Image by David Mark from Pixabay
Storytelling has played a key role for humans for thousands of years. It doesn’t take money or resources to tell stories, yet it has helped build connections and relationships throughout history. Storytelling isn’t only a form of timeless entertainment but also an important and effective teaching tool that is often overlooked.
Many textbooks and lessons for children are written in a dry, formulaic manner. Children are curious and eager to learn. Although they are not born to think that school will be boring, the way that concepts and information are presented to them can cause them to lose interest and believe that the entire topic is boring.
Why is storytelling effective?
Stories don’t just engage the mind, but also aim to elicit emotions, and are helpful in teaching lessons.
In the book, How to Tell Stories to Children, authors Joseph Sarosy and Silke Rose West, illustrate why stories should be used as a vital part of teaching.
According to Rose West and Sarosy, one reason is that people are more likely to remember material from a story (2021). “Memory has as much to do with how information is taken in as how it is recalled. Attention plays a key role, telling the brain where and when to lay down tracks for the incoming information. As we all know, however, attention is a limited resource. Storytelling, along with its central characters, emotional gravity, unusual plot developments, and descriptive language, is one of the most powerful tools we have for gaining and retaining attention” (Rose West & Sarosy, 2021, p. 108).
Have you ever read the same line over and over again without paying attention and then not been able to recall what you just read a few minutes later?
We’ll remember information differently based on how we gain that information. The package that is used to deliver that information plays a key part in how much of it the learner engages with and retains.
Information presented in a dull way doesn’t have the same effect as information presented in an interesting way even though it’s the same information. Start with the end result or goal in mind – the student learns the information. Now, work backwards from there. How do I present this topic in a way that causes the audience to listen? Who is my audience? What is their knowledge level? What do they find interesting?
This method may seem time-consuming and it certainly takes more time than just regurgitating facts and statistics from a text book, but put it into the context of your goal. Your goal shouldn’t be to present the information. If that was your only goal, then obviously, reading the facts would be the fastest way to reach the goal.
Keep in mind that the goal is that the child learns the information. In that case, it is more efficient to use a story or an anecdote to present the information in an interesting way, because the extra time it takes upfront to come up with a creative package for the information will help shorten the time it takes for the learning to occur.
Fiction vs. Nonfiction
“We did not choose books solely for their instructional value. I would even say we chose them mainly on the basis of the enthusiasm they were likely to arouse in the children – as opposed to in us, or in the school-district officials,” wrote Céline Alvarez, a bestselling researching and educator, in her book The Natural Laws of Children: Why Children Thrive When We Understand How Their Brains Are Wired (Alvarez, 2019, p. 186). She observed that the children were much more engaged when they were interested in the story.
Common Core standards required students to have nonfiction be a certain percentage of their reading instead of primarily reading fiction. Natalie Wexler, education journalist, points out in The Knowledge Gap that the argument in favor of this change toward nonfiction was that students would gain useful knowledge versus reading fiction, which didn’t teach anything. However, a challenge they ran into was that. without having relevant knowledge, the students struggled to examine or even understand the nonfiction texts. They were better able to understand fiction since it was based on familiar human behavior (Wexler, 2019).
Certainly, there are merits to reading fiction and nonfiction. Why not have both in the same text? An entertaining story that elicits enthusiasm and has educational value.
Using storytelling to teach public-speaking
I wrote Super Speaker because I wished that I had been exposed to public-speaking at a younger age, because developing my presentation skills helped me gain confidence and become a better communicator in many different arenas of life.
Sure, I could’ve just written my framework for effective public speaking – the 5 