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Do lessons have a plot? Should classes have a story line? How do lesson plans resemble movie scripts? We speak with teacher trainer extraordinaire Diederik Van Gorp, about story arcs in lessons and how these affect our transitions form one activity to the next.

The Art of Story Arcs and Transitions in Language Lessons (With Diederik Van Gorp) - Transcript

 Tracy:  Hello, everyone. Welcome to our podcast today. Let me introduce our special guest, Diederik.

Diederik Van Gorp:  Hello.

Tracy:  Welcome.

Diederik:  Thank you very much.

Ross Thorburn:  Just to check because I don’t think we said last time, it’s Diederik Van Gorp, right?

Diederik:  Yes.

Ross:  Just in case there's many other Diederiks out there. [laughs]

Diederik:  I haven't met them yet.

[laughter]

[crosstalk]

Diederik:  The dutch pronunciation would be Diederik Van Gorp. But I anglicized it slightly, I think automatically. When I was teaching children in China, it very quickly just became D.

Ross:  I remember you saying that to me, "Just call me D."

[laughter]

Diederik:  The first class, you introduce yourself and I just write a letter D. They thought it was hilarious because this person just has one letter as a name.

[laughter]

Diederik:  They're very cute.

Ross:  Diederik, you wanted to talk about transitions, which I think is really interesting. One, because there's not very much about it online, just as you pointed out. Two, actually when I started preparing for this, I also got to this point where I was like, "What does he mean?"

Diederik:  I wondered as well. At one point, I was talking to a colleague, he's like, "The transitions were very smooth in this lesson, from one stage to the next." It was very hard for me to pinpoint exactly what that was, trying to find an article, you go online, or go to your books. There's almost nothing there. I guess now, they're creating the...

[crosstalk]

Diederik:  One of the big things in the lesson is context. There's one stage of the lesson, you're going to the next stage. It can be very abrupt, means that the learners have no idea where did this come from. Good transition is, you either refer back, for example to the context, or you point to something that's going to happen later.

If you go from a nice lexis activity to a reading task and then all of a sudden there's this seven, eight words, students are matching them, you ask concept‑check questions, you drill it maybe, all of a sudden you say, "Read the text. Answer the questions." Where did this come from? It's a very clear instruction, there's no confusion possible but it's very mechanical.

Linking that activity to...these words were actually in the text. By quickly pointing that out or a listing, or, "Do you remember earlier on?" "Ah, yeah, yeah, we're going to read something about your friend Bob." It gives it coherence. There's something else that I quite like, if a lesson is a narrative, if a lesson is a story, then it becomes very coherent. I like it when it comes full circle.

I wrote for a while, writing dialogues for short movie clips to learn English. Basically, one of the things I learned there was, it's not just the movie that needs a beginning, middle, end. Even a dialogue needs a beginning, middle, end and there needs to be some kind of conflict.

If you look at a lesson, because they argue that the human mind is a bit wired for beginning, middle, end. For a lesson, it seems to be similar. You need a beginning, set it up well. You need to the meat, the most important part of the movie, most important part of the lesson. Then, some kind of closure at the end.

Very often, lessons fall flat because teachers are great at setting it up but it falls flat at the end because they run out of time and becomes very abrupt the end. That's why, watching a movie ‑‑ the bad guy got killed and that's the end of the movie ‑‑ we don't see them being happily ever after, getting married and all those things.

Ross:  Interesting. I remember watching Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" a while ago. It does end like that. I think the woman jumps off this tower and dies. Sorry, if you've not seen it.

[laughter]

Diederik:  Spoiler alert.

[crosstalk]

Ross:  ...and dies. Literally, the credits come on and you're still in this shock. You're like, "Oh, that's it?" Like you say, movies always, nowadays, we have this scene.

Diederik:  Somehow, it links back to the beginning but there will be the change. With a lesson, that could be a nice idea to approach a lesson. If you fit your stages in there, finish on the high somehow.

Tracy:  Do you know there is an activity, at least we played it in Chinese a lot when I was a kid. This kind of my understanding of transition in the class. You say Chinese [Chinese] .

