe I can do this!
Well just remember that there are no rules. By the way it is assumed that he character is already made (either as a OWI (class created image) or an ICI (individually created image) so that the timing starts at QL 2 of the process. (QL2 – “who” is a review and I give it 2-4 minutes to start the process.)
Dana did you use the story driver? I find that where I get hung up is toward the end of the story in QL 5 bc I want to do introduce more dialogue than I have time for. And then if we use the director’s cues (a must!) it slows us down even more. But again, no rules….
I learned a lot about the Star Sequence in Chicago with an amazing group of teachers at the Catherine Cook School. The Star and all aspects of this new work are deeper and more powerful than I had any idea. I’m going to have to rewrite A Natural Approach to Stories (ANATS).
Yes, I used a story driver, but I did that last year too and it didn’t help me because I wanted to get out lots of details. Using an OWI meant that the students already knew the vocabulary for the character’s description. When I shift to a student’s character, I think I might describe the character one day and do the story the next. That way, it’s not too much new language and the students aren’t as tired.
The key for me was telling the class that I’ve set a challenge for myself and I need their help – that we need to finish the story in less than 30 minutes. They were all up for the challenge and we’re focused on that goal too.