Imagine This - Ideas & Stories for Creative, Meaningful Teaching | The Game Is Writing: How Frankenstories Is Transforming Writing Classrooms with Andrew Duval

How can we use the principles of improv theatre to help students become more creative writers?

In this episode of Imagine This, Dylan Ismail sits down with Andrew Duval, educator, writer, and co-creator of Frankenstories and WriteLike, to explore how game-based collaborative writing is changing the way students experience literacy. Andrew shares the story behind Frankenstories, why he describes it as "the game is writing," and how principles from improv theatre can help students become more creative, confident, and collaborative writers.

The conversation dives into what meaningful collaboration really looks like in classrooms, why peer feedback can be more powerful than automated feedback, and how teachers can use Frankenstories for everything from narrative writing to poetry. Andrew also discusses the impact of AI on writing education, explaining why he chose to focus on building authentic, social writing experiences instead of relying on AI-generated assessment.

About Andrew Duval

Andrew Duval is a teacher at Humanitas High School in Brisbane, Australia, and the co-creator of WriteLike and Frankenstories. He holds a Master's in Scriptwriting from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School and has spent his career exploring how storytelling, design, and technology can improve education. Andrew has received an Australian Writer's Guild Award, a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant, multiple Good Design Australia Awards, and was a winner of the MIT Solve AI in Assessment Challenge.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

[00:02:05] The classroom moment that revealed the power of Frankenstories
[00:06:50] How Frankenstories evolved from writing research, mentor texts, and cognitive load theory
[00:12:37] Why collaboration is more than group work—and what improv teaches us about writing together
[00:22:16] Why comedy comes naturally, and how genre shapes collaborative storytelling
[00:30:02] Moving beyond silly stories through poetry, empathy, and authentic writing
[00:35:16] Using Frankenstories for poetry, reflection, and different writing experiences
[00:42:40] Designing classroom experiences: adapting the tool for different learning goals
[00:49:40] AI, writing, and why meaningful collaboration makes shortcuts less appealing
[00:55:15] Practical advice for teachers: diagnostics, scaffolding, and building classroom norms
[01:03:23] Final reflections on improv, collaboration, and why writing is meant to be played together

—

Resources discussed in this episode:

—

Contact Classmate:

Contact Andrew Duval | WriteLike:

Creators and Guests

Host

Dylan Ismail

Dylan Ismail is the host of Imagine This and an Educational Technology Coach with Classmate, a Vancouver based team that helps people in schools succeed with technology through fun, collaborative learning experiences.

Guest

Andrew Duval

Andrew Duval is a teacher at Humanitas High School in Brisbane, Australia, and the co-creator of WriteLike and Frankenstories. He holds a Master's in Scriptwriting from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School and has spent his career exploring how storytelling, design, and technology can improve education. Andrew has received an Australian Writer's Guild Award, a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant, multiple Good Design Australia Awards, and was a winner of the MIT Solve AI in Assessment Challenge.

What is Imagine This - Ideas & Stories for Creative, Meaningful Teaching?

Imagine This is a podcast about what’s possible in classrooms.

Each episode features conversations with teachers who are building meaningful, creative (and sometimes boldly real-world) projects — the kind that help students create work that matters beyond school. From documentary field trips and immersive role-playing games to student-made podcasts and more, we explore ideas that make learning feel alive.

Hosted by Dylan from Classmate — a team that partners with educators to co-create fun, collaborative learning experiences — the show blends reflection and storytelling. Some stories come from classrooms we collaborate in; others come from schools and educators we meet along the way. Each episode includes a teacher interview alongside reflection from the Classmate team on what worked, what surprised us, and what we’re still learning.

This show is for K–12 educators (and really anyone who cares about learning) who want school to feel more meaningful, more imaginative, and more real.

Andrew Duval: [00:02] This is the middle school student writing about this. Questions for a mother whale and her calf. And they wrote, How do you deal with the sleepless nights and toddler fights? What happens when you run out of breath or your baby annoys you to death? Where is a school in the sea? Why are you so much bigger than me?

Dylan Ismail: [00:26] Welcome to Imagine This, a podcast about what's possible in classrooms. My name is Dylan Ismail, and I'm an edtech coach at Classmate, a team in Vancouver, BC that helps people in schools succeed with technology. This week, my guest is Andrew Duval, one of the creators of Write Like and Frankenstories. Andrew teaches at Humanitas High School in Brisbane, Australia. He has a master's in scriptwriting from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, and he's won an Australian Writers Guild Award. He also spent a decade as the creative director at Liquid Interactive, where he worked on population-scale behavior change projects for the Australian federal government. Now, I want to be up front with you. This one is a long one, but stick with me because something happened in this conversation that I haven't stopped thinking about since we recorded it. Frankenstories is an online writing game for middle and high school students. It's based on improv games like telephone or one-word stories. But don't be mistaken, it's way more than that. Now, I've played Frankenstories in classrooms, and I've also taken improv classes. I never really connected those two experiences until Andrew explained why the game works the way that it does. Underneath all the noise and enthusiasm and focus that happens when the game is being played, is a skill that he calls ego regulation. The ability to put your own ideas out into a group, being okay with having it accepted or not, and then building on it in good faith. This isn't just a side effect of playing Frankenstories. It's kind of the whole thing. It's giving language to the root of collaboration, the selflessness of building something together with others.

Dylan Ismail: [02:00] Something that improv teaches early on, but not something I really recognized in classrooms where we ask learners to work together and collaborate on almost a daily basis. So once he named it, it kind of changed how I saw Frankenstories entirely. Hearing Andrew lay out ego regulation made me realize that Frankenstories isn't just a clever game bolted onto a writing lesson. It's actually a pedagogical approach to teaching writing, and Andrew makes the same turn later in our conversation. By the end, we're not talking about Frankenstories as just a one-off activity. We're talking about building it into a full sequence of lessons, a real curriculum for teaching narrative writing. Because the game carries that same body of knowledge and that same social dynamics as improv training, it's just delivered through text instead of on a stage.

Dylan Ismail: [02:46] So if you're thinking, okay, that sounds great, but how do I get started, Andrew also gets practical. We cover how to run a diagnostic first game, how to set up social norms as a class before letting your class of writers loose, and how to scaffold all the way down to just word lists before attempting a full story. So yes, it's a long one, but if you've ever wondered what it actually looks like to teach kids to collaborate, not just do group work, but really, really collaborate, I think this is one of the best explanations of what it takes that I've heard. So here's my conversation with Andrew Duval.

Dylan Ismail: [03:28] Thanks for being on the podcast, Andrew.

Andrew Duval: [03:30] Thanks, Dylan. How are you doing?

Dylan Ismail: [03:32] I'm doing great. Thanks for joining me from basically the other side of the world compared to Vancouver, B.C..

Andrew Duval: [03:37] Exact opposite. A little fun fact while we get started is Brisbane is the home of Bluey. I didn't know if you knew that.

Dylan Ismail: [03:43] Is it really? I did not know that, Bluey is very popular in our household. I have a two year old. We were actually listening to the soundtrack on the way to daycare this morning.

Andrew Duval: [03:50] Oh, amazing. Yeah. Well, so when you watch Bluey, I can tell you it's very Brisbane centric. Like all the locations are real Brisbane locations.

Dylan Ismail: [04:00] Is this the same as like if I watched friends, I would know all the locations of New York. So if I watch Bluey, I'll know all the locations of Brisbane?

Andrew Duval: [04:09] Pretty, much, exactly. Yeah. I would say it's a very romanticized portrait of raising children in Brisbane, and romanticized in the sense of it shows all the good stuff that is genuinely true about raising children in Brisbane and then just drops all the bad stuff.

Dylan Ismail: [04:26] Yeah.

Andrew Duval: [04:27] And just leaves you with good stuff. But the good stuff that is there is really what it's like to raise children in Brisbane.

Dylan Ismail: [04:32] Yeah. Bluey and Bingo are wonderful children.