Ross:  Idiom.

Diederik:  Idiom?

Tracy:  Yeah.

Diederik:  The four‑character idiom?

Tracy:  Yeah, the four‑character idiom. The next person would have to use the last words from the last idiom and then next, the beginning of the next idiom. That's hard picture like a lesson transition.

Diederik:  That's interesting. The last thing you do needs to be the first thing of the next stage. Something like that?

Tracy:  Yes, something like that.

Ross:  Your example earlier, Diederik, of that read‑this‑answer‑the‑questions, it's almost so abrupt you can imagine people going, "Did I hear that right?" Whereas if you say you have that who could remember these eight words? Can you see these words anywhere here? Oh, one of them's in the title. Where do you think the other set will be? Great. Now, read this and answer the questions."

Tracy:  Another thing ‑‑ it might be related to transition ‑‑ is about the difficulty level. If you look at a lesson, it's a flow. Maybe at the very beginning something a little bit easier or less challenging. Then it's getting maybe a little bit more challenging. At the end, they can see how much they have improved.

Diederik:  Then you release the pressure again a little bit at the end test, what have you learned or something?

Tracy:  Yeah.

Diederik:  When you introduce the language in a traditionally staged lesson, maybe in a movie where the conflict is introduced, we have an obstacle to overcome, it's this language point.

Ross:  Is it Joseph Campbell? Is that the person? This idea of there's a story arc, there's only one story that basically people ever had...

[crosstalk]

Diederik:  Yeah, or just a variation on the theme.

[crosstalk]

Ross:  One great story but a lot of it. Certainly my favorite lessons that I've taught to start off with some...We're doing one like an activity. I think it's on my diploma at the beginning asking people, "Oh, I'm doing this. Are you interested in coming to this thing tonight?"

People turning down this invitation and at the end of the class, you go back and do the same thing again but, like the story, the characters have changed. Except in this, the language the students are using have changed. That's the difference, that's the development that's happened which is like a story.

I'm just so into this movie analogy now. You got me thinking of this great Chinese movie I love called "Shower" or Xǐ zǎo in Chinese. At some point in the movie ‑‑ it's some people who are in a bath house in Beijing ‑‑ it cuts to 50 years ago in this desert area of China. After five minutes, you start thinking, "Is this a mistake? Is there a problem with the DVD?"

It creates this expectation. Eventually, it cuts back. It's like the back story. The main character says, "That was your mother." This reminded me of doing teacher training years ago, doing an activity for writing lesson, getting them to do something stupid like, "Give them a dart board but no darts. Then ask them who's the best darts player."

I remember one of the trainees say, "Why are we doing this? What's the point?" One of the other ones goes, "There will be a point. You'll find out in a minute."

I think it's almost that same thing, isn't it? Like with the movies, it's creating this expectation. Sometimes, I don't know what's going on here but if I have belief in this teacher, this trainer, I know there's going to be a point.

Diederik:  It must be there for a reason, but they must have been disappointed so many times.

[laughter]

[music]

Diederik:  Just thinking of something related to transitions is, one of the main scales that a teacher needs is working with published materials, either course book or whatever that has been given to them. That teaching is going from one exercise to the next. "Are you finished?" "Yes." "Now, do exercise three. Do exercise four."

The teacher actually can see the flow of that lesson and just verbalizes it almost, "Yes, now we're going to put that into practice." Maybe transition are a bit more important than you think, to bring something that's dead on the page, bring it alive, give it purpose.

Tracy:  When we're doing research about this topic before, not really much about it, do you think it's because transition in class, it doesn't affect the lesson a lot?

Diederik:  Maybe for the feeling, for motivation of the students, maybe it does a little bit more than we think it does.

Ross:  I think this also comes down to this idea that if your classes feel like a succession of unrelated activities, it's going to be very easy to give up as a learner. It's going to be very challenging to maintain motivation for a long period, isn't it? Like, "Why are we doing this? What's the point?"

Diederik:  Another gap filled.

