Lawyer Stories

Forward

Years ago now, I was standing in a classroom as a teacher candidate. I was at the front of the class with a substitute teacher in Thunder Bay  when he asked if there was anything students were going to be working on today. I looked at him,  shook my head and replied, "I believe the classroom teacher was expecting the snow day to stick. He called me telling me he was not coming in due to illness." A smile grew on the face of the substitute teacher as he began writing a decent size paragraph on the board. 

I began thinking to myself, "so-arts and crafts?". As I walked over to the substitute teacher, he quickly finished up and spun around. 

"Alright, you have 20 minutes to think about the short story I wrote on the board. You need to tell me/find out the answer to the question..."(I forget what it was now). The students looked at each other, looked at me and then back at him. Jaws dropped and eyes widened. He said, "But the idea being that you need to answer that question using your own yes/no style questions. Each person can only ask one question and I can only give you answers in Doesn't matter, Yes and No. There are no redo's or try again's."

The students became excited as did I-after he got them started on that, we looked at the teacher's day book and figured out roughly what needed to be done. "Arts and Crafts/Religious Studies", Reading and then Math.

With still 10 minutes to spare the students were scribbling down questions, passing notes, whispering to each other when finally the substitute teacher stopped the timer. "Well, you all look like you have a question for me." He asked who would like to begin, out of 27 students-25 of them put up their hand bursting at the seams with excitement.

Systematically for 20 minutes, the questions were being tossed across the room. The students didn't solve it, but at the end of the day wrapping up before bus-guess what we did until they did get it.

Since then I learned that these stories are called Lawyer Stories and that the practice of these stories is quite substantial not only as a substitute teacher but as an ESL/ELL/ELD/Literacy Coach/Creative Writing Teacher/Homeroom Teacher/Spec Ed. Teacher. The innate need to answer "the question" that seems easy enough to "guess" is quite strong. Sometimes strongest in the perceived "weak student". 

I have seen spirits get lifted when they are the ones to provide the final question that sets up the next person for the answer. I have also seen pride grow across a face as they proudly say that no one was able to guess the premise of their story.

I teach my students how to create these stories, but I especially love using these on the students to just get them interested. Key to success in literacy is first building good associations with it in the eyes of a student.