I made five videos in Connecticut that I would like to share here. This one describes how to create an Invisibles story using the “seven level questioning sequence” described in A Natural Approach to Stories.
The instruction, being from a workshop and not a regular class with real students, is not great teaching – just a demo. Indeed, the need we have in our society to win approval or to be hailed as something special because of our great teaching talent is in my opinion destructive.
Some of us have fallen for the wiles of the ego in this game of teaching and the historical altar-worshipping of the great ones in TPRS – Linda Li, Susan Gross, Blaine Ray, etc. – and in my view it is something that we just need to get over.
Great teaching is extremely rare. We must recognize the ego-driven desire that drives us forward to win the approval of our colleagues. I am guilty of it, of course, because I grew up on a steady diet of competition in athletics and academics and just about everything else and it nearly killed me.
Trying to be the smartest person in the room is not good for us. We can only be who we are in our classrooms and that is enough. Our students only need comprehensible input in order to become confident in their language abilities. That’s all they need. It’s about them not us.
That said, this is who I was in the workshop last month with Keri Biron and her colleagues in Wallingford, CT, trying to explain to them how to get through the seven levels of questioning of an Invisibles story.
Two important notes:
(1) The floor panels are very useful to me but you can decide if you want to use them yourself when working through a story. They keep me “grounded”. I need that. The Story Driver guides me along – not really in this video, but that is how it is supposed to work – from panel to panel in my goal to knock out an Invisibles story in 25 minutes or less.
(2) I didn’t get footage on level 7, the Video Retell. My phone was full. But it’s easy to do level seven – all you do is retell the story from the side, out of view, so only your voice is heard, while the videographer films the actors as they re-create the final product of the just-created story for the end-of-year artifact collection process (documentary film, etc.) that is put out by the tech team in the class (Hub D). Questioning Level 7 – the Video Retell – usually is about a 3′ long process.
In this story we were working from a one word image (class created character) from the day before, not from an indidvidually created character. The other four videos, which I will post later, describe how to make an Invisibles story from an individually created character.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9Wo4tvJd5Y&feature=youtu.be