Andrew Duval: [04:37] Yeah.

Dylan Ismail: [04:38] So, Andrew, the reason that I invited you on the podcast was because of one of the things that you've created, which is Frankenstories. And for those who don't know, Frankenstories is an online, I would say it's a game. You've actually described it as Frankenstories is a game and the game is writing. So today we're talking about gamified writing is basically where we're going to be heading. And I wanted to start by telling you the story of the first time I used Frankenstories with a teacher in a school. How's that sound? Okay, so I'll be honest, I don't actually remember where I saw Frankenstories for the first time. I'm guessing it was probably like an Instagram reel or something on social media. And I brought it to a librarian who, any time I brought her an idea, she would do it day of or the next time I was there, it was someone who I knew would test it while I was there in the room. And so I said to her like, hey, I found this really cool game. It's called FrankenStories. You've been looking for a way to engage your students a little bit more with writing and storytelling in the library. So what if we just did this today with her newspaper club. So there were about 15 kids at lunch that were sitting there ready to do newspaper club. And I was like, let's just interject and play this game really quick. So we threw it up on the screen.

[00:03:23] And the way that the game works is that there's a prompt. It's usually like an image and like a question or something that says, write like this monster is about to take over a town or something like that. And then there's a few rounds of students being able to write, and then their writing gets rated or sort of voted on by their classmates. And this is all done through a website on their Chromebooks. And the librarians face, after the first 90s of them writing where the whole class was, what are we doing? Oh, let's go log in. Oh, I get to pick an avatar. I get to pick a name and then absolute silence while they all vote for that first prompt. And then 90 seconds goes by, there's a Bing and it's voting time. And they're all reading other people's writing. They're kind of there's like a little bit of chatter and like kind of laughter coming from different corners of the room. And then it's like, Bing, the person who gets their writing voted on the highest or collects the most amount of votes is presented. There's like, cheers. Everyone's so excited. It's been like four minutes and the classroom is just so engaged. And then that just continued that cycle like 3 or 4 more times until the end of the class. Well, the end of the session. And I remember talking to the librarian after and she was like, what was that magic that just what was that absolute black magic that just happened where the kids were like silent and engaged at the same time? Is this a common experience with Frankenstories?

Andrew Duval: [07:22] Yeah, it's the canonical experience. I think there was a time I remember, I don't know, I remember a couple of years ago saying to somebody, just, we'd been doing it in class, and I said to one of the people I work with, Katrina, who's she's a linguist and a data analyst and does escape rooms and narrative design and things like that. I was like, we need to find a way to bottle this sound in some way, almost like a form of audio branding or something. Because of this, this kind of yeah, this kind of chatter, silence, and then that transition back out where there's this explosion of energy and that oscillation is 100% what it's about. I think that that's the canonical experience. I would also say that what, what happens inside that is the bigger question. So when you get the silence and the noise, the real question for me is some teachers are happy with that. They're happy with everyone's engaged, everyone's writing and just writing anything is good, is progress. And there's good reasons to think that. I myself get a little bit more stressed out about it. I also want to see pretty high quality work as well. And so when you look at what kids are writing, that's also a big question is kind of are they engaged? What are they writing complete gibberish or just in-jokes or whatever. That's where you get into some really interesting sort of the next level. It's basically like, it's a great vehicle for getting that engagement that you're talking about, that sort of lock in and that joy. But then the next question is, how do you channel that engagement to what you actually want the students to be learning and practicing and developing over time?

Dylan Ismail: [09:03] Yeah. So I would love for you to kind of give us a description of how we got to Frankenstories, and then we can talk about how it's going to be used as a game, but also into some of these deeper writing skills that we discussed last time we talked. So how did you get to this idea of Frankenstories? Where did it come from?

Andrew Duval: [09:23] Yeah. So Frankinstories emerged from a pretty slow process. So if you roll the clock back nearly 12 years now, I won a Gates Foundation grant for something called the Lit Challenge, and their interest was in helping develop projects that tried to address this kind of decline in writing ability that comes around grade four and grade five, and it's pretty universal, happens in Australia, happens in the US. It's really where students are making the transition from basic literacy, basic reading and writing into more advanced text production, basically. So you're doing longer, more sophisticated stories, persuasive pieces, analyzes that kind of thing. And the demands of that type of writing just get a lot more complicated, and everything kind of goes off a cliff a bit after that. So they were interested in ideas about that, and I just happened to have a combination of things I was interested in at the time. I was interested in creating some kind of voice gym, because I think writers are great mimics of styles and voices. And if you could teach kids to mimic text in the way that writers mimic text, you've kind of done half the job anyway. I was interested in the application of cognitive load theory to the teaching of writing, particularly the use of examples and mentor texts and modeling, as opposed to writing whole texts or writing sort of fresh, original stuff all the time.

Andrew Duval: [10:49] And yeah, so I got this grant and that led to the development of Write Like, which is like a short form mentor text modeling platform. And so Write Like, you know, the formula for Write Like is we'll give you a snippet of authentic mentor text highlights and patterns. And you as a student, write your own version of this, applying your own content. And so I would describe Write Like as the experiences like going to the gym and doing weights at the gym, it's about reps. So it's the same basic pattern over and over again on different pages. You're just focusing on different aspects of language and genre and that kind of thing. If you do the reps, you will get conditioned, but it's very repetitive as a format in a good way. But it also means that what we found over time was just students just got fatigued doing that. And it's how do you make that experience rewarding? And so we tried all sorts of ways to make that experience more rewarding, introducing some social aspects to it and some light sort of game elements to it. And voting things came up in it. We were developing all these ideas, and increasingly, I was, Chris, my co-founder, and I, so I'm sort of the writer, teacher, designer type person. And Chris is a programmer and a competitive gamer, not a reader.

Dylan Ismail: [12:11] And it's a good mix. It is a good mix of personalities. Yeah.

Andrew Duval: [12:15] That's it. We complement each other really well. And I was walking around all the time saying, I think we really need to find a way to, we need a way to add an element of surprise to the writing process. That was the key thing. How do we get an element of surprise to this? And Chris, on the other hand, was thinking, this needs to be more like we need to make a game. And I want to experiment with some technology around our live sockets talking to each other, Chris one day said, I think we should take this voting thing that we've got and Write Like we should make that a live multiplayer writing experience.

Dylan Ismail: [12:50] The voting thing and Write Like was two students could put their work next to each other and then it would be voted on by the class. Is that how it worked?

Andrew Duval: [12:57] The sort of it was basically we called it. It's called Write Vote. And what happens is when everyone's finished a lesson, there is a checkpoint piece at the end of the lesson in Write Like, which is the sort of everything we've been doing, the lesson, let's pull it all together now and write something kind of a paragraph from scratch and Wrote Vote would take people's checkpoint pieces, put them into a bucket, shop them around, and then when you played it, you as a student would just see two next to each other. It's basically comparative judgment. And yeah, you were sort of hot or not kind of thing. You would choose your favorite out of this pair. So it basically asks you to read two students' things side by side, look for comparisons and differences, and make a choice. And then after that it would be revealed who wrote it. And you could leave an emoji in a comment. So it was a great way of making sure that everyone got feedback, that you sampled a diversity of things and you did some of that comparative analysis stuff. So it's feedback and learning at the same time. So that went really well. Again, it's asynchronous, so you could do it any time. And it didn't have any sort of element of social live kind of dynamic to it.

Andrew Duval: [13:55] And Chris was saying, I think we should do something like that, but add a live component to it. Right. And when he described it to me, my initial thought, and I think this is what a lot of people think when they first encounter Frankenstories or hear about it is I thought, oh, this would be like that game of telephone, where you write on a piece of paper, fold it over, pass the paper along, and everyone just keeps extending on a sentence at a time. That's what I thought we were making. So my verdict on that was cute. Yeah, cute. It'll be nice. That'll be a little thing. It'll be a feature in. It'll be a fun little thing you can do in WriteLike a cute addition or whatever. No problem. So Chris built a prototype for this in about two weeks. And then we played it with a group of just like 5 or 6 of us. And the first time we played it, it was so different to what I'd been imagining, the experience of playing it, the actual experience of playing it, the speed, the anonymity and the voting, and then critically, everything that's involved in adapting. Because I think that's one thing you sort of skipped over in your description of it is in a typical game, when you close out around, everyone votes, there's a winner.

