A way to train teachers that I have found very successful is to just return to something Blaine was doing before all the fracturing of TPRS over the past twenty years, for which I am partially to blame and I apologize, is to return to Passive Mini Stories, or the infamous PMS term.
Perhaps it was the acronym that threw people off the scent of true TPRS, because they forgot this simple yet brilliant strategy to get a teacher’s TPRS legs under her. Passive Mini Stories provided a set of training wheels and kept the training of the new teacher firmly in the body where it belongs.
Instead of being out of their minds with new ideas to think about and things to do, teachers using passive mini stories, and later actual story scripts, were able to find a nice and simple way to ramp their way up to full blown stories that brought the quality that they wanted.
A secondary level, beyond the PMS but not quite up to full Blaine type stories, was the story script. Few teachers avail themselves of them now, but they work. Anne Matava and Jim Tripp have the best ones out there, indeed the only ones that I know about. Anne has an important chapter in her script books that teaches teachers how to write really good story scripts.
Combined with an emotionally safe coaching setting, where the coaches don’t tell new teachers what to do but rather gently ask questions about options the teacher might have while working on her feet, passive mini stories and longer professionally written story scripts can provide the necessary lead up to doing actual stories with confidence and ease.
For more, see the sample stories at the end of TPRS in a Year! They guide the new teacher through the thought processes involved in standing in front of a real class and creating a home run story from a script.
Also in my book The Big CI Book, I describe, while fully crediting Blaine who invented them, a variation on passive mini stories which I call the super mini stories.
Blaine Ray Workshops presenter Michael Coxon has said this about mini-stories:
“When we use a mini story, a teacher in training can begin to internalize what it’s like to do a story that takes a full class, an entire week, for several weeks.
“Mini stories grow into something bigger. As the confidence of a teacher and training grows so does the way in which they interact with the story and with their students.”
It’s time to return to the basics.