Video:

Noticing and Wondering 

or

How NOT to Become Charlie Brown's Teacher

Use the link below the window.  Evidently there is an error in the code to embed which I copied from youtube.

http://youtu.be/5nhBF736F34


Chapter 7 Story Planning Considerations

Here Ohler presents some of the tools and approaches he takes in teaching storytelling.  Below are the tools that struck me.

1.    The Story-Storming Grid seems like a useful tool—especially if groups of students were to do a project.  I can imagine students brainstorming alone first, and then the students putting their ideas out on the table and placing them in appropriate places on the grid, thereby identifying some problems without solutions or transformations.  Or perhaps each person in a group brainstorms problems, then the group places all problems out there and then more brainstorming to determine more than one possible solution and transformation that could be used to address the problem.

2.    I also appreciate the questions he provided in the event that someone is blocked: 

·       For teachers: “What’s an important concept you teach that you feel students have a hard time grasping?”

·       For someone telling a personal story: “When is the last time you cried or got really excited?”

·       For an organization: “What’s the most important thing you think people need to understand about eh value you bring to heir lives, and can you remember a time with a client that exemplifies that value?” 

3.    Research Box diagram in figure 7.1 which he said he uses for both storytelling and more formal research.  I would have liked to hear more about the latter just now, having just rewritten my outline of my culminating experience for EDTE 250i.   I agree with him that it allows the writer to keep thinking of idea, so as not to stop the flow, while also asking the writer to classify those things inside the story and outside.  In this way ideas are not lost, and can be put down, so the writer and identify their place and move on, instead of having too many ideas and going all over the place.  Below are the guts of the box from diagram 7.1.

Research Box… What’s inside the story? time frame… events… relationships… places… What is outside of the story?

4.    Tips for working with younger kids seemed to make sense.  Ask the students to draw a picture (which is something I would have thought about) about something that “reminds them of something in the story” (p. 100).  That last part seems like a nice twist that would help the students get started, as it reminds them of the story—rather than saying something like “captures the essence of the story” which might be a bit paralyzing to the student (let alone the fact that younger students wouldn’t use that language!)

5.    Ohler’s statement that “A story map is a portal into the storyteller’s thinking” was intriguing.  This might be another way to formatively assess student thinking.

6.    In “Telling via Transformation” Ohler suggests students should consider the potential of a story by identifying different possibly transformations for a single problem/solution pair.  This identification could assist students both in testing the viability of the problem/solution pair as a story, and in taking on different perspectives in order to consider different transformations.  This is something we need to ask learners to do more often—it helps them to see more than one side of an issue.

Chapter 8: Transformation Formations

Bloom was certainly a busy fellow, writing so many taxonomies including one about  Character “Transformation” with a continuum of change from physical through spiritual.  Then those familiar 8 categories were applied in a way I had not seen, in the taxonomy of Cognitive “Transformation” which described the changing in a character along the continuum from knowledge up through evaluation.  And finally he presented Bloom’s Taxonomy of Affective “Transformation” with a continuum beginning with the character receiving phenomena to the character internalizing values.  Who knew Mr. Bloom was so busy and well rounded?

Ohler states something that I sometimes get the feeling some folks in the institution of American schools forget is the primary function of a teacher,

"As always, what you’re really doing here is challenging students to understand something in greater depth.  After all, this is what teachers do." (p. 111)

Here here!  Let’s make sure everyone remembers that is our purpose!