Andrew Duval: [15:10] The really key thing is that if you're writing a story, everyone has to adapt to that winning response. Yeah, that's the main thing, is you have to dump everything that you were thinking before and pick up on whatever has been basically locked into place and extend on that in good faith. And you were talking about this oscillation of sound and energy, that there is this kind of locked in silence and then this explosion of energy during sort of voting and everything else. There's a different kind of oscillation in this game, which is an oscillation of ego. So when you are in that writing round, you are competing. You're putting yourself forthrightly down and making a play because you want to win that round. Generally, you want to influence where this stuff is going. And then when you go into the voting round, ideally, and this isn't always the thing, but this is part of the learning of the game, I think. And part of what makes it interesting is you have to put that ego aside, and you have to think collectively at that point and go, okay, well, what is the best option here? What gives us the best potential to go forward? How do I make that responsibility, make that choice responsibly?

Dylan Ismail: [16:22] The writers are not getting their own writing back. They're forced to vote on other people. So you can't just write something and then vote for yourself.

Andrew Duval: [16:29] Yeah, that's exactly right. And there's all sorts of dynamic, we can talk about this as a different layer to it, but there's because there's all sorts of dynamics around that. That's part of the complexity of the game. Part of the interest of the game, but something I think is really fascinating, like at my old job when I was a creative director at Liquid, we had a reputation for being highly collaborative, and I never really understood it because I thought, isn't everyone collaborative? And then it took me a while to really understand that we often talk about collaboration without actually really having a very good mental model of what collaboration really is and why it's important and how it works, and the degree to which complex collaboration is essential for doing anything of any real value out in the wider world. You know what I mean? And in school, we tend to equate collaboration with group work. Yeah, but that's not what it is.

Dylan Ismail: [17:20] I've seen examples of this where teachers say they're collaborating together and it is group work, but a lack of structure about who is doing what or how they're supposed to interact with each other. Like how do you ask good questions? How do you support other ideas? How do you have a productive debate without being mean to each other? You see that a lot.

Andrew Duval: [17:43] Yeah, 100%, I guess. Like, this is interesting to talk about even now, because this is all stuff that I spotted in that first prototype. When we first played it, I thought, oh, this isn't like that game of telephone. This is like improv theater. This is like doing theater sports in writing form. And I thought, that is completely new. And that is very powerful because sports and improvisation training have this amazing, two things really. This amazing reputation for developing craft skills in career creative professionals. And part of that is a collaborative skill. And also they have a sort of a theory of genre, like a theory of narrative, for instance, that is different to the conventional theory or model of narrative that we would teach in school because it's theory based on not being able to plan, if that makes sense. And that leads you to think about it differently and have different sort of frameworks and structures for it. So that was all stuff that I saw from the prototype. We were really, really enthusiastic about what Chris had created.

Dylan Ismail: [18:52] I'm assuming you've taken improv classes.

Andrew Duval: [18:55] Yes.

Dylan Ismail: [18:56] And was there anything that was that before or after Frankenstories?

Andrew Duval: [19:01] No, that was long before. Long before. So it was very early in my I mean, like, I have a little story I tell like, this is Keith Keith Johnson's Impro, which was written in 1979 or something 1981. So this book. So Keith Johnson invented Theatresports. He started off in London doing improv theater. And so impro was written based on that work back in the 70s. And I found this book because I was in a little drama bookshop in Sydney when I was, I don't know, 21, 22 or something. And the Drama bookshop, it's the size of a closet, right? It's not there anymore, but the size of the closet. And so it's just me and a guy sitting at the counter. And it's just a, you know, three walls of, of play manuscripts and playwriting books and things. And I'm just wandering around and browsing. And over about 20 minutes, I make it to the opposite wall and I pull this book off the shelf. And, the minute I put it off the shelf, the guy on the other side of the room goes, that book will change your life. I was like, oh, okay, that's pretty serious. And so I bought it. And it's true. Anyone, if you're in the know, you're in the know. This is the book that changes people's lives because it just has this different conception of narrative and storytelling and performance. And so that was the roots of it. And then we did theatresports classes at uni and things like that. So yeah, so there's a background in all of that and recognizing that, but the collaboration thing I just want to get back to. We'll loop back to this for a second. Collaboration versus group work and what you see in Frankenstories and that sort of oscillation of ego.

Andrew Duval: [20:33] I think part of it is about you talking about structuring roles and how to ask good questions and things like that. That's an important part of it, and that's what I'd call sort of a practice part of collaboration. And there's a structural part to that, which is if you go out in the real world, like at my old job, we would work on websites and apps for things and education related stuff. You would have these teams of people with very different backgrounds, experiences, and expertise, and that's how we coordinate. Everyone had a very different thing to bring together. That's not really the case in classrooms. Like often the kids are, well, you're all learning the same stuff. You're all performing the same skill. You can make these sort of limited differentiations and roles, but you're still kind of doing the same stuff. And that's where you get the problem of group work in school, where it sort of devolves into just, well, who's best doing all the work and other people coasting on behind and that kind of thing. So like, there are structural parts of collaboration that are important to understand and practice and things, but they've also got sort of limited, I don't know what the word is like, limited runway or limited value in school. There's only so much you can get out of them. But deeper than that in collaboration is actually values, right? And at the bottom of that is this idea of selflessness. So you cannot do any effective collaboration at all unless the people in the group can regulate their own egos, basically.

Andrew Duval: [22:02] And so if you think about that, we're talking about this oscillation thing, silence and noise, competition and collaboration. Underneath all of that is this regulation of your own ego. So when you are writing in a writing round, putting yourself out there, contributing something, taking a bet on yourself, writing an entry down, right? That's leaning into your own ego. And then when you come out of the voting round, stepping back from that and going, right, what are we actually trying to achieve together? I wanted this, I might still want that. I might still vote for that. I might still try and steer things in that direction if I can. But if it doesn't work out, then how do I put myself aside and figure out what are we doing next? And then bring that ego back to bear and kind of go, okay, well, how do I commit and say yes in good faith to this new thing? Or if I win, how do I keep building on it? And so yeah, I think underneath it all is this idea that you can learn to get more comfortable with selflessness. Get more comfortable with regulating your own ego. And again, this is one of the things that when people talk about improv training later on in life, it's something like Amy Poehler talked about or whatever. People always talk about this kind of idea of saying yes, yes, responding and being changed by the other people around you as opposed to rigidly resisting being changed by anything. So those are all things that you can learn.

Dylan Ismail: [23:27] And so I'm hearing there's two sections that I'm connecting here. There's the writing, which is the improv that's like the offer, right? Like that's what you're offering to the group. And then in the voting, there's the saying yes, which is like, I'm gonna say yes to those because I've let go of myself and now I'm accepting the story for what's in front of me. Is that, am I following?

Andrew Duval: [23:49] That's right. Except also there is that transition when you start writing in the next round. Because like when you start writing, you have to say yes there too, by picking up and extending on what was before you. So it becomes this continuous kind of thing, right? And so to pick up on a couple of threads here, you were saying, what is the typical experience of starting and playing Frankenstories for the first time? I think that engagement, that sort of sonic experience that is engaged and then joyful and then locked in and then joyful again, that's all part of it. And then inside that is much more varied than about how kids are doing that ego regulation thing. And that's where I think it gets. That's the second layer when you start to look inside. And it's not just about the writing skills and focus and things like that. It's also about what do I see in terms of collaboration between students? How do I see this sort of handover of ideas? How are students lobbying for votes outside of the game and everything else, or begging for votes inside of the game? There are all these sort of social normal kinds of things that get to this really complex, rich kind of experience.

