Card Talk/Circling with Balls is an activity that can last all year, and we only want to use maybe one card per class, or even one card per week, as we milk all the information we can out of a particular card before going to another one. Because of Card Talk, we are free to focus on enforcing the rules and building community in the first weeks and months of the year.
Those of us who are using Card Talk right now in conjunction with the Invisibles would do well to take a close look at the role of intuition in this work with the student cards.
Typically, as per the instructions in all the books all the way back to and before the Big CI Book that talk about Circling with Balls/Card Talk , we pick up a card that appeals to us as we walk around the room and start talking about it.
That means that we have to find the right time to start talking about a certain child’s card. If the child is not ready to have her card discussed, we must wait, we must find the right time, and that means relying on our intuition.
What does this do? It allows us to get to know each student better when each student is ready for that. Some kids have been badly scarred by having to present to a class in a certain way when they are not ready. (That’s the real cause of withdrawn students – it’s not that they don’t want to learn; it’s that they’re scared.)
And what if a child is just having a bad day? What if they don’t yet possess the kind of trust that they will one day have in your classroom after being allowed to “watch from the sidelines” as you slowly build the community back from what most classrooms have become?
My point is to suggest that we learn to “feel what is happening” with certain kids before immediately talking about their card.
This work is intuitive. When we go through the cards during our planning period when choosing which one we are going to work with on any given day, we must sense what is going on with certain students. Most of us do all this naturally and intuitively in class without even thinking about it.
Also, don’t pre-fabricate stories. I addressed this important point in the 2008 post just re-published here yesterday. Stories that we pre-fabricate are doomed. Good stories or tableaux grow intuitively from the card chosen for that day. It’s a result of spontaneous emergence of funny and happy things as we go through the seven questioning levels.
CI can’t work when we force things any more than natural conversations can be interesting when one person tries to force it down a certain path (targeting, etc.) We need to loosen up on the “mindset” and embrace the “heartset” of this work more. This shows respect.