FLO Teach With Stories Introduction copy
Denise Withers: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to teach with stories. I'm Denise Withers, and I'm going to be your guide during our adventure over the next five days. So in this video, I'm going to share some of the foundational concepts that have worked for me and hopefully inspire you to find some new ideas that you can bring into your teaching practice to increase engagement and improve learning outcomes.
So let's get started. You know, I've worked with story for 35 years as a filmmaker, a strategist, an educator, and an author. And I've learned that no matter what you do with it, you know how you slice it or dice it. Every single story teaches us something, and perhaps more importantly, everyone has stories to share.
So that means everybody has something to teach to everyone else. One of my favorite examples of how to use story to teach is from a project that I did with a professor at the Sauder school of business at UBC. So she was teaching leadership to executives and wanted to find a way to engage them and really tap into the experience that they brought into the program.
So we designed a pretty simple assignment. What they had to do was they had to write up. A story about an experience that they had had related to a specific concept of leadership. And then in the online forum, they all share their stories. And then in small groups they analyze the stories. And so they were looking for trends and patterns and outliers. And then as they came back together as a big class, they, you know, they brought all of their findings together, and were able to identify what were all the things that were critical to know to bring into your practice as a leader. You know, related to that leadership concept that she was teaching.
And then in the very end, all she had to do really was come in and kind of top up anything that they had missed. And so what happened was engagement went through the roof. They loved the assignment. Not only did they cover off everything that she would have covered through a traditional lecture, but they actually were able to introduce much more, a deeper, richer learning by identifying things that, you know, weren't part of her standard curriculum, and they were much more engaged in the process.
And they got to know each other much better. Plus they learn from real world examples. So and then finally, the best part was it was actually less work for her because all she really needed to do was facilitate the process. So that's just one example of the kind of thing that you can do.
We're going to talk a lot more over the next week about different, different ways that you can put story to work. And so before we really get into that, what I want to do is explore a few of the basic concepts. Right? And so what is a story? There's a lot of hype around story these days. It seems like people are calling every single piece of content that's created a story.
And that's a problem because for us, in particular for teaching and learning, we're really interested in how stories create knowledge and how they engage people. And to do that content has to follow have a specific structure and it has to have specific characteristics. And if you don't have those, you don't get those benefits.
And so. Here's the example that I've worked with for a long time now that works really well for me. It seems quite simple. But as you'll see going forward, it's actually quite a powerful definition. So in my practice, a story describes the experience of a hero as he or she resolves a problem.
And so that immediately eliminates, you know, most of the content that is out there. So, you know, things like games, descriptions, brochures, photos, Snapchats, tweets, you know, even IG stories typically are not stories. They are simply media, right? Or they are content, but they don't have the structure of a story.
And so what is that story structure that we need to understand so we can create engaging and, and powerful learning? This is what I've been working with for quite a long time. I call it the story specs. If you're familiar with Joseph Campbell's hero's journey structure, this isn't it.
It's, it's really a much dumbed down version. Frankly, I find the hero's journey just, you know, a little too confusing to work with. So in the story specs, at its core, every, every story has a few key elements. There's a trigger, which is something that happens that disrupts the status quo or disrupts the hero that creates a problem that the Euro has to solve.
The hero goes off on a quest for knowledge or resources or skills to solve that problem. In the end, there's a resolution and there's really only three ways that stories can end. So either the hero succeeds, fails, or dies trying. And all of that is driven by a higher purpose. You know, why this matters?
So what does it, what does this actually look like? Can we map this onto a story? And when you look at, you know, a lot of the big epic stories that we're all familiar with, you'll start to see this pretty simply. So in Lord of the rings. You know, the Hobbit, Frodo inherits the evil ring of power and then discovers that he has to destroy it.
So he goes off on a quest to figure out how to do that. And of course, his first attempts don't succeed. So he has to keep trying new things, which get progressively riskier and riskier. Right? And so each of his attempts to solve the problem, to destroy the ring of power is represented by one of the dots in the arc.
Right? So those are, those are story beats and some stories are really long, and I've lots of beats and some stories are really short and have very few beats. The key thing that matters for us here is the problem. It's really what, what separates a story from other kinds of content. And the reason it matters is that the problem essentially creates a kind of a gap between where the hero is and where he wants to be, right?
So between Frodo standing there with, you know, the, the ring of power that he has to get rid of and where he wants to be, which is happily ever after living life out in Hobbiton where there's no danger from the evil Lord. And so the gap is also really critical for us because it's what generates engagement and it's where learning happens and, and here's how that works.
