Writing and Reading the Story
Gratitude and Summary
Before tying a ribbon on The Beginning Storyteller course, I want to congratulate you. You are the hero of this story, and you have taken your first steps toward becoming an expert storyteller. Together with your students, you will go on many adventures, be tested in unexpected ways, confront dragons (or perhaps unicorns), and rise from the ashes as changed people. The Beginning Storyteller’s journey is lifelong, but you are well on your way.
LESSON 1: FIRST STEPS
In lesson one, you conquered the revision of your syllabi to make them more amenable to CI storytelling, and you learned to control what you can control in terms of scope and sequence in your course. You also uncovered ways to systematize some of the more mundane teaching tasks. With these tools in your utility belt, you can focus on the pre-storytelling phase.
LESSON 2: PRE-STORY PHASE
In the Pre-Story Phase, you and learners teamed up to overcome the trickiest part of learning to speak a new language, which is getting proficient enough to start engaging with the language. This is a critical piece, especially at the beginning of the term.
During this lesson you also acquired some essential skills that will prepare you for quest. You learned to orbit student-generated content and to use TPR to introduce new vocabulary. These skills equip you for telling the story, which is a journey in and of itself.
LESSON 3: TELLING THE STORY
In lesson three you crossed the threshold into the land of storytelling. You took what you learned about orbiting questions and honed your abilities. There were likely many trials along the way, but you were able to rise from the ashes. Your students helped you along the way by generating artwork, recording the events of the story, and/or by bringing the characters in your story to life.
You learned that you and learners are in this together, and only by working together can you vanquish the incomprehensible.
LESSON 4: WRITING AND READING THE STORY
In the fourth lesson, you took what you co-created with your class and spun it into two golden (i.e., comprehensible) versions. This was a difficult task, full of tribulation, but the systems you learned, such as the three-act structure and writing summaries in a Word document during class made it much more manageable. Finally, you learned various ways for students to read the story, which kept things from getting stale.
When the dust settled, you were successful in writing scaffolded versions of the text, and learners were able to read and comprehend them. For this story, their training is nearly complete. Soon they will go out on an adventure of their own. One that will lead them from input to output.
LESSON 5: GUIDING LEARNERS FROM INPUT TO OUTPUT
Lesson five offered many strategies to provide learners with additional input. The activities you built out of the story guided your students from the safe realm of input to the (oft-perceived) dangerous land of output. By scaffolding the tasks in a strategic way, you set learners up for success, and they produced meaningful output at an appropriate level.
With your guidance, learners conquered the dragon of producing in L2, which is a foe that so many people fear. Your mission, for this particular story, was almost complete.
LESSON 6: ASSESSMENT
In the final lesson you summited Mt. Assessment and threw the ring of power into the inferno that rages therein. You scaled past traditional grammar tests and learned many ways to evaluate learner proficiency. For The Beginning Storyteller, this is often the most arduous part of the journey, but you did it!
A New Adventure
“I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” – Luke Skywalker
Now that you have returned home to the Ordinary World, adventure calls to you again. Truly, each story you tell is a new journey that will lead to face trials and return a changed person. You may not feel ready to go it alone, but your training is complete. Deep down, you have what it takes to defeat your adversary and rescue your students from the tall (and incomprehensible) tower.
Andrew J. Snider ciimmersion.com