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Pacing a Story
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8 thoughts on “Pacing a Story”
I can’t be reminded often enough to slow down. This is my BIGGEST weakness (among many others). Lately, I have encountered just that – bored looks and lack of attention (lots of distracting behaviors). And, deep down, I knew exactly why all this was happening. So, thank for the much needed hit over the head with the sledgehammer! I will PQA Jen’s “cold boy” structures today (thanks Jen!!!) and do the story tomorrow, all the while thinking of your post.
I think that the pacing key is this…make sure that each student has the accurate visual story in his/her head…before you go anywhere else. Key point Ben! Gracias!
with love,
Laurie
Laurie this is so true –
…make sure that each student has the accurate visual story in his/her head….
We absolutely must reach out with our awareness of what each kid is experiencing to make sure that they have that image accurately portrayed. This awareness will bring the awareness of SLOW. In that respect it is what jen said about this work being like a yoga practice. We must be aware of the experience of each of our kids in our classes at all times.
Brigitte – Jennifer has a great script there but it is too complex if your kids are level one students. That kind of Matava script is too complex for level one classes. This is a new awareness for me. It came out of that thread where Laurie challenged me about going too wide, if not totally out of bounds, in my own practice of PQA and stories.
It offended me when Laurie first said it a few months ago, but I have to own it. She has presented with me at national conferences and has seen first hand this weakness in my teaching to go all over the place. I need to slow down too. I need to use simpler scripts. My kids don’t understand me a lot of the time.
We want simplicity in this work. Read some of the threads in that category here. Our success depends on our completely deconstructing most of what we think about communicating wtih kids in the TL. We cannot continue to speak too fast to them. The internal work that you prescribe for yourself above, Brigitte, is not going to be easy!
Slowing down seems simple. If you want to slow down on a bike, you stop peddling and put on the brakes. But if you want to slow down in a story (the empty looks in the students’ eyes are the flashing orange light signalling us to slow down), you have to develop the awareness of what the students are experiencing mentioned above.
My take on this crucial topic of SLOW is that if the climate in our buildings is one of high stress, in which fear of being judged by both students and colleagues is almost palpable, then we will never get to SLOW. We can’t slow down if we are under that kind of stress.
We need to cultivate compassion for that tendency in ourselves to go too fast. We need to forgive ourselves for turning our careers into speed events. If we can do that, we can slow down in our classrooms. Maybe.
Yes, and in a way, counter-intuitive on the boredom thing. The students ACT like it’s too slow, too uninteresting, when in fact it’s too difficult and too fast. That’s what I find with my 7th graders. The “bored” looks from 3 sharp kids need not to push me into speeding up, but into slowing down. I’ll try to use those kinds of reactions as a reminder to slow down.
…the students ACT like it’s too slow, too uninteresting, when in fact it’s too difficult and too fast….
Brilliantly expressed. They are, after all, children, and they want to understand. So when they don’t, being children, and many of them afraid and untrained in self-advocacy, they shut down and we in our hubris take that as an insult to our teaching and we even use jGR in completely the wrong way to call them lazy.
We must be very careful in how we use jGR. I had that awareness in class the other day and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was internally pissed at about five kids because they weren’t with me. Then I slowed down like from 45 mph down to 10 mph, and they sat up in their seats and started participating. Bad on me for not going 10 mph from the start of class. What if I had given them 1’s and 2’s in the gradebook for their dismal jGR performance that day? I would have been wrong. If they don’t understand, it is because we are going too fast. Period.
Actually, I’m using Jen’s script for both my level 2 kids and the ones who are in their second year of level 1 (level one is two years in our district). Today we just PQAed and I managed to go r e a l l y, r e a l l y S L O W. So much so, that in level 1 it took us all period just to PQA “he/she is cold”. Big difference! I will keep going in this vein and if it takes me all week to PQA the rest of the structures.
Right on. Go with the flow.
By the way, could it be that the reason your school went with the two years for level one is that the grammar teachers were so ineffective that they needed to blame it on something and couldn’t blame it on their students anymore and certainly would have never looked at their own inefficient instruction as being the cause for so little being achieved in one year?
Related:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2009/10/11/i-can-relax/
Anything is possible…. your guess is as good as mine. Although yours seems to be a very good guess.
But the tide is changing, curiously Sandy is giving me lots of opportunity to spread the word. I am carpooling right now with colleagues from the Spanish department and on the first day in the car together, after 5 minutes the first one asked: “so, how does that work again with that TPRS you’re doing?” 🙂
This is the first year I’m teaching 7th grade (1st year of level 1) and the kids pretty much could already handle the listening, reading, (possibly even the writing) that is required for the state exam (or replacement thereof) at the end of 8th grade. We will have such a ball over the next two years, just talking about whatever interests us (assuming we ever go back to school – off again today because of a snowstorm!!!!!).