Dylan Ismail: [24:49] How does this sort of align with genre? In one of the videos I watched, you had mentioned that Frankenstories inspires comedy or horror as like the two easiest pieces of genre to write in a collaborative sense scene. How does this sort of like offer and yes, ending? How does that integrate with comedy and horror, and where have you seen it go elsewhere?

Andrew Duval: [25:15] Okay. All right. So I'm going to get technical for a second. Technical about the concept of genre, because it's one of these sort of fuzzy words that people have different meanings for, right? And so there's one version of genre which is sort of the bookshop version of genre, which is what you're talking about. So we're talking about horror versus comedy versus romance versus memoir, that kind of thing. Sort of, which are sort of, I don't know what else they are sort of genres. Right. And there's another version of genre, which is what you might also call text type. So narrative argument, persuasion, poetry, informational, that kind of thing. So I think those are both really interesting things to discuss. So the one that you're talking about, this kind of tonal thing, comedy and horror, these are the two things that most games revolve around and it's not a bad thing. What they both have in common, what horror, comedy, and horror have in common is the importance of surprise in both of them. Both of them are about a setup to something and then a very shocking flip of some sort.

Andrew Duval: [26:19] It's really just, is that bright or dark? There's a tonal thing to it and that kind of element of surprise. Remember I said, when creating Frankenstories, we're looking for a way to add an element of surprise to the writing process engineered into the way that you experience writing, but it also then gets reinforced in terms of the form of writing that you do with. That is then a natural form of writing that exploits surprise and make the most of it. Those are forms that also can do quite well with kind of having a sort of an emotional distance is the best way that I can sort of say it. You can sort of make crazy things happen to these characters over there. Whatever. They're doing silly and stupid things, or they're getting themselves in terrifying scrapes or whatever, and that's all a lot of fun. But at some point you want to try and move beyond that if you can. You don't want to have Frankenstories, games only stuck in those two palettes, right?

Dylan Ismail: [27:14] One of the experiences I've had is in a grade five class. They were kind of starting this idea of writing a hero's journey sort of story. And the teacher that was running the Frankenstories game, the first like 3 or 4 games were just for fun. Like they were doing it every couple of days. And a lot of them were sort of the comedy tropes of monsters or burritos or whatever. Sushi was popular that week was being thrown somewhere, and by the time they got to the one where they were like, really going to write something, and they were going to use the story that came out of it as a structure for an editing process later where they were going to edit that story into something that included more of the visuals and setting and character development and that kind of thing. By the time they got to that story, there was a whole like, ethos of characters that existed within the Frankenstory's universe. So it didn't really matter what the prompt was. We're always coming back to the burritos. We're always coming back to the flying sushi pieces. Yeah.

Andrew Duval: [28:19] Yeah. And I think that there's a balancing act with this stuff. It's interesting that you bring that up. We run a monthly challenge, and this year we only started running it sort of over the last 12 months or so. But so it kind of lines up with the end of the most recent US school year. And so there were two classes that started to dominate the. We don't really make a big deal about who won, but we just know in the background that there were two classes that were just winning all the time. There's a sight unseen, right? We're judging these things anonymously, and it's only afterwards we check ourselves which class was which. When I asked these guys again. And so one of them was a school in Massachusetts that I had visited that happened to be in the States, and they'd been playing with the teacher, had been using it for a while, and I was passing through. I will play a game together. And something about that visit made them made the students lock in. There was something about that where they said, we suddenly started taking the game much more seriously after hearing you talk about it.

Dylan Ismail: [29:20] Yeah, it.

Andrew Duval: [29:20] Was like, I'm with you.

Dylan Ismail: [29:21] Like an audience thing. Like they knew it was being presented to them like they put a name to the face or something like that.

Andrew Duval: [29:28] Oh no, I wish I could even explain what it was because I didn't think I did anything particularly radical when I went in there. I think we just played. I think I just made maybe.

Dylan Ismail: [29:37] The visit itself was radical that you showed.

Andrew Duval: [29:39] I think that is part just feeling elevated by that. Like that could be a big part of it. But I also think I took the writing seriously when we were playing and I maybe had a more serious way of, when we were voting, a more serious way of discussing and analyzing what we were voting and talking about the pros and cons of different things. I'm not really sure what it was. I think you're right. I think 90% was probably literally just the visit and feeling special. They really locked in and they were a very small group, which is part of the reason why they were such strong competitors because they were very unified, but part of their magic was building a bunch of lore around it. And yeah, because I interviewed them at the end of the year, because they were all graduating grade eight and they were going to move on and leave their school and stuff and all going to different schools. It's like, oh, you guys are sort of one of the reigning champs. Why don't we do a basketball style end of the championship? Yeah, exactly. And like, talk about what you guys did and what made you such good competitors. Yeah. One of the things they talked about was just the degree to which they enjoyed building their own lore in frankenstories. That was something they could share as a group and then critically talk about outside of the game. So this was part of that sort of ownership is it can seem really unhinged and it can seem kind of like they're being silly, but it is owning something that is a world that they can take outside and discuss out in the playground, and then they will literally have come back with thoughts about this world that they're building.

Andrew Duval: [31:10] So that's part of it. And I think even that the trick is it's not the burrito monster isn't a problem. The recurring burrito monster is good. What you want, though, is to extend basically. So you want to take it. We've got the burrito monster now, what else can we do with the Burrito Monster? Rather than doing the same tropes over and over again? How do we extend beyond that? And again, I'll refer you to this book, the book, because Johnson discusses exactly this phenomenon inside the book. So he had a style of game called a word at a time game. So just players will, you'll have half a dozen improvisers and one person will say one word and the next person will say another word. Continuing on from that, and you'll try and do a story one word at a time. And what he talks about in the book, and he has extracts from some players that went home and did this for a few hours. He talks about this phenomenon where when players start by doing that, everything will be silly and stupid and low stakes and not very personal, and it will be some combination of it will be silly, it'll be scatological, it'll be violent. It's kind of all the stuff that is supposed to be sort of crass and crude. It'll be a lot of that. And he's like, it's like, you have to sort of clean the sludge out of some old pipes that haven't been used, and you have to give time for everyone to sort of get comfortable with each other and get used to saying that like, okay, all this sort of sludge that we're pouring out is okay.

Andrew Duval: [32:35] And then if you just keep going and taking it seriously, then slowly these other layers of personality and emotion and authenticity and sincerity start to appear until by the end of this sort of sequence that's duplicated in the book, they move from completely unhinged gibberish to these very deeply poetic, sort of spiritual, religious kind of things. They're doing one word at a time because they've just been sticking with it. And so in the context of a classroom, this stuff doesn't happen automatically because you don't. One, I think there's there's too many students. You're dealing with far more students in the class and you don't have that sustained, continual touch point kind of thing going on. But that's where I think understanding the lineage of these kind of experiences then means you can sculpt and channel that experience and sort of know where you're heading. And so yeah, trying to move, if you want to move students beyond the really silly kind of playful sort of stuff, that's where for me, for instance, I'm just a huge fan of poetry. Poetry games are fantastic there. So there's a workshop that I do for English teacher conferences. Sometimes they call brainrot to bathos. And bathos is a word that's being misused in this context, but I just use it because I like the rhyming bees. But really, what pathos?

Dylan Ismail: [33:56] What's bathos instead of pathos?

Andrew Duval: [33:58] Pathos. Yeah. Bathos is like fake emotion, like cheap emotion. And I mean something sincere which should be pathos. But just when you put it on the page, bathos just looks and sounds better. So. And I just rely on not enough people really knowing what bathos is to sort of just slip slip it through. It's a progression of poetry games that were originally inspired by Kenneth Coke or Coke. So he was a poet.

Dylan Ismail: [34:23] What's the name of.

