"Just Telling Stories"

I wish I remember the exact quote during my radio broadcast about Common Core with State School Board member Tami Pyfer. I had asked about informational texts in the curriculum reaching out to cover subjects outside of Math and Language Arts. In discussing the use of informational texts, she asserted that one of the aims of Common Core is to increase the critical thinking skills of students. And this begins in elementary school. Then she said, with a tone implying the "improvement" of the Common Core standards, that before the standards, what teachers were doing amounted to "just telling stories." (Again, not a direct quote. Just as close to the sentiment of what was said as I can get without remembering her precise words.)

I think the listener was supposed to feel, "Oh yes. What a disgrace. We don't send our children to school for stories. We send them for knowledge. For information. For FACTS! Enough of this childish storytelling! How about some EDUCATION!?"

I remember this unspoken, yet clearly articulated disdain communicated about the inferiority of an education made up of stories. It probably stands out in my memory for my immediate rejection of the idea that stories are somehow an inferior teaching tool to whatever nonsense has been cooked up in Common Core.

Thanks to my husband, who is an admitted self-improvement junkie, I already knew stories increase your mind's capacity to store information. Trying to remember something? According to his readings on improving your memory, you simply put it into a story and see how much more easily the facts or concepts stick.

Of course, any student of the Bible could probably have guessed (without science weighing in on the issue) that stories are powerful teaching tools. Whatever you make of Jesus Christ now, his contemporaries referred to him as Master, and teaching is what he did. How often did he teach with a story?

But science HAS weighed in on the issue. Here is a list of books about and studies done on storytelling and it's effects. I'll highlight in this post a few of my favorites. (Confession: haven't read the studies themselves. I'm quoting the summaries of the studies.)

In one study, students who listened to and participated in oral narratives in history showed "a significant increase in history affinity in the positive direction," while students who were taught in conventional lecture and note-taking methods had no such increase in history affinity. (Benefits of Storytelling Methodologies in 4th and 5th Grade Historical Instruction, 2006)

A study in 2005 compared the benefits of reading and storytelling. The recall ability of the group who was told stories improved over the group who read. (Storytelling and Story Reading: A Comparison of Effects on Children's Memory and Story Comprehension, 2005) A similar study done in 1998 showed students who "witnessed storytelling scored higher on comprehension/vocabulary measures than did children who listened to story reading."

The conclusion of another article I found on the benefits of storytelling shed some light for me on why my kids' Sunday School teachers are amazed at all the scripture stories they know. It's not like we DON'T cover the scriptures, EVER. But we don't cover them regularly - not as often as we should. We don't use them to teach other subjects or even practice reading. And we don't own videos of the animated stories. But the final paragraph of the article made me wonder if my dramatic self hadn't stumbled onto some good stuff.

Here are the author's suggestions:
"If you want kids to listen actively and understand the story, you have to read out the stories emotionally. Change the pitch of sound according to the feelings and emotions depicted in the story. Use effective body language to convey ideas in the exact way. Perfect storytelling is acting out a story."

Well, that DOES sound like scripture time at the Caspersons. It would make an outsider laugh. But it also makes scripture study something my kids love and request.

Anyway, I gather that there are all sorts of people who believe in the benefits of storytelling. They see/have measured advantages like increased social and cultural empathy, larger vocabularies, stronger retention, and extended attention spans, and find these benefits not only in subjects like Language Arts and History, but in math and science as well!

So the next time I'm around some "educator" belittling storytelling, I might just agree with them. After all, who wants an engaged learner? Who cares about an active imagination? Who was ever served by having empathy for people from different times and circumstances in life? Who wants a kid to know anything more than the FACTS right in front of him ON THE TEST?

.... Well, homeschoolers probably do! Now go enjoy a good story with your kids!