We were pretty cavalier in the old days around 2000-2001 when this stuff was starting to get some attention. Teachers would tell students to act like lions under a tree, for example, and there would be laughter and theatre with very literal actual CI and respect for the Three Steps.
Much of what we did wasn’t comprehensible. A lot of it was just bad. People noticed how weird the new flash in the pan method was. It was our fault. They could base their own defense of their outmoded instruction on our failures.
It all had to do with blurting. Every failed story and visceral based reaction in fear of the method by the few teachers who were brave enough to even try it contributed to a growing image of TPRS as just plain wacky.
It was all because of blurting that we weren’t able to parade out a great product. People presenting at national conferences misrepresented the method because we had teachers for our students. Back in our classrooms, because blurting was there, destroying the ideal, we crashed and burned more than we soared in the storytelling heavens.
But we kept at it. Now, this week, three things in my own CI world have finally helped me remove blurting, so long ignored as THE cause of our unrest and insecurity in our classrooms, for good:
- The Town Meeting. How on earth any one of us could actually believe that we could slay the blurting dragon without a team approach within our departments, I’ll never know. We need to make it a department problem, take our complaints to the students in a town meeting setting, and keep checking in with our students in that larger venue throughout the year. Blurting is not an individual teacher problem and cannot be solved within individual classrooms. When we bring it to the larger departmental group, the kids perspective that the students have on our remonstrations about blurting becoming entirely new. There is an awareness of responsibility that grows in the kids. They stop blurting. Then we learn something.
- Two Strikes and You’re Out. This bad boy of bad boys works for me with my smaller classes. The question is who will test it in larger classes? So many of us – me included – are so absorbed here with a kind of self-indulgent pre-occupation with people in our buildings who are not going to change professionally that we are entirely missing the potential for us that Two Strikes and You’re Out and other new strategies provides, and we need to test Two Strikes now in larger classrooms but nobody seems to be stepping up. If you need proof on that look what people are commenting on here lately – it’s not on strategies, which is the main reason for this PLC – to test and implement new ideas that can make our CI instruction better in our classrooms.
- The Creator(s) of the Invisibles. The timers are no longer useful. The quiz writers are history. (At least in my own CI world, I now do both of those jobs very efficiently with much less hassle.) This new job is kick ass. We have kept the Story Writer and the General Artist and now we have added this new job which jacks up the interest in the classroom to an extraordinary degree. I’ll post on that. Here is a link to what one of my classes has created. I just give the job to one person and with middle school kids they all want in and start emailing each other ideas in the evening. Hey, does this mean that I give homework?
These new creatures who live in the French classroom are taking over my classes. Especially that horrible Ugly Unicorn.
