A funny thing happened on the way...Part Two

I knew the “what,” but I couldn’t master the “how” of sketch writing in three weeks. I don’t doubt that given more time, I could have produced a sketch that met all criteria of good sketch writing. This is where practice would have made perfect or close to it. I would have to do many rewrites, which would require my sustained motivation, focus and determination to produce a sketch that met curriculum goals. I would need to incorporate the constructive criticism of the teacher and my peers into every rewrite, which would require note taking. I would have to have something at stake to keep coming back for more constructive criticism and more rewrites. This tedious, multi-step writing process would pose many challenges for my 2e learners, no matter what type of writing they were asked to produce. So, in fact I learned that instruction in any type of writing process must meet their specific cognitive, social and emotional needs to support their task completion. The structure of sketch writing most definitely meets their short-term objective needs, dealing with their weaknesses in processing, memory and focus, and the use of humor would keep them engaged for a while, but in the end, it will be the ability to accept the writing challenges and to persevere that will produce successful written expression.

The strategies I would use to create a safe and engaging learning environment for both those who will face challenges in the writing process and those who won’t are: explicit classroom protocol, individual rubrics, explicit instruction, opportunity for diverse learning styles, differentiation, both collaborative and individual work and creative behavior management. I would begin by presenting “following the fear” as part of any challenging learning process, not a consequence of an individual learner’s deficit. It would be listed as a goal on the sketch-writing rubric.

Rubrics for sketch writing will help my students break down the production process into explicit skills and short-term goals. I will use a new rubric for every phase of the production process, and also align the rubric to specific student’s goals. Differentiation is vital during any writing process for 2e teachers. This approach openly suggests that not all learners will begin at the same level or reach a goal at the same time. This focuses the student on his individual progress and ability to meet the goals set specifically for him or her.
Many 2e students are visual/spatial learners and need visual input. There are no DVDs of essay writing that are entertaining and engaging, but there are many sketches, both online and on DVDs to watch and to analyze. It would be a great help for the teacher to find sketches of well-known comedy groups to view, and explicitly identify the elements of sketch writing as they view it. First let them view a sketch in its entirety, and then go through it identifying the elements and beats necessary to produce good sketch writing, following their rubrics.

I would begin the sketch writing process with improvisation, a kinesthetic approach to writing. Just as they viewed the sketch on a DVD, now they will step into the shoes of the sketch writer and create a scene, on their feet, collaboratively with their acting partners. This teamwork would allow those with stronger skills to contribute and lead the group, affording the less skilled less anxiety than they would have producing independently. After the scene is improvised, we would go through the sketch writing elements again and apply them, if needed, to the improvisation. After each beat is created, we would have a recorder write the dialogue up to that beat, and proceed from beat to beat until we reached the end of the sketch. This is the explicit instruction that I was missing in my class; understandably, there was just no time for it. This strategy would give the teacher ample opportunity to assess each student’s individual skill mastery and could proceed based on that information.Student writers who are ready to write independently should do so now. Those who still need outside support should be paired with a peer. Let the writing begin!

When impasses are hit, students can experiment with improvisation, again transferring the learning to the kinesthetic mode and see if they can’t solve the problem. This is when the class as a whole can contribute constructive criticism, a protocol that needs to be preset before any writing process can begin.

It is critical for any teacher to create a positive and safe learning environment, especially if “following the fear” is going to be a goal in the classroom. Taking risks in front of one’s peers is scary and the only solution is to have a strict behavior code set by the students and the teacher. It must be a group effort; they must buy into it and usually when they set their own rules, students are more willing to follow rules. It is age appropriate for middle school students to give criticism by telling a peer what they did wrong. It is up to the instructor to teach the correct way to give criticism, literally putting the right words into students’ mouths. This will keep the classroom a safe place for all writers to stay motivated and determined to complete the writing task.

