In exchanging emails with Jeff Easthon in Illinois, who totally gets the Invisibles, I was surprised to learn that he is staying with Matava story scripts this year as his main CI delivery option. He explained to me that for him the Invisibles, though they have power, get a little dicey when it is time to come up with a problem.
My insight from Jeff’s observation is that I did in fact create the Invisibles approach with small classes of highly motivated kids of privilege in New Delhi last year. For this reason, I would ask anyone doing the Invisibles this year to keep a close eye on what happens when the story rolls from Level of Questioning 4 to Level of Questioning 5.
There is no doubt about the potential here, but how this new approach works with larger classes (over 25) is of great interest to me this year and I would love to get any feedback I can on this topic.
We talked about this one morning in Portland last week. We discussed the importance of how we connect the two characters that are brought into the process in Level of Questioning 2 and 4 and how a problem can come from that. We agreed that the nature of the relationship between the two characters, not to mention where they are, can play a strong role in creating a strong problem.
Of course, the importance of strong colors and character details, especially in the first character, whether it is made by motivated kids on their own or through the one word image set up process that was the brainchild of Kathrin in Germany last summer, cannot be overestimated. Motivated kids creating fantastic characters is the big key to making the Invisibles approach work.