Andrew Duval: [34:24] That American poet? Wishes, lies and dreams. So he's a poet who in the 70s did a lot of work in public schools in New York. It was almost like a poet in residence. And Richard Lies in Dreams is just his account of running this program, or what he did with these kids, ranging from basically grade one to grade five, and it has a bunch of poetry formats that he started to develop that he found just really appealed to those kids, as well as other observations, like so. So examples of poetry formats were things like just write about just wishes, right? Lies, right? Your dreams, things like that. Write about colors, write about sounds, and then just showing them poetry as part of that. And adult poetry said they were all really enthusiastic about Byron and like, they don't understand any of it really, but they, they like the sounds and the weirdness of the words and things like that makes them very playful. And they enjoy playing with these poetry formats. And some of the poetry formats get progressively more sincere. So he talks about this observation where students early on will basically his observation that younger students will quite happily write about themselves and their internal experiences. Right. And then the older students become more self-conscious and then they start to close that off. And so then finding pottery formats that will encourage them to almost write, knowing about this self consciousness. So the one that I use is I seem to be, but really I am. Right. So that's just a stem. I seem to be x, y, z, but really I am a, b, c. And he said the older students were very fascinated with this idea of just the difference between presentation and reality.

Andrew Duval: [36:15] Yeah. And so getting back to brainrot to bathos. It's literally just a poetry workshop where we'll just do little poetry games that track this sort of progression, or we start the first three are all about playing with language and just the fun of it, the fun of poetry. So playing with musicality, playing with imagery, playing with metaphor. And then the second three, we move more into empathy and perspective taking. So poems that are made out of questions entirely, poems where you take point of view of something in an image. And then finally that I seem to be, but really I am format. And that progression is really amazing. And the funny thing is, I used to advocate this as you would do a lesson for each of these things. You could do one or more lessons just on musicality and playing around with language and poetry and things like that, and you'd work your way up to these other things. What I discovered in the workshop, which was just meant to be a demonstration of the progression in the workshop. We would do all six of them just in an hour very quickly. Turns out that actually works really well as well. The first time I did it with an adult English teacher workshop, I then found myself in Sydney doing grade five school class visits just at other schools, just demonstrating Frankenstories. I thought, oh, we should just try that workshop that I did with the adults. I didn't change anything. I had all the same poetry just did, just did the same workshop again. Great, great for the fifth graders, great for fourth graders. They love it. And now other people do it too.

Dylan Ismail: [37:42] And so what does that format look like in Frankenstories when you're using poetry instead of storytelling?

Andrew Duval: [37:49] The first thing to understand about Frankenstories is that it is just a blank page, right? It's just a blank page. But that blank page is decomposed into chunks, which are the rounds. And it can be as many or as few chunks as you want. So it could still be just one page if you want it to be one round, five minutes, five minutes, ten minutes if you want to. Yeah. We've got people who play 45 minute games to simulate exam conditions. You know what I mean? Like just all sorts of stuff. So it's a page that you can keep as a page or break into chunks. And by breaking into chunks, you are either doing completely like discrete writing experiences inside that if you want to, or you are just limiting the scope for what we're going to focus on and around. So you are controlling attention and load by chunking the page, essentially. And then around those chunks, you're introducing these other affordances. So the timers and the stimulus and the round instructions, the voting and the feedback and all that kind of thing are really just tools for essentially adding elements of surprise, pressure, and pleasure to the whole experience to make it this much more sort of vivid writing experience. Right. And then your choices as a teacher are really about if you've got these three levers of surprise, pressure, and pleasure, how do you want to adjust and tune those things to create sort of a particular kind of emotional landscape while you're playing the game?

Dylan Ismail: [39:14] Am I right to say that the exam conditions are probably like all pressure? Like we're putting that lever all the way up?

Andrew Duval: [39:22] Yes. And they'll do that one. That one that I'm thinking of specifically. They do that as a homework game. So you don't even have the voting at the end. Got it. Right. Because sometimes I'll do one round games where it's five minutes. I was running a memoir class once. We were doing two truths and a lie. And so when we're doing Frankenstories, writing games as part of that unit, if we were writing about lies and practicing something about lies and detail and things like that, we would play as a group and we'd have voting rounds because it didn't matter what you were writing about, it was all make believe anyway. But if we were doing an exercise, it was really about your own memory and your own experience and staying true to that. I wouldn't do the rounds. We would just do. We would have a one round game. So everyone still plays a class playing one round, but instead of it being 2 or 3 minute writing rounds for 4 or 5, I'd have one round that was 7 or 10 minutes long.

Andrew Duval: [40:11] Everyone was still locked in. They're still right, because at the end of that round, you would get a voting round and everyone would read each other's stuff and you would get hearts and likes, and there would be a winner for the whole thing. And everyone would sort of value that feedback. So when we get back to your original question, how's the poetry thing work? That's what we're really doing in that kind of poetry form that I'm talking about is every round will be its own free standing fragment of poetry. So there's none of that continuation part of it. Like you're not adapting to anything. But the collaboration part is voting well, because in a sense, like what you're going to produce is a little collection at the end of it, that will be a four or 5 or 6 fragments of poetry as a kind of a final top line piece, even though everyone else's entries are below the surface. These are the ones that are presented as the text that we created. And so you are kind of.

Dylan Ismail: [41:03] On demand poetry zine where everyone gets a small bit. Yeah. That's great.

Andrew Duval: [41:08] And editorializing that I'm often yelling in classes, you know, voting is as important as writing in the game, responsibly voting that that editorial choice. What are we choosing here is really important. And developing that taste and that maturity and that reflection and everything is part of it. And so that's what we're doing. We're just basically doing micro rounds of poetry. I will put up a different picture for each round. And so mechanically, the way I do it is I literally have a big Google Slides presentation for it, and each round it'll be: here's the focus. Okay, so we're doing musicality. What is this? It's the sound. It's rhythm, it's rhyme, anything like that. And we just quickly read through bits of, say, 3 or 4 poems. And I will generally choose one sort of accessible contemporary poem. I will choose one difficult poem. So Shakespeare or something classical or something difficult, Plath or something that's sort of difficult and contemporary. And then a couple of student written examples, and we'll just blitz through them so they get a sense of possibilities. And the instruction is simply grab hold of anything you like in there, any sound you like. We will do a bit of reading of poetry. Here's your stimulus. Hit the timer. They write and they all vote something. We get a winning poem or a fragment of verse, and then we hit pause in the game. Flip back to the slide deck, So okay, next one, let's talk about rhythm or let's talk about point of view. Let's talk about questions. I'll just read some examples. So by the time you're done in an hour, they have sort of skimmed across, I don't know, 20 poems and they've written 4 to 6 of them, depending on how you're pacing it out.

Dylan Ismail: [42:47] And you're getting this all done within an hour.

Andrew Duval: [42:50] Yeah. And so it depends on how you've got to sort of modulate that. I will often not do all six in an hour. You can, but it's a big rush. It depends on how efficient you think the class is going to be. So generally in class, I'll compress it down to four. And the four that I would generally do is I would do musicality and I would do imagery and metaphor. I would combine in one, and then we'd do questions and we'd do point of view and that's enough. So you get that sort of, again, that pairing of playfulness and experimenting with language. And then you get into this empathy and perspective taking thing. And when you get to that, the questions poem is really interesting. I can't even really describe it. You sort of got to read some of them, but the questions can get very deep. These will be things like. The typical picture I've used at the moment is a whale and a calf, like a mother whale and a calf. This is an example. And so this is somebody writing about the middle school student writing about this questions for a mother whale and her calf. And they wrote, how do you deal with the sleepless nights and toddler fights? What happens when you run out of breath or your baby annoys you to death? Where is a school in the sea? Why are you so much bigger than me?

