I got a question:
Ben, how is your new concept of the Invisibles different from other TPRS techniques?
My response:
Nothing is never new and I am not making that claim with the Invisibles.
I feel that the Invisibles express in a wonderful way the word serendipity, where (1) the images we create and (2) the jobs we have in the classroom and (3) the particular way we do the questioning levels come together in a way that just makes stories a lot better, with a lot more things poppin’ during the story. At least this was my own experience in my own classroom in New Delhi last year. Others report a change in their teaching as well. But nothing new in terms of basic CI principles, except for the One Word Images, which were of my own invention in 2004, as per this 2009 version of it:
As Kathrin Shectman has said about the Invisibles, “Do you really have to reinvent the wheel to come up with something new? Can’t you just change the material and composition and have it be new and exciting? I feel like I have gone from a wooden wheel to a rubber one, the basic idea stays the same but the ride is so much smoother.”
Another way to answer that question is to say that, with the Invisibles, we learn a way to listen to what our students want to say instead of cramming the language down their throats.