So when we run into a gap like this, you know, in real life or in a story, when we run into a problem, it triggers this thing called epistemic curiosity. And we naturally want to solve the problem, especially if it's relevant to us. And problems can be really, really small. It might be something like you're sitting at your desk and you suddenly see, you know, a wolf run down the hallway. Well, that's going to get your attention and you're going to want to know, what the heck is a Wolf doing in the office? What is it running from? Where is it going to? Should I be running right? And you're going to want to go, and you're going to want to close the gap between where you are now and what you know and what you really want to know.
And so when we're listening to a story, the same thing happens. The problem triggers our curiosity, and we get engaged in the pursuit of a solution. So we mentally play along with the story, trying to solve the problem ourselves and figure out what the hero will do next. Right? So as we're watching Frodo go through the movie, we're thinking, Oh, is he going to do that?
Is he going to do this? I would have done that. Oh my goodness, I can't believe he did that. Right. And as long as the problem remains unresolved, we will stay engaged the minute it is resolved or engagement is over. And that is really important to remember because quite often we tend to drag our stories on and on and on, right?
So the problem structure matters because it's what engages us. It's also what facilitates learning. Because to move forward in the story, we have to keep solving these problems, these little mini problems to get to each beat in the story. And every time we solve a problem, we learn something. You know, either either what we tried works or it didn't work.
And that learning accumulates as we work through the story. So when you put all of this in the context of teaching and learning, we can start to see that every story is actually a little package of Intel about how to solve a specific problem. And that means. That every single story is actually a little teaching package just waiting to be used.
So the other thing to bear in mind about this is, you know, again, if your content isn't structured as a story with a problem, question resolution, you're not going to get the same benefits. You're not going to trigger learning and engagement. Now, one of the reasons I really like this structure is you can expand it and collapse it to, you know, infinite, different levels to get into as much detail or, you know, go to as high level as you want about a concept.
And, and that really also shows you the difference between narrative and Story, right? So the narrative is kind of like the 50,000 foot view of, of an ongoing issue or an ongoing story. And then you can think about stories as episodes within that narrative, right? And so if you look at the, you know, the narrative of space exploration, right?
There's all of these key steps, right? There's the first rocket and the first orbit, right? And then there's Apollo 11. And then what you can do is, Apollo 11 itself is actually a specific story, right? Where there is liftoff and landing and the first steps on the moon. And each of those again can be expanded in, into even more detail about what happened and, you know, the problems that NASA had to solve and the challenges that the astronauts had to overcome, right?
And so you can kind of zoom in and out depending on what you want to look at and what you want to explore. And so that's where you can start to see how this can be really, really powerful for teaching and learning. And so there's an underlying concept. For all of this. It's, it's, it's sort of an emerging field.
Something that I came across during my grad research about 15 years ago. I call it narrative intelligence. It's inspired by the work of Howard Gardner, who has written a lot on multiple forms of intelligence. So everything from emotional, you know, there's emotional intelligence, there's natural intelligence, there's linguistic, you know, mathematical intelligence.
And really they all kind of work the same way. And so. For me, this is again, my definition of narrative intelligence. It's, it's our innate ability to make sense of and resolve problems through the lens of story. And what's really cool these days is that we're actually starting to see a lot of neuroscience research confirmed that we are hardwired to do this right?
That that story is how we think. It's how we relate to others. Um, it's how we react to situations and, and for me, that's really exciting. And so how does intelligence work. It's really any kind of intelligence is really just a form of pattern recognition. And the better you get at recognizing patterns, the deeper your intelligence in that specific domain.
So for example, if you talk about car driving intelligence, when you're a new driver, you really have to think hard about what to do in specific instances and to analyze each pattern and make a decision. Whereas once you've been driving for 40 years. You know, quite often you end up somewhere and you don't even remember doing a thing because you're able to recognize all the patterns and respond to all the patterns and you've become quite a master at it.
Right. And so narrative, narrative intelligence works the same way where the more that we're exposed to stories and the more we work with stories, the better we get at recognizing the patterns and making sense of the patterns. And so. There's a few things that go on cognitively that make this really powerful for me that again, are really important for us when we think about teaching and learning with stories.
