Seeing students begging for the next phase of a project gets me every time. I will never bore of knowing how students respond to these assignments. The last two Grade 4 presenters shared their Master Storyteller 2's this week, and the crowd called out for more. Even some of their Friday WHOWs (What Happened in Our Week) and MST reflections ended in exuberance over the MST2 or excitement for the upcoming MST3. The projects are part of our class culture, and the students love them.
Master Storyteller (MST) is a three-part Building Outside the Blocks project which I refer to as atri-BOB. The first version involves reading a picture book to the class in an expressive way. MST2 revisits all of the elements of MST1 but adds a visual. As I wrote in a previous post, the visuals for this MST2 have ranged from Power Points to iMovies to puppet shows to collages and more. Beyond student voice and choice, it is a project that breeds success.
For all of my Building Outside the Blocks projects, students tend to bring their best selves. I have always attributed that to the personalizing nature of the projects, the presentation component of the task, and the audience’s active role in the approach. For the individual student, regardless of age or ability, this will often become a shining moment that they can build from.
There is a saying we have for lifecycle events and milestones: May you go from strength to strength. Students are more willing to work on skill development or persevere through a difficult task if they have had a “win” of some kind in school. So often, kids who don’t meet with success start to build up a disdain for school and disengage as a self-protective mechanism. The success experienced through these projects help students build their own sense of what success in school looks and feels like. These projects help students celebrate what they are capable of doing when they are deeply engaged in a task that is meaningful to them.
The first key aspect of “meaningful” is the simple idea that students can choose the content of their presentation. For the first two phases of Master Storyteller, that is a picture book. The perfect examples are my last two presenters this week. One boy who enjoys the spotlight and has a flare for accents presented The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt. Everyone laughing at his "naked crayon" voice was appropriate because it was his time in the sun, and he was hilarious. He was also well-rehearsed with a Power Point of every page of the book. He got to receive attention for on-task behaviour and something he worked hard to accomplish. This has translated into the regular classroom in terms of his risk taking and perseverance. When tasks are meaningful, it is easier for students to put in the effort and reap the reward of success.
The same held true for another student who met with success. This child breathes hockey. This year, one of my new additions to the rubric for this task was to note under the Learning Skills strand of self-regulation with a level 4 on the rubric descriptor saying: shows significant development from the feedback on the first MST. This child was disappointed by his MST 1 assessment, so this was his change to prove to himself that he could do better. H used my feedback and practised to improve his fluency almost as much as he as ice time in a given week. He picked a long story by Mike Leonetti called The Greatest Goal. After his father scanned the pages of the book into Power Point, he felt that he hadn’t done enough to show his creativity. In addition to his slideshow, gathered his equipment and rehearsed in full gear to act out some of the scenes. He attained his highest level of achievement to date, and I was thrilled to show him that he how capable he was. I was so happy to write on his rubric that he had met his greatest goal for improvement
The next aspect of the projects that make them meaningful is the choice of product. The term visual has a vast range, and I never provide a list of options. I may make suggestions , but I most often co-create a list of possible mediums with the class when I introduce the assignment. I love the open-ended aspect of the "how" of this project, and I see that students learn from each other's product choices or have ideas that I had never conceived of. The freedom of selecting and making a visual invites creativity and elevates the experience of this second revisit of the Master Storyteller (MST) tri-BOB.
That is what these projects do for kids, especially when they come in threes. Each revisit adds something else that gets students really into the assigment and makes it part of class culture. Today, I introduced the MST 3’s, and there was so much excitement in the room. The Grade 4's have spent many months working on writing skills, and they have the choice between writing a personal narrative or a fictional story for their MST 3. They will go through all the stages of the writing process and tell their story through words and visuals. While I will give them some class time to support the prewriting, drafting and editing stage, they will work on the bulk of their storytelling at home. This is the 4th time I have facilitated the Master Storyteller tri-BOB, and it really does help students master the art of telling stories. More importantly, it helps students meet with success and grow from there.
