Week 3 ~ The New Way to Tell Stories

As your high school English classes will tell you, storytelling was our first way to pass on our wisdom, lessons, and histories. Telling stories predates written language, and even though we have easier ways to pass on wisdom and teach lessons storytelling is still the most effective and most commonly used. I see this skill every day with my two-year-old students in my daycare class. They create stories for everything from what they had for dinner last night to why I told them not to run in the classroom. They remember every page of their favorite book whenever I read it, but sometimes forget my name and the name of their classmates. It only makes sense to me that an effective teaching tool involves telling stories. Stories are exciting and stories captivate us. The article The Science of Storytelling by Leo Widrich says that "Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too." This means that we remember stories as if we lived them. The effect on learning is immense. If teachers can take difficult subject matters and new ideas and present them in a story they could potentially raise understanding and proficiency of a skill. In college whenever I needed to remember a composers name and dates I always remembered the ones that had stories attached to them. It didn't always even have to be about the composer it could be about my professor and something that happened to them while learning about them or playing a piece by them. I have seen stories work first hand and I plan to use them in whatever way I can in my teaching.