Though I expected to be more adept at sketch writing, the reality was that I needed more time. Patience. I have a feeling that I learned more about teaching my students this engaging writing process than I would have if I had been sketch writer magnifique! Yes, I was reminded of my own students’ challenges and how these challenges impact their self-esteem. I was reminded that it is difficult not to compare one’s own skills to those of peers and keep enough self-confidence afloat to publicly make mistakes and carry on anyway. I still believe that basic writing skills are similar for many types of writing, and meeting any goals, no matter if they are different goals, requires the same emotional disposition and executive functioning skill mastery...even before a word hits the paper.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way...Part One

In the proposal for my fellowship, I stated my long-term goal as using the strategies, structure and humor of sketch comedy to teach my middle school 2e students basic writing skills. I would take an intensive sketch comedy class as my professional development and smoothly slip back into my classroom with all of the knowhow to teach sketch comedy writing; but the word “propose” is not finite. The reality was that know and how are two very different aspects of learning. British philosopher, Gilbert Ryle describes these two distinct elements of content mastery as “knowing that” and “knowing how.” I thought I had learned and understood the concepts of the curriculum, “knowing that,” but I could not appropriately produce this knowledge, “knowing how.” I was catapulted into the real world of my 2e learners when working in their areas of weakness. Somebody up there in 2e teacher heaven was laughing.

However, this trip into an area of weakness allowed me to explore the emotional, social and cognitive challenges that arise when a 2e student is unable to consistently meet instructional goals and comes face to face with an impasse. There are three separate forces working against successful task completion and I was not immune to their destruction. Even as an adult with matured self-advocacy skills, a solid identity in my areas of strength, the world, and supporting a fairly healthy ego, I, admittedly, wasn’t ecstatic about going into a classroom where I did not shine. My class participation began to diminish; I began as a strong contributor to class discussions and soon became anxious about reading my sketches aloud and hesitant in offering constructive criticism to my peers. If I couldn’t write a sketch myself, why would they trust my opinions about their sketches? Was I lacking the “know that” or the “know how?”  Where did the breakdown happen, and what could the teacher have done to prevent or at least diminish the negative experience for me? Ah, new research questions, whose answers are vital in completing my original goal of using the sketch comedy model to teach basic writing skills to my 2e learners; a side road to my long-term goal that I never anticipated.

2e learners have high expectations of themselves and the disappointment in not being able to meet these expectations is reason enough to stop trying; but to fail publicly, in front of peers and teachers, puts 2e learners in a situation where their only means of personal and social survival is giving up and becoming silent and/or getting out of the classroom as often as possible. So, their confidence in task completion is being chipped away by their negative personal voice, their perceptions of their peers’ and teachers’ negative voices and either weak cognitive ability, or weak skill acquisition, the “know that” and the “know how.” How can 2e teachers help 2e learners shift away from their path toward disengagement and keep them invested in knowledge, and help nurture acceptance and patience with skill acquisition when working in their areas of weakness? How do we as teachers of these sensitive perfectionists convince them that following their fear is the only choice that will bring them closer to skill mastery?

Stepping into the teacher's shoes...

 I can’t help but fixate on the teaching style of this week’s sketch writing teacher. It is an interesting contrast to last week’s teacher, as are his instructional objectives. Last week’s teacher’s objective was to set the groundwork, the structure of the sketch writing process. He was neither boring nor charismatic...he was consistent, very organized and amazingly explicit in what he required from us. His discourse was lean and always relevant. He was patient and incredibly accepting and supportive of all his students’ work...in a classroom with many inexperienced sketch writers.

This week’s teacher is charged with taking us from the basic sketch structure and formulas we learned last week to helping us find our own voices, our personal stamp on sketch writing. Classroom learning has gone from linear skill-based learning to a more abstract, creative brainstorm. Last week, I experienced explicit instruction and was given formulas/outlines for developing my ideas. The lessons were scaffold, beginning as short, one joke, and one-twist objectives and each day formulas were added that required longer and longer sketches with three or four beats to construct and heighten. I realize how essential explicit instruction is in helping students master any type of basic skills. In my quest to inspire my 2e students to work toward their potential, I might have failed them by focusing more on keeping them emotionally engaged than being explicit in stating and restating the objectives we were working toward.

2e students are adept at covering their incomprehension and it is up to the 2e teacher to beat them at this game. Many times, the high intelligences of 2e learners belie their lack of comprehension. They will smile and nod at you, pretending they “get it,” because admitting they don’t is like admitting they were mistakenly deemed gifted. This irrational belief is a consequence of both their chronological age and desire for peer acceptance, and their asynchronous emotional and cognitive development as 2e learners. Regardless, a good strategy for checking who is clear in the task objective and who is not is asking each student to state the objective orally before beginning the task, and asking a few quick follow up questions that ensure the student is using his words and not repeating yours. This can and should be done discreetly, so the student does not feel his lack of understanding opens him to ridicule by his peers.