When we experience a story. Whether we experience it ourselves or we hear it, we take it in and we store it in a kind of a mental database. Right? And I talked about stories as being a little teaching, you know, learning packages of knowledge. And so we store it as, as a package that has the problem, the question, the solution.
So this is crazy valuable because it informs how we live. You know, every decision that we make, everything we do, um, every time we have to make a decision where, you know, in microseconds, at an, at a really deep level, we're tapping into our database and w and retrieving experiences and using the intel within those experiences to inform the decision that we have to make.
So when we're, you experience stories, we kind of sort them or tag them into categories. And that's how they get stored in our database. So we might have a cooking data story, or sorry, a cooking category. We might have a hiking category, we might have a coding category. And every time we come across a new experience.
Our mind, you know, asks, is this related to an existing category that I have? And if it is, then it stores it in that category. And if it's not, then it actually creates a new category. So, you know, if I go off and I decide that I'm going to try and I don't know, diving, you know, that's not going to fit in any of my existing categories.
So I'm going to start a new category all about diving. And so in practice, what does this actually look like? So, one example I like to use, especially for those of us in the Pacific Northwest, is the idea of having to start a campfire in the rain. So you're faced with this dilemma. It's pouring rain, you're cold, you want to get a fire going.
So you know, you gather up your, your twigs and things like that, and then you query your database and you say, you know, Hey brain, do we know how to start a campfire in the rain? Right? And your brain goes off and it searches all the categories. And if you've started a campfire and the rain before, it'll retrieve all the stories or all the experiences about how that happened.
And then you'll be able to extract the knowledge that you need to go ahead and start the campfire. If it doesn't find anything, it'll start to run another query and it'll start to look for related categories. So it might start to look for things like fire, or it might start to look for things related to brain.
And what might happen is it might find a story about the time that you saw somebody in high school said a bag of cheese puffs on fire. Right, and you're suddenly going to remember that cheese puffs are actually flammable, and then you're going to think, Hey, I've got cheese puffs in my backpack.
I wonder if I can use them to start my campfire. And that for me, really brings to life the power of narrative intelligence. And it's why I get so excited about, about doing story work and using stories for teaching and learning. Because when you start to think about it, there are billions of people on the planet and every single person has a unique database of stored experiences or you know, stored stories.
That they can tap into and share at any time. So imagine what we could do if we could start to mobilize that knowledge and experience to tackle some of the more complex problems in the world today. Right? So how do we put this all into practice? What does this mean when we sit down to actually start to teach with story?
Well, you know, again, I've been doing this for 35 years and I can tell you there are a million different ways that you can teach with story. And in step two of the course, we're going to start to surface some of those and you know, create a big list for you to work with in the big picture. At a high level, really, there are four main ways that you can teach with stories.
So the first one, and probably the most common, is that you share stories for learners to analyze. Really, this is storytelling, right?And it can be telling a personal story or a fictional story, or sharing a third party story. You might do this through a case study using books or, you know, news articles or movies.
You know, again, there's a million ways that we can actually share stories. And one of the good things about this is that, you know, if you're going to create the story, you can custom design the story to work for you to deliver and achieve specific learning outcomes. However, I will also say that this approach is the most work for you, right?
You are doing all the work and you're sharing the story with your learners, and then they're going to consume the story. They're going to process it. They're going to make sense of it, you know, pull out, pull out some meaning about how the problem was solved in the story. And that's it. So that's, that's one approach.
That's the most common approach. Another option is to flip things around and get the learners to start to do some of the work. So one way to do that is to have them actually analyze, collect, and analyze. Others' stories. And so this is really narrative inquiry or qualitative research where you give them a research question or you know, a topic to go explore.
They have to go off and they collect a bunch of stories from different sources. It might be the news, it might be people who, you know, were experiencing a situation. And then they do a pattern analysis or a trend analysis on that. You can use mind mapping to do that kind of thing. And then pulled together, pulled together their findings to do some synthesis on insights.
I really liked this one because they're doing all the work and it's one of the most powerful ways for them to actually learn. A third approach is a, what I described in my, the story that I shared at the beginning. So you actually have learners create stories. And the stories could be about things that happened in the past.
They could be about things that are happening now, or that could be about things that could happen in the future. And actually future stories are really powerful way to explore solutions to really complex problems that we're facing today. The stories can take any form you can possibly imagine.
They can be written, they can be video, they can be tweets, photo collage.  I actually really like to do work with, you know, sketches or skits, role-plays and scripts, things like that let students, you know, be a little more creative. And sometimes you can let them choose, choose the format themselves.
