In the post below, Bryce addresses the spontaneous creation of CI as opposed to the standard option that we always have in the three steps. It’s the old question of whether to do stay close to the safety of stories or just roam free with one word images and PQA and the like.
Everybody has their own take on that. I prefer the free roaming stuff unless I have a great script to work from. If I have a mediocre script it just kind of sits there in the middle of the circling and the CI and emits a low grade odor.
The hippy stuff, the PQA freaks, those who want to just take “what comes up” in the classroom and running with it is an art form, will not find a more valuable description of how to do that than here in Bryce’s offering:
We are all struggling with the winter blahs this time of year. Will this winter EVER end? The students have heard our best jokes and have grown inured to the routine. We need help in maintaining interesting comprehensible input.
In the book The Survivor’s Club Ben Sherwood talks about how the ability to take advantage of random events is perceived as “luck” by those that are not good at it. He claims that this ability can be learned. Since reading that, I am working on taking advantage of random events to generate CI that kids will pay attention to in my classes, and I had some “luck” last week with a random event that morphed into interesting CI.
I cut my head while shaving and came to school with two criss-crossed bandages on it on Monday. The wound was obvious and looked like it hurt. When students asked about my head I (in Spanish) started a story (in Spanish): “It happened in Denver on Saturday night. I don’t really want to talk about it.” Of course, this just piqued their interest and they kept asking “What happened?”
Setting the stage with a plausible real-life event and reeling them in with is a great way to get the kids to pay attention. I have come to think of it as my “Shanghai gambit”. Here is what I mean: I have a couple of scars on one of my arms, and one day, inevitably a kid will randomly ask in the middle of a lesson “What happened to your arm?” I almost always respond: “It happened in Shanghai one night a long time ago,” and I (ostensibly) continue with the lesson.
My wonderful lesson plans have now been altered–now the lesson is about giving them interesting CI when they ask for it and to keep reeling them in. Susie Gross has always said it is about talking to the kids, not necessarily stories.
Another hand will go up or someone will blurt out (In Spanish–I don’t respond to English when we are speaking in Spanish): “What? Shanghai? You lived in Shanghai?” and they will demand more and more detail the more I withhold details from them. It is very similar to asking a story, except now the kids are the ones asking for the details. I give them just enough to keep it interesting.
The head bandage story grew and changed with each hour throughout the day. Toward the end of the day, it went something like this:
“I went to Denver to buy a book for this class (nothing like laying a bit of make-believe guilt on kids to pull them in). I was walking back to my car when a group of five men approached me. Two of them had baseball bats (or in some versions, machetes) and they wanted to take my money. I said to them that I didn’t have any money because all of my money goes for books for my Spanish classes. They wanted the book. I did not give it to them. I said, ‘No, it is for my seventh hour Spanish class.’ So they attacked me.”
“How come they only cut you one time?”, some kid invariably would ask.
“Well, you know that I am very quick, and so they just cut me a little bit. I had to fight them. I didn’t want to do it. Now four of them are in the hospital (or in some versions, in jail), but one escaped.”
It seems like the critical thinking portion of the brain is temporarily disengaged while kids are listening in another language–maybe because they are trying so hard to get all of the details–the students seem tho believe that part of the story may actually be true.
The wonderful thing is that they asked one another about it outside of class and returned the next day reporting the details from other versions of the story from other classes. Then I got the opportunity to re-tell the story and integrate the details they had heard form other students into the story and make it a larger, and more coherent version of the original. Sort of like an extended reading is an expanded and more complex version of a simpler story.
The following day they came back again and reported that the stories STILL did not add up, so I got to do it all another time, expanding all the way. It all happened in Spanish and almost all of the students were engaged. We got a good 45 minutes of interesting CI for three days out of that situation. The head bandages and the subsequent stories serendipitously worked well for me last week, and I am going to work on using something like it again.
Bryce