Andrew Duval: [44:05] Things like that. They're very simple, and some of them are very, very deep and very poetic. But it's this amazing transition into the next phase, which would be doing point of view. Poems will do. I often use as Steve McCurry image of a cat sitting in a graveyard. And and you can write about anything in that scene. Be the cat. You can be a leaf. You can be a tree. You can be a headstone. You can be a grave, can be your body in the grave. You can be a visitor. And what it gets kids writing about life and death or mortality and relationships. Just that is really fascinating. That's how I think you structure it. That's how I think you move beyond the pure creative play energy nonsense kind of thing, which is really important and really fun and really rewarding, but also extending beyond that to explore this place where students are more, yeah, a more honest and authentic and sincere and exploring other ideas. One of the things I would say is the poetry format doesn't require that continuation.

Dylan Ismail: [45:13] Right?

Andrew Duval: [45:14] And that continuation process, that adaptation step is part of the reason why things, like I said, become horrific or comedic because you are just nobody knows where anything is going and you're dealing with all this sort of surprise and stuff. It's very hard to develop a cohesive emotional journey in a large group of people with that sort of amount of volatility in voting. But again, this is where sculpting the experience is really important. So recognizing when you look at a tool like Frankenstories, it is a tool for creating certain types of writing experiences, a variety of them, and having a literacy yourself as a teacher about sort of what type of experiences do I want to create is really important because you can do something like the poetry game, where what you're doing is changing the, the text type that we're going to write, the genre that we're going to write in, and we're changing what the role of the rounds are so we're not getting that continuation thing. Or another thing that you can do is simply change the team compositions. So if you make, if you reduce some of that volatility in the voting by making smaller teams, and they can be teams of friends, they can be stable teams, they can could be random teams or whatever.

Andrew Duval: [46:26] But if you make it two kids or three kids or five kids, something like that, then you reduce the volatility in the game and it makes it much easier to sustain a certain kind of cohesive emotional world that way. So these are all affordances that exist in a good tool. And I think more broadly, just while we're on this topic. I personally I'm also a classroom teacher as well, and I'm not a technologist, I guess is the key thing here. I'm background is in writing and design and teaching and education in general. I'm genuinely ambivalent about technology, right? Like there's a whole bunch of pros and cons, and using it arbitrarily in any classroom is really dangerous. And so I think, yeah, what I look for as a teacher and as a designer is to use and to create tools that are weirdly both very specialized and also potentially very flexible, right. So something like, Write Like for instance, is very specialized. This is just primarily about mentor text modeling. So it has this very strict pattern inside it because it's really just trying to do one skill and make that easier. And the thing about, right, like is you don't even really need the technology to do it.

Andrew Duval: [47:40] You can just do it on paper if you want to. The technology is sort of an organizing thing for it. Frankenstories, on the other hand, to me is an example of a good use of technology because it's both very simple but very flexible in terms of what you can do inside that. So you can create all sorts of types of experiences based on how you change timers, how you change round structures, how you change the composition of the students, how you change the prompt, how you change scaffolding instructions, create all sorts of different writing experiences inside that. So it's very simple. It's very flexible, but also it makes really good use of automation. So the speed that you get in the game is really critical. And the anonymity, the speed with which entries are sorted and distributed, and then you can do the voting and that's all counted out. And there's a winner. You can slow down the parts where you need to slow down and read stuff, but the stuff that is just administrative is made more or less instantaneous is really critical to creating this kind of hive mind experience that you get out of stories, which is really important.

Dylan Ismail: [48:44] There's like when you described to me this sort of blank page metaphor of like Frankenstories is just a blank page and you can sort of pull these levers to do different things and create different experiences. The first thing that I thought of was a Google doc. When you put a blank page in front of a class of students and you ask them to write something like, it's kind of overwhelming. And what you're describing about these, like automating the feedback or the administrative tasks being done within Frankenstories. When I think about how all that feedback could have been done or created, or teachers sort of like trying to create that experience with a blank Google Doc in Google Classroom. Like, there's no wonder that they don't want to do that because like the amount of administrating of comments or sharing documents between students or having people edit things, it can be done there. But it's not this experience that you've described in Frankenstories where it happens like so, so quickly, and the feedback comes right away and you get another chance at adding to the story. It's just the learning feels so much more potent on the Frankenstory side, even though you could probably just design the same experience or go through the same content on both sides, but one of them just does it way better. And I didn't even really know that before you sort of explained this non story structure of just using it in these different ways. So I'm excited to share that again with more teachers.

Andrew Duval: [50:16] Yeah. That's it. I mean, I think it's like a lot of these things. I feel like if it's sometimes it's a really good tool, you know, it takes a while just to learn the potential of anything. It's like being handed a piano. You sit there and bang keys and it's the thing that makes them sounds. Yeah. But yeah, there's, there's a lot more to using it, choosing your technology so that like if you're going to use them, they're really potent for that, that use that you use them for. But if you are trying to create that particularly kind of intense writing experience, so like, let's say there's value in a reflective, slow writing experience where you have time to do something by hand and move things around in space a little bit and go silently into your own thoughts and get the benefits of the physicality of pen and paper. There's a particular kind of reflective, meditative, internal kind of writing experience that is really valuable and should be encouraged and taught, and kids should be taught what they're doing when they're doing that, because it's so foreign to them. Some of the time, because we don't live in a paper based world anymore, that needs to be taught.

Andrew Duval: [51:13] And then when you switch to something like Frankenstories being that what you're doing is, is you are using this speed and this feedback to create this kind of hive mind experience is really crucial. I've done other workshops where we'll sort of simulate it on paper. We'll sort of push paper as far as you can go for this kind of collaborative thing. It's great in its own way. It's not bad. But for instance, one thing you'll find is if you're constantly passing bits of paper around, there's all this business of shuffling the paper around, and then you're constantly having to sort of read new things and re-upload things into your mind that you don't have to do. And it's all sort of being done simultaneously, sort of reading lots of things together. And you're sort of, you're more sort of locked in and aware of what's happening all the time. So you get this very seamless kind of experience if you can automate that. Frankenstories is just very flexible. It's very open ended. It's very simple. At the same time as being a really good use of really good use of technology, automation should be.

Dylan Ismail: [52:13] I just want to I want to pick up on this idea of technology Because in one of our well, in our earlier conversation, you had mentioned something about how Frankenstory is kind of subverts the use of like AI writing in a classroom, like because of the way that it is designed, it's almost like anti AI writing by design. And I'm going to guess that it wasn't intentional, because I'm pretty sure Frankenstories came out before all these chat bots were, you know, readily available to all of us.

Andrew Duval: [52:40] I mean, there are so many things we can talk about here. So one thing anti AI. Yeah. So personally I'm not anti AI right. I'm very pro. I think the technology is kind of miraculous when we're talking about deep learning technology. It's pretty profound what's happening. But one of the good things about Frankenstories is it sidesteps AI the way I've described it. That's it just makes the whole thing. It makes the whole thing irrelevant. Yeah. And why would you want to do that? I mean, I still believe that writing is really important. One of the ways that I think about writing. And there are, I think about it in different ways. And this is just one of the ways I think about it, I think is useful is writing is how we model the world through language, and we make models of the world through all sorts of mediums. We make mathematical models, we make visual models, we make physical spatial models of what we do, all sorts of model making in the world, which is really important for how we sort of think and understand the world and communicate our own internal experiences to each other. So model making is really important, and writing is just how we make models through language and how we think iteratively through language.

Andrew Duval: [53:54] For that reason, it is really important. It's fundamental to how we think, and it's important to keep learning it as a capability. It's also important to recognize that everything gets under increasing pressure, I guess, around it, because we have these affordances of technology and we have all these competing media that we pay attention to. It's harder and harder to find the time and the focus to learn these complex kind of skills, like writing. So you kind of want to be efficient about it in a sense. Strategically, when you think about school, it's like, okay, well, I've only got limited school time. Everyone's attention spread through all these different sort of channels now, how do you make the most of the time you've got? I think Frankenstory is just great because it sidesteps AI, and it lets you focus on producing content for an audience and making that experience rich and valuable immediately so that it fundamentally students value it. They value the writing. They want to get better at writing. They want to do more writing. And so I think that's really helpful. Well, it's funny because you were talking about timing as well.