Though I believe I am learning useful formulas and exercises for teaching basic writing skills through sketch comedy writing, my long-term goal in fulfilling my fellowship, I am also processing the way in which I am being taught these skills, and see the areas in which I can improve my own instructional approach...a welcomed, additional benefit to learning sketch comedy writing that I did not expect.

Fast and furious!

The writing intensive class is heating up! We have a new teacher for Level II, Joe, and he is full of energy and his energy psyches all of us into a creative state of being. He asks for more writing in less time, but since the class environment is safe and I am free to learn as I work, I dig in and try to think of “situations” to expand into sketches. We are asked to write down twenty situations/plotlines in fifteen minutes. Joe states emphatically, “Quantity over quality!” The hard thing about this request is that there is no room for self-criticism, something that comes naturally to many of us. However, when you are trying to beat the clock, you have to free your mind of any negativity and push forward or you will never meet the objective. Once we hit the number twenty or fifteen minutes, whichever comes first, we choose five of the twenty that we like the most, read them to the class and the class decides which plotline each of us will develop into a sketch to be read in class tomorrow. Majority rule!

This process will be a fabulous pre-writing exercise for my 2e students, who tend to be overly critical of their writing skills and many times freeze over their laptops, hypnotized by the cursor and unable to get one word from their brain into their word document. I will need to cut the number of ideas down from twenty to ten, or surely there will be several spontaneous combustions to deal with in the classroom. But this exercise in pushing through the fear and critical voices will become a fixture in our writing curriculum. If I can get them to accept less than perfect ideas as a beginning, instead of an end, my students will be closer to the flexibility and cognitive shift necessary in producing written expression.

Now I must flex my own cognitive muscle and write!

Three strikes and you're in!

One of the shortest formulas given to my sketch writing class was the Blackout sketch, a sketch that stands on its own with one joke and one twist. The formula outline is as follows:

THE WHO

2 characters (can be more, but two works best)

1 character on stage

1 character enters

THE WHAT

Character #1 on stage is doing an activity

Character #2 enters with “What are you doing?”

THE PUNCH

Character #1 answers question with a fabulously funny answer

Here is my version of the formula-still one joke, one twist

THE GAME

Dropped calls that would have changed history

LIGHTS UP!

Innkeeper is serving steins of beer when his cellphone rings.

Innkeeper

Is there a Paul Revere here?

Paul Revere

I’m Paul Revere.

Innkeeper

You’ve got a call.

Paul Revere

Thanks. This is Paul. The British are what... The British are what? Damn, lost ‘em.  Another beer here!

BLACKOUT!

Then you take the game and put it within two more contexts where dropped calls would have changed the course of history, and you have a Blackout Trilogy.

In my experience of teaching writing skills to 2e learners, I noticed that the most usual challenge was avoiding getting bogged down in the details that take them on side trips away from their main idea. Many 2e learners find it difficult to identify the main idea in their reading due to distraction by the details supporting the main idea or plot. So, how can this simple sketch writing process be used to strengthen basic writing skills in 2e learners? This simple sketch formula includes nothing but the main idea. No details allowed or you’ve lost the game. This formula also allows the 2e teacher four instructional strategies that both support 2e cognitive strengths and accommodate their weak executive functioning skills. These instructional strategies will:

1. Attend to 2e learners’ cognitive strengths (Intellect and humor)

2. Accommodate 2e learners’ attention and memory deficits (Through  

    setting short term goals)

3. Accommodate different learning styles of 2e learners (Auditory-

    talking it through, kinesthetic-improvise before writing, and visual-

    storyboarding before writing.

4. Provide opportunities for task completion due to its short term

    objective, which builds personal self-efficacy.

It is also asked of the Blackout Trilogy writer to remake his game three times using different situations, but remaining true to the original game. This practice of repetition, something so necessary in skill mastery, is something that 2e students are loathe to do. However, since the context is ever changing, they will not feel as if it is repetition; they will be engaged and motivated in their quest for humor.

Laughing through the writing process...hopefully.

Everyday, we are given a new formula (two on the first day!) and asked to write a sketch using that particular structure. What I discovered is that a formula does not guarantee “funny”; It can only produce a blueprint allowing for funny. In sketch comedy, out-of-the-box thinking is required for truly successful sketches, and this is exactly what my 2e students excel at. Their ideas and concepts are never really of this world. It's a perfect match in theory.

