Day 3 PD reflections: What story am I telling?

A few things have me thinking about the idea of story - a colleague and I had a little conversation about this during the school year, KSTF has us talking about the power of teacher stories, and what I am learning at Upperline PD has me thinking about the story each lesson tells while teachers are teaching their sample lessons.

Now I am wondering, how does each unit I have tell a story?  How do my lessons weave together a content story for students?  Is there a story arch throughout the year I can hang units and lessons on?

More recently, I have been thinking of the role of stories and learning targets in different types of lessons.

Traditional Instruction

When talking about traditional instruction, I think the story still needs to be there and learning targets provide key pointers at the beginning of the lesson to tell people where we are going.  For example, the move "The Breakup" is about, and results in, a break up.  You can still tell a good story if you know the ending.

In my upperline PD, I realized that if a teacher was teaching in a traditional way, I wanted to know exactly where we were going in their story.  I saw it needing to know the key checkpoints along the way.  It was somewhat like peeking ahead to the titles of future chapters in a book so I could see the story come together.

In traditional instruction, the teacher is the story teller.  Every student gets the exact same story from the same deliverer. Some teachers tell stories better than others here and I think there are some tricks to make the story still compelling for students.

• I have noticed when ever I am super excited about the content (even if in reality I am not super jazzed about it), students engage more.  Seeing story tellers excited about the story is one way to get buy-in from students.  
• Making the story feature key characters that are interesting to students gets a giggle from kids.  Including references to fidget spinners, Shakira, whatever is trendy or and inside joke at the moment includes students in on the story.

I get that some days even the most constructivst teacher needs to go to traditional methods of teaching.  That's OK.  That's not an excuse to forget about the story you want to tell or to skip a good hook. 

I wonder how else strong traditional instruction teachers are able to engage students in their classrooms.


Discovery/Inquiry Based Instruction

Inquiry based learning puts the student at the center of the story.  It also means that you might have 36 different stories being constructed in the classroom during a lesson.  Thus, it is the teacher's role to weave these stories together to make the picture clearer for all learners.

I truly believe that to give students the learning target at the beginning of an inquiry based learning lesson, you give away the punch line.  It's less fun to explore if you know how the story ends.  In fact, why explore, why take risks if you know the ending.

In discovery based learning, the storyline of a class is revealed by students and through students work.   However, I think we have all read something where the story wonders for too long (perhaps this blog post is one of them).  That's why the teacher is the ultimate architect of the story in these classrooms.  Being able to predict student questions and responses and guiding them to the "a-ha" moments takes a different set of skills.