Andrew Duval: [55:03] It's the timing of this is funny. The degree to which I have an opinion on AI is actually goes back to right, like because right from the start, I always wanted, right? Like to have some form of automated feedback in it because you were essentially mimicking patterns. And right from the start, this is 12 years ago or something, I was thinking, oh, this should be pretty straightforward to say, well, if you've written something in this style of this voice, we should be able to measure that in some way and even just give you a thumbs up or thumbs down. You did it or you didn't do it kind of thing. So in that period, what you had were essentially natural language processing technologies. The deep learning stuff was all just kind of happening in the background, hadn't sort of really hit mainstream release yet. None of that natural language processing stuff actually worked in this context. So the fuzziness of language and even right, like activities which are trying to constrain things and saying, okay, well, whatever would be set up a situation here and then introduce a reversal there or, you know, describe a character's thoughts and feelings finding purely.

Dylan Ismail: [56:09] It's still quite fuzzy even like what you're writing to, that prompt is still quite fuzzy.

Andrew Duval: [56:15] 100%. There are so many different ways you can do it. And so natural language processing technologies are looking for linguistic markers. A lot of those linguistic markers you're looking for, they could be anything. There's so much flexibility in that. And so it was always a sore spot for me that we couldn't find something that worked.

Dylan Ismail: [56:32] I just wanted to sort of like cap off all the things that I've heard from you, because my head is sort of swimming with ideas of being able to, like, present this to more teachers and I guess like weasel my way into more classrooms to see how the Frankenstories set up can sort of affect the classroom. One of the big things that I've taken away is this idea of like sticking to it. So like getting through the first few uses of Frankenstories and you mentioned like wading through the chaff, like getting the silliness out of the way, not that the silliness is bad, but that you can really sort of level up the writing that students are doing if you keep pushing and and keep going through that initial comedy. And one of the ways that you can sort of do that is by integrating, I mean, we talked about poetry and how poetry can kind of lend itself to like deeper thinking and reflection and that kind of thing. So that's something that I feel like I'm going to be a little bit more confident in sharing with teachers. Are there other things that you want teachers to know when they jump into Frankenstories? I know you've mentioned a lot, but if there's one thing that you could sort of say, here's the once you get through the silliness at the beginning, like, what are you hoping teachers do with Frankenstories?

Andrew Duval: [57:48] Yeah, that's a really that's actually a really big question with multiple layers of answers. So without making it too complicated for anyone, because I feel this dilemma because teachers, everyone's so time poor and everything you do in class is a risk. If you don't know how it's going to work out, it's a risk. Was this a waste of my time is a risk. We don't get that time back. Time is really precious. Risk management is a big part of the job, so there are a few things I would say. One is going into it and a part I guess I also, why I'm hesitating to answer this question is part of. This is my job to try and figure out ways to essentially teach teachers and explain some of this to them. And I think some of this stuff is about learning to use frankenstories as a tool, where to go, what to do, what to click on that kind of thing. But some of it is about teaching practice. It's about deeper things, but practices that are kind of called up or recruited because of this particular kind of format and this stimulus. So if you think about this is where I think it's helpful to decouple from Frankenstories and think about if you're using this kind of improvisational, rapid social style of teaching and learning and writing, what do you need to do to manage that and use that effectively? Aside from Frankenstories, is one of the ways that I would think about it.

Andrew Duval: [59:13] And inside that, the first one is to think about basically, probably the first one is actually cognitive load management. So scaffolding down, shrinking down initial tasks. So when I would start to play, like my advice to teachers generally is you play your first few games and you make them just story games could just be your first game. Doesn't even have to be a couple. You just play a straightforward story game. It lets everyone get a chance to get a feel for just what the mechanics are. Get a feel for this voting thing, everything else, they get a bunch of energy, and if you have time to play one or 2 or 3 of those games, let kids just sort of find their own sort of balance point. If you're under pressure, then one is fine, but you do one that's kind of I used to call it a sacrificial game, but I think of it more as a diagnostic game is actually what it really is, because you are just in the first instance, seeing how's everyone respond to this? Where do they go? What's their sort of level of maturity? And you're looking both at the writing ability as well as that collaborative ability. And how responsive are they to feedback and just judging, where are we at right now and how responsive are they to my influence? If I say do this or don't do that, to what degree do kids want to go? Well, actually, we've got the power here because we've got the voting lever, so we're just going to do what we want.

Andrew Duval: [01:00:31] And usually you can reject replies that aren't going to go through to voting. So you can modulate it to a degree, but you don't want to have to do too much of that stuff because it's just more effort from you. So you're judging everything. You're diagnosing that in the first game or two, and then I think you sort of go down two paths. One is on the social side, you're starting to try and set norms and standards. And one of the best techniques, this is something I actually learned from a teacher early on. I was completely shocked that this was that they were doing it. And I realized it was a great idea. You have this approval mode, and as a teacher, you can see all the responses that come in. They can sort of sit there as a bucket and you can nobody gets to vote until you let everything go through. And you can reject the stuff that you don't want to go through. This is just a third grader, a fourth grade teacher. She's like, oh, we just put everything we I put all that up on the board and we read through every response as a class and we as a class decide what's staying in and what's going out.

Andrew Duval: [01:01:27] And it takes ages. You don't get through the whole game, but we just go through it. And you do that a few times, and the kids start to internalize a sense of valuing valuation or norms about this. And that's how she would enculturate that. And that's something I encourage everyone to do now is take the time. It's slow, but what you are training is that underlying collaborative skill, that underlying sense of taste and judgment, and that makes everything work more effectively after that. So you can focus on that as one thing to practice for a while, and then strategically after that, it's about scoping and sequencing your games. And my number one tip here is when you're getting started, shrink it right down to lists. Lists are chronically undervalued in writing and in school, I think. And so I will spend a fair bit of time just doing. I mean, I've started I've literally got a new frame storage unit running at school. We're just gonna do Frankenstories this term and it'll be narrative. And so the first few games have just been just letting your mind wander and free associating, linking words together and thinking about the gaps between these words. Like, what is a small jump? It was staying close to an original idea, was jumping far away from it. Where does that lead you? And getting that feeling of just latching on to things. Some kids can get really stuck with that.

Andrew Duval: [01:02:49] I remember a fifth grade class, this was in Oklahoma, and we were playing a game like this, and one of the kids asks about being really stuck and not being able to think of anything. And I was like, okay, well, look, if I here's what I mean. If I give you the word rabbit, what do you think of it's like 40 second pause. And then finally he's like tortoise, like, okay, great. So we've got another animal. What are they linked by? Well, okay, they're both pets. Okay. That's fine. Okay. Now, if I want you to go from tortoise and rabbit to something else, another word, but it can't be another pet animal. What do you think of 30 second pause, lettuce. I'm like, okay, that's great. And then I'm like, you could stop right there and go, what kind of story could I make with a rabbit, a tortoise, and a piece of lettuce? If there's only one piece of lettuce, they're going to share it. They're going to fight over it. It's one of them going to hide it like that kind of thing. But starting with just lists and then ways of getting these lists. So classroom at the moment, the next stage we've moved through are okay. So a narrative will be made of different elements. So basically like the core things like as in things, as in nouns you've got in narrative will be characters, objects and props and things like that.

Andrew Duval: [01:03:56] Settings, locations and events like storms and parties and things like that, explosions. And so you can take a stimulus and start just brainstorming lists like that. And then the improv thing would be adding qualities to those to give them characteristics. And then you start combining them in different ways and seeing how they interact. But you can start to build these skills in this very constrained way. And again, this is where it's partly my responsibility is I've realized over time the need for me to create more extended programs, which is something I'm literally working on right now. Like even this class that I'm doing right now is partly me prototyping out, okay, what would like a 15 to 20 game sequence be if we were going to do a narrative course, here's. Would it be so you as a teacher could then sort of follow a bouncing ball? Basically, if I was going to play one game a week, here's how I would progress and plan it out. But then I think in general, those sort of like broad survival skills for teachers, this idea of diagnostic games, spending some time doing social norms and enforcing things and then shrinking the format of the game down so that the skill focus and the cognitive focus is really narrow and then building up systematically those skills. I think that is how you kind of navigate some of those early stages while everyone's sort of finding their feet.