[laughter]

Diederik:  There's another one. I just remembered this. When I started out as a teacher trainer, I was explaining to new students, if one stage does not go well, no problem. Every stage is like a new spring, you can start anew.

A stage that feels flat, the energy is drained, it was boring, whatever went on. Every stage is a new opportunity to re‑energize the students, project your voice. Transitions can actually spike the energy again.

[music]

Ross:  I want to talk about what I actually thought you meant by transitions, which is completely different. What I think we spoke about there was teaching for adults or maybe teenagers but probably not like six‑year‑olds.

What I actually ended up writing about, taking notes on, was going from one activity to another with some very young learners, almost like this classroom management idea for kindergarten students. As an example, the chaos of some six‑year‑olds with bags coming in to a classroom...

Diederik:  Almost a routine, in this part of the room, this happens, this is the storytelling corner, here we do the book work.

Ross:  This is obviously potential, "All right. Everyone, move to the front of the room!" Then there's this, you can just imagine a car leaving a cloud of dust, things are flying out.

Diederik:  The transition then would be sometimes counting, maybe sometimes a song.

Ross:  Exactly. The idea that if you have those in place and you trained your students on them then all those moving from this part of the room to that part of the room or from a writing or a coloring activity, to another, are smoother and safer.

Diederik:  Different cues, basically. That's similar to teaching adults. Some of the automatic things you do ‑‑ like they worked on their own and you let them compare around as in pairs ‑‑ there's this moment they do it automatically. They're also transitions, I guess.

Ross:  The commonality between the two of those is that if you do a good job of them, they should become so natural that the longer you work with the students, almost the less instructions you need to give.

Diederik:  I've seen a beautiful thing once where the student was so used to the techniques, because this person just came every month to every class of every training teacher, that if the teacher was about to give the handouts, while giving the instructions, she would give an act...

[laughter]

Diederik:  It was like, "Oh, instruction before handout." She wouldn't say it. It's like she knew it.

Ross:  Did you go by that point about it being logical and making sense? It reminds me of...Tracy, when you and I were in India a few years ago, we booked these cinema tickets. It was some beautiful old cinema in Jaipur. We bought these tickets. I think we assumed it was in English or at least it would have English subtitles, but it didn't. It was all in Hindi and had Hindi subtitles.

Because of the genre of the film, which was like Arnold Schwarzenegger‑esque action film, we were able to follow and understand the whole thing. It made complete sense even though we couldn't really understand a word in the whole movie. I think that's similar, isn't it?

Diederik:  Yes, it's very similar. I remember watching Disney movies on the small screen in a long‑distance bus in Turkey. It was all in Turkish. I could understand everything, I think "Kung Fu Panda" and I'm indeed [inaudible 12:56] . It's like, yeah, this is the moment that the obstacle is introduced.

Ross:  It's almost like that you think of the brain being hardwired, the stories are hardwired for a language classes, something, right? They will know the beginning, middle, end.

Diederik:  When people really hate a movie, very often, it's an art‑type movie that they accidentally watched. A lot of people do like it but they're not the mainstream.

Ross:  Or it doesn't wrap up at the end, there's no ending to it.

Diederik:  Like the Coen Brothers movies, [inaudible 13:20] at the end.

Ross:  That almost reminds me of another point. I think Donald Freeman had an article. It was called "From Teacher to Teacher Trainer." He talks about, how can you tell if your training was successful?

He said, people smiling, high‑fiving each other at the classroom doesn't mean they learned anything. People leaving confused and disappointed doesn't mean they didn't learn anything. That's almost like the Coen Brothers just because at the end of the movie, "What on earth was that about?" It doesn't mean it was a bad movie.

Diederik:  It makes you think maybe.

Ross:  Those are movies that I love where you're still thinking about what could the ending mean weeks or months after.

Diederik:  Let's say an action movie, the immediate response is satisfaction but you want to remember it, you want to talk about it more.

[music]

Tracy:  Thanks very much for listening. Thank you so much, Diederik, for coming to our podcast.

Diederik:  My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Tracy:  All right. See you next time.

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