Jim has been with the group for many years. He is always changing and evolving. Here is an excellent report describing what he is up to these days:
Lately the way I’ve approached CWB has changed. After a few conversations with Bryce and others about how they do personal interviews, I’ve found myself more comfortable talking about real (i.e. non-fiction) things with students even in first weeks and months.
I haven’t made up my mind if it’s a better way for me yet, but it’s certainly a bit different approach than the way I used to approach CWB, which was always much more dipped in the bizarre element from the get-go.
So I interview a student, for roughly a whole class (with other things like TPR mixed in especially early on). The next day we write and discuss, or I live type as Diane called it recently, while we expand on interview information. The following day we do a story, usually with the student as the main character. The intentionality of it for me lies in the ongoing development of some super simple scripts that relate to the students’s CWB drawing. For example today we started a super simple story about a girl who drew a volleyball and we’d been discussing the last two days. My script was really more of a plot that anything… with us just going from the moment that the girl served the ball. “she has the ball. she serves/hits the ball. the ball hits someone on the other team. It hits the girl on the other team in the mouth. She loses 16 teeth.” I knew that the girl was going to serve the ball and that it was going to hit someone, but that’s really it. Room for plenty of unscripted story if desired, while also tethering me to a simple plot that connects to this girl and her interest.
I suppose I’ve been trending in this way for a while, since writing something similar on your blog years ago when you had me and a couple others guest-writing. It was called “Spanish One: One student, one structure, one week”. I think I’d still call it that, substituting now “story” for “structure”.
As I’ve been following and reading about the explosion of OWI and Invisibles, I keep reveling in the power of these images for bizarre visualization. It’s such a great way to get kids’ imaginations rocking. We did one with “the football player” recently. The OWI was the special football that he wanted. It was a strange looking ball named Templton with long pretty hair and he rides a tiny motorcycle. Energy was high during its creation. It also reminds me to get my ass in gear with illustrators this year. I’ve been slacking on this end at my new job… trying to get settled at a new school this year has been not as easy as I had hoped, logistically-speaking mostly.