Dylan Ismail: [01:05:14] Yeah. So it sounds like there's letting teachers kind of find their own way in the first few diagnostic games, like how their classes sort of respond is a really important part. And then it sounds like you're also going to be. Is this something you're developing right now? Is you're a longer flow of onboarding for teachers or even like curriculum for teachers?

Andrew Duval: [01:05:35] Yeah, that's essentially it. Yeah, that's essentially it. So. Okay. Yes.

Dylan Ismail: [01:05:39] Great. I mean, I feel like I have a whole new appreciation for Frankenstories now or for improv writing, how I'll put it. Now, I've taken one improv class, but I feel like I've, I've already developed like a, I feel like I've taken another class even after just listening to you talk.

Andrew Duval: [01:05:56] Yeah. And I think it's really interesting. Like, I was not good in improv classes because I'm not a very good performer.

Dylan Ismail: [01:06:01] It's a fun experience though, right? Like it's so yeah, it just feels like, I don't know, I felt like I was it's so playful. And if you're with a bunch of good people, like, it's fantastic. I don't know, I had such a great time. Yeah.

Andrew Duval: [01:06:12] Especially if it's well run. Like I think a lot of it's about the philosophy of these things. It's like when people talk about sort of an educational strategy or design a particular sort of school system or something, it's all devils, all in the detail. It's all how you execute things. And so yeah, a good improv class is great and magical and great improv show can be really magical, but it's.

Dylan Ismail: [01:06:36] Like a Frankenstories game can be pretty magical sometimes.

Andrew Duval: [01:06:38] They really can. They can be really spectacular. But what I really love about Frankenstories is that it takes that off of the stage and just gives you a new way to approach that experience with a different medium, basically. We'll often talk about it in comparison to music or sport. Other things where you play collaboratively with other people. Jazz music or being on a basketball team or something. They're all forms of improvisational play. When I talk about right like and frankenstories as a pair, sometimes I say, yeah, right. Like is going to the gym and frank stories is going out and playing on the field with your friends. They're two different experiences that complement each other. And so improv as a form of thinking about narrative and thinking about argumentation and stuff on that genre level. And then as a creative social experience it is so profoundly useful. It's just really nice, I think, to have a vehicle where you can take the stage element out of it and do it through a different medium. Yeah. And do it through text and through writing and get access to the same body of knowledge, the same sort of set of practices, the same emotional and social dynamics. You get all of that stuff, but you can do it in a text form and get all the benefits of that. I just think it's really great.

Dylan Ismail: [01:07:50] Andrew, I just want to thank you for sharing all of this, because I personally feel a lot more connected to the game, and I'm also feeling like, I can't wait to take all of this and bring it to another teacher in September. I'll probably just also say, hey, listen to this episode that I recorded because I think there's a lot of great stuff in here.

Andrew Duval: [01:08:13] I'm sort of hoping maybe I can use this episode like that too, even if it's just a mental to-do list for myself.

Dylan Ismail: [01:08:19] And I'll also add that we now have this relationship that spans the ocean and you have someone in British Columbia. Actually, I saw on the website, there's actually quite a few classes using it. It'll actually show you like stories around you.

Andrew Duval: [01:08:33] Yeah. That's it. Yeah. We've got this little Hall of Fame and this discover section. Yeah. And we just. Yeah. So geolocated. So if we know where you're from, then we'll try and promote stuff from.

Dylan Ismail: [01:08:42] You can see stories that were written well, it says BC Canada, but you would assume that, you know, taking place within the same curriculum. So you can kind of like look at these stories and be like, this is proof. This isn't something from the other side of the world, from America, from somewhere that's not doing the same things that we're doing. So it's kind of nice.

Andrew Duval: [01:08:59] Yeah, no, that's really nice. That's really nice. Yeah, that's what we wanted to, that's what we wanted to. The effect we wanted to create with that was just a sense of just a sense of community about it. So yeah, no, it's really nice to see what other people are doing. And you feel like you're part of a little community with it. And I think it's also great. You know, I think it's like you said, relationship across the oceans, I also think is really great because Canada and Australia are just in many ways siblings. I think quasi polar nations, ex-British colonies, similar populations, you know, parliamentarian, you know, that kind of thing. I just think we're just we're little twinsies.

Dylan Ismail: [01:09:30] I don't know if you heard of the stories. When Australia played a FIFA World Cup game in Vancouver, a bunch of the bars were sold out specifically on that day. It was not. It was there's a lot of Aussies in Vancouver.

Andrew Duval: [01:09:45] Yeah yeah yeah.

Dylan Ismail: [01:09:46] Yeah. There's definitely a relationship.

Andrew Duval: [01:09:48] Very easy place to go. Yeah.

Dylan Ismail: [01:09:50] Andrew, is there anywhere that people can reach out to you online?

Andrew Duval: [01:09:54] Best just to send me an email if you want to get in touch. So andrew@writelike.org. If you do want to sort of find me on social media, either just me on LinkedIn, if you, if you want probably Bluesky, it might be the best place to go. And so I've got a Bluesky handle. I don't know what it is, but you just look me up. Andrew Duval, Bluesky.

Dylan Ismail: [01:10:10] We'll put you in the show notes too. Yeah. I'd also add that the Frankenstories, Instagram is actually a really great place to see what it looks like in classrooms. There's lots of little clips and videos of those interactions.

Andrew Duval: [01:10:23] That's right. That's something I'm trying to do more of is because it's such a lived experience kind of thing. I'm trying to do a better job when I do school visits of getting video of it again. Like I really don't like being on camera particularly. So I've always been very reticent about it, but I'm trying to capture little moments at the moment so you can see some of the vibe and some of that stuff about the audio sort of side of things. Just this kind of waves of noise, isolation of Silence. Yeah. Try and capture them in the Instagram or TikTok. Stick them on both places. Whatever your platform is, you'll find that classroom footage in one of those channels.

Dylan Ismail: [01:10:57] Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, again, thank you for joining us. And I'm excited to to continue the Frankenstories story in the schools that we're supporting.

Andrew Duval: [01:11:07] Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Dylan. Thanks, I appreciate it. It's been really nice to chat.

Dylan Ismail: [01:11:11] Thank you. You can find Imagine this on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite Podcatcher. Don't forget to follow the show so you'll get new episodes delivered right to you every other Tuesday. And if you like the show, let us know. Leave a rating on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. Maybe you listen to us on both. Maybe you can do it on both. You can also check out our show notes for some of the resources that Andrew referenced. There's a few books that he shared, including Impro by Keith Johnstone, Wishes, Lies and Dreams and Rose, Where did you get that? Read by Kenneth Koch. I know those are going to be added to my bookshelf of resources, and I'm excited to get my hands on them. You can also subscribe to our newsletter, The Classroom Chronicles, for deep dives in some of the classroom projects that are happening in schools right now in BC. Make sure that you subscribe before September because we're going to have lots of resources hitting in the new school year. If you want to know a little bit more about what happens on our team and what we're up to, you can follow us on Instagram @classmates.team. And if you send us a DM, tell us about a cool project that you're working on or how you found our podcast. We will send you some stickers. What's a better way of impressing your friends than a beautiful. Imagine this sticker on top of your laptop or maybe on your water bottle. Thanks for listening to the show and we'll see you in the next episode. Bye.

Imagine This - Ideas & Stories for Creative, Meaningful Teaching

More episodes

Chapters

Creators and Guests

What is Imagine This - Ideas & Stories for Creative, Meaningful Teaching?