Time needed: 1 to 20 min
Why? Stories help to emotionally attract students to a learning topic.
When? Stories can be told before or during a new learning session. If told before, stories raise attention. Told during or after a period of front-to-back teaching stories allow them to lean back and re-focus on an emotional level.
How? Find one or more characters and let them become alive by telling what happens to them in a certain situation. How do they act and react? What do they feel? What challenges them? How do they overcome a crisis?
Any risks? Give yourself a time limit. Good stories don‘t last forever.
Expert's Advice
There are many traditions how to craft a story. To improve your personal storytelling try tu understand in which tradition you grew up with. Try to learn at least a different tradition. You could also invite a puppet in your story in order to shift the narrator’s role away fro you to the puppet, or to introduce a second character in your storytelling performance. Reverse-Engineering: Analyse great stories. Why do they work. What ist what attracts you?
Story
Social life is about stories. They’ve been told to endure the winter. The’ve been told to pass traditions. They’ve been told to entertain. Life is story – we listen and we tell.
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Teacher's Role
Make up a story. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.