And then again, you know, you can bring all these stories in and, and you can have the story. The students analyze each other's work, or you can analyze the work as a, as a class analysis. You know, one example, I know one of the profs, again at Sauder, had an assignment that she ran every year where the students actually produced a little mini documentary about a topic.
And it was incredibly powerful because in order to produce. The documentary and to tell the story, you have to go out and do the research and really make sense of the problem and decide what's important, what's not important and what the key messages that you want people to take away from that.
And I will say one of the things that makes story work so important for me is that, you know, at the end of the day, no matter what we're trying to teach, what we're really doing when we are telling a story is we're trying to create change. Right? We're trying to change what somebody believes, what they know, the way they act, you know, the decisions that they make.
And so when you're designing your story or you're having your learners design stories, you need to make some conscious decisions about what, what you want to change, why you want to change it, why it matters, and how you're going to ask them to do that. Right? So then the fourth approach is actually have the learner solve a problem.
So really this is problem based learning and I'm going to give you a, a, you know, a simple structure that you can, you can share with your learners to, to do this. This is a lot of the work that I've been doing around innovation, design and strategic planning is combining story and design thinking into a problem solving framework.
And in teaching and learning, and in academia, you know, you can see the structure and problem based learning. You can see it in the scientific method when you combine the storytelling and design thinking, I call it story design. And this is, this is kind of how it works, right? So it's an intuitive approach to problem solving that taps into the expertise we already have, which is narrative intelligence.
And the reason this is important for me is, you know, I've discovered that we actually don't really teach problem solving, in post-secondary systems. And students are quite often left to figure it out on their own. And so story design. Gives people a relatively simple and intuitive way to solve problems.
That is, you know, it's agile and it's iterative and you can apply to any kind of problem. So when you do this kind of work and you choose this approach, you're kind of getting a two for one, where you. You know, you're teaching the topic that you want them to go off and research, but you're also teaching them storytelling and problem solving.
And so this is how story design works, you can see this structure at play anytime you try to try to solve a problem and you can also see it at play. As you watch movies unfold, right? So if we go back to Frodo, you know, the first thing you do is you define the problem that you have to solve, right?
So Frodo comes into possession of the ring of power, and he realizes that he's got to get ring rid of the ring of power. So then you dream up ideas. How am I going to do that? Well, one of the ideas that he comes up with is, well, I need to get to the village of breed to meet up with the wizard, and then he'll take care of it, right?
So Frodo comes up with an idea and then he dares to test it. He dares to prototype it. He actually heads off for the village of Bree, and if you know the story, you know, lots of bad things happen to him. He gets to the village of, he gets to the pub and he finds out that the wizard isn't there to meet him, and the bad guys are after him.
And so Frodo does what all of us would do, which is, you know, he sits and he has a pint of beer and he analyzes what the hell went wrong and what he's going to do next. Right? So he discovers what worked, what didn't work, and he then defines what the next problem he has to solve is. All right.
So it's a very basic problem solving process. And then when you put it into the context of the story structure that we've been working with, you can see that every beat in the story structure, um, actually uses this problem solving approach, right? So every, every beat is like a little mini problem solving cycle.
And one of the reasons I like this is it also teaches students that it's very rare when you're trying to solve a, you know, a tough problem. It's very rare that you first idea is going to work and you're probably going to have to go through multiple iterations to really get to a solution that's functional for you.
One of the tools that you can share with your students, to help them through this process is in the, in the tips and resources page, you'll find a copy of the story canvas, which is basically just kind of a planner or, you know, they can use a spreadsheet, they can use a roadmap, they can come up with whatever, whatever works for them as a way to, um, structure, structure, their problem solving journey.
And the nice thing is if they structure it as a journey. When they're ready to pull all their findings together and share the story of the work that they did, it's already going to be structured as a story for them. So it's going to make it a lot easier for them to share the results and share their findings.
And in fact, yeah. This is one of the reasons why I love working with researchers and scientists, is once they start to use this structure, it makes it really easy to share impact stories of their work. So I know that's a lot. ,We're just at the beginning. That's really the, the biggest theoretical part.
The rest of the, the course is going to be focused on actually doing and trying. And learning from what we're doing. So if you have questions or you want more information about some of the concepts that have introduced here, check out the tips and resources page. Or if there's something really specific, you can post a question in the open forum.
So check out the Course Guide to find out what to do next and happy story designing.