Godly Play Trainers' Training: Part 2

Telling a story and being trained by another Storyteller

The second part of our course to become Godly Play Trainers involved telling a story to our peers and being trained by another student. I have to say that we were all nervous about telling stories to each other. Of course, we would all have been completely in our comfort zone with children, but the idea of telling a story in front of so many really good, experienced storytellers was both exciting and intimidating! What took the heat off was knowing that the real pressure was on the person who had to take the role of the trainer. 

I was fortunate enough to be assigned "The Holy Baptism". This is a story that I love, have a personal history with, and that I have told three times in the past year. The only thing that made it difficult was that we weren't allowed to light any candles in the building where our course was being held. Candles are central to this story, and at the end you "change" the light by extinguishing them with a candle snuffer. Pretending to do all of this made the story seem less authentic to me. Fortunately, my listeners were not bothered at all by this and were able to be fully in the story anyway. 

I was also fortunate to have Anita from Latvia as my trainer. She was so gracious and helpful. She also asked many questions and helped draw out my discomfort about the fake candles, and then help me receive feedback from the others. I was glad to know that the fakeness that I was feeling apparently did come spill over into my storytelling. I was really honored when one of the women in our group expressed how she had really disliked this story before, but had seen it in a new light as I was telling it.

When Rebecca debriefed Anita, she gave us some practicals about the story. One important thing to know is that the picture showing the set-up in the English version of the book, Godly Play Volume 3, is actually wrong. If you put the candle on the white felt circle to the right (storyteller's perspective), you will burn yourself when you show how the doll is baptized. (The German editors knew about the mistake when they published the materials in German, so the candle is on the circle in front.) 

Most of the time, when you debrief a storyteller, you have them put the materials away in order to keep the group from doing further Wondering when they are supposed to be giving feedback. But in this story, it is helpful to leave the materials out. From the position of the materials on the three felt circles to the way the doll is held, there is a lot to discuss.

Telling a story to my colleagues turned out to be a very positive experience. I, in turn, enjoyed hearing and seeing how they told their stories. Each person had a specific style and something to teach us.

Godly Play Trainers' Training in Holland: Part 1

Hi everyone, if you've been wondering where I have been, I've been super busy getting grades together for the end of the first semester, and finishing up a couple of projects for Godly Play Deutschland. I love to be in this space, but the things happening in real time take priority.: )

One of my favorite blogs is called "What did we do all Day?", and that is an appropriate question about our recent training in Holland to become Godly Play Trainers. Exactly what did we do all day for six days straight? Can you really discuss and do Godly Play from morning until evening for that long?

Well, for the inquiring mind that want to know, you can talk about and practice Godly Play for six days and still not have all of your questions answered.: )  

There were 12 of us training to be Trainers and we were divided into 2 groups of six. Our trainers were Dr. Rebecca Nye, the author of Children's Spirituality: What it is and Why it Matters, and the Rev. Peter Privett, who together brought Godly Play to Europe in the late 1990s. They were both wonderful down-to-earth people who came in with the attitude that we were all learning together rather than them being the experts who knew everything. How refreshing that was! 

Our training was divided into three parts:

1) Training another Storyteller 

2) Telling a story and being trained by another Storyteller

3) Background work in Children's Spirituality

Since I promised to write shorter posts, I'll just tell you about the first part today: 

Training a fellow Storyteller

This was baptism by fire for me, because I was the very first one in my group train someone else! Fortunately, Rebecca and Peter had brought along Peter's wife, Rosemary (brave woman!), to be a guinea pig storyteller, and Rebecca had begun the training by training Rosemary.  I trained Andrea from England who did a marvelous job of telling "The Flood and the Ark". Fortunately, I had told my kids this story in Nov., so I was familiar with it. 

       

When you train someone else, you sit outside of the circle behind the group in a chair, so that you have a clear view of what is going on and take notes as quietly as possible about what you see. Then, you observe the story, the Storyteller, the people listening, and the Wondering at the end. 

I found it incredibly difficult to be such a multitasked here! My natural Modus Operandi is to get drawn into the story itself and forget about everything else. I had to fight with myself to stay on track and keep observing. Taking notes helped a lot. 

When the story was finished, I had to gently find a way to enter the group. The circle had been formed in the beginning and the participants had experienced a deep Wondering time together. To come in too abruptly would have made everything suddenly strange and possibly make the Storyteller nervous about what I was going to say. So following Rebecca's example as a Trainer, I gently asked if I could join the group. 

Andrea had done a brilliant job of telling the story, so there wasn't much to address in the first place. I began by asking her how the experience had been for her. After she shared, I asked the group what they liked about the story, and they shared encouragements for quite a while. Finally, I asked Andrea, "Were there any rough spots for you?" Then, she knew exactly what had been problematic without me even having to mention it. 

I discovered through all of this that being a Trainer is really a pastoral role. You are not necessarily there to give a lot of direct critique, but to help the person draw it out for themselves. You want to encourage the storyteller that he or she can do this storytelling thing. Rebecca and Peter stressed that training someone is different every time and that you just have to look for teachable moments and feel the person out for how open they are for critique. Apparently, in most Core Trainings, the time for the direct instruction is during the practice time, BEFORE the person tells the story in front of the group. The training afterwards is a debrief about how it went. 

Also, one important thing that I mentioned in my first post on the training, is that a Trainer evaluates not just the story, but the session as a whole. Again, this stretched my multi-tasking skills, but I think it will get easier with practice.

Right after my experience as a Trainer, Rebecca then debriefed me by doing exactly the same sort of thing that I had just done with Andrea. And then I thought to myself, I think I can really do this!