However, the formulas that produce longer length sketches require meticulous preplanning, as in essay writing. The executive functioning skills necessary to produce all written expression- the ability to plan, initiate, organize, execute and shift ones own cognitive effort-are areas of weakness in most 2e learners. Representing ideas on paper, applying basic skills such as capitalization, punctuation and spelling, organizing, sequencing, elaborating on ideas (what is relevant, what comes first, what comes next, etc.) present challenges in task completion. Add to this mix, deficits in working memory, short-term memory, and processing speed, and you can see why written expression is a painful and frustrating process for these gifted individuals.

Sketch comedy writing provides me with the carrot to engage my students’ strong senses of humor and motivate them toward task completion. The sketch comedy writing process is well suited to scaffolding, an instructional strategy. For example, the writing task is easily broken down into beats, even smaller bits of information than paragraphs. For the visual learners, we can watch professional sketch comedy as examples of the desired outcome before they begin the task of writing, and brainstorming and collaborating on the sketch ideas and their execution will allow the students to “think aloud,” another great strength of 2e learners.

As I mentioned in the previous blog, in sketch comedy, the game or main idea, is everything. Just as in essay writing, no side trips are allowed. Each subsequent beat in a sketch must be true to the game you set up in the beginning of the sketch. Also, like in essay writing, the fourth or last beat must reiterate the game established in the first beat. There is a correlation here that might serve my 2e students well in their development of stronger writing skills. 

Follow the fear...

My 3-week Sketch Comedy Intensive class has begun-and they weren’t kidding with their use of the word “intensive.” Level 1 consists of three hours of rules, formulas and structure for five days before we pass on to Level II and a new teacher. This week’s teacher is a fast talker and I believe he was hired for just this reason. There is an amazing amount of information to get out and into our heads in one week.

I am surprised by our little United Nations of aspiring sketch comedy writers. We have a student from as far away as Austria; Canada is represented, and various cities over the United States contribute to our writing group of twelve. I am also happy to see a range of ages from early twenties to yours truly.

A banner with the motto, “Follow the Fear” hangs across the back wall of the small theater. For an artist, playing it safe is counterproductive to creativity, but oh how much more comfortable it feels than risking looking foolish. I know this; my students know this. Accordingly, my first objective in teaching sketch comedy writing to my students will be to help them push through the negative voices inside their heads and guide them toward the light of creative courage...

I noticed over these past two days that the negative voices in my own head will do anything to stop me from writing. Telling these voices to shut up is part of the writing process. Dan, our teacher, could not stress this enough. I get it. Something mediocre can ONLY blossom into something special if you push through the muck and the fear. I know that for highly gifted learners, finding themselves in areas of the unknown and open to criticism from teachers and peers is as threatening as swimming in shark-infested waters... worse. Convincing my students to work through this fear is the greatest challenge I will face.

I wish I were a cleverer writer. A few of the students in my comedy writing class are unbelievably “out there” and it is such fun hearing their ideas. My 2e students are the same...far cleverer than I when coming up with ideas for sketches...but fall flat when breaking their ideas down into outline form and expanding on them within a structured form of written expression...especially, essay writing. Beats are the smallest form of information in comedy writing and can translate easily into other forms of structured written expression. 

The professional vocabulary used by sketch comedy writers is as vital to their discourse as pedagogical vocabulary is to the discourse of educators. Here is a list of some important words in sketch writing:

Formula, structure, heighten, twist, rule of threes, set up, punch, crazy man, straight man, beats, reiteration, destruction and most importantly, the game.

I will start with the game. It is best described as the sketch’s succinct plotline, the main concept or idea of the sketch. Playing the game means constantly adding new information to the plotline, no side trips, just like in improvisation. The difference between the two mediums of communicating story is: in improvisation “yes, and” is used to build a story as an ensemble, while in sketch comedy the humor comes from the writer building the game with “No, but.”  Negation is allowed in comedy sketch writing because the game is controlled by writers who are planning, not performers working in the moment. Yet, both are strategies for storybuilding.

We were given a few formulas over these two days and then asked to write a sketch using each formula structure. This was another intimidating moment for us; “Here’s the formula, now write something funny!” Talk about pressure. Oh, such sensitive egos we have, which is why it is critical for teachers to set down rules beforehand for supporting peers with applause and positive feedback FIRST,  and then they must learn how to give constructive criticism in a positive way. This feedback etiquette will take much practice before it becomes automatic in middle school 2e learners, who are out to protect their egos at all costs, even at the expense of their peers, and most certainly their teachers.

Tomorrow, I will give examples of a couple of formulas used in sketch comedy writing and try to find the correlation to formal written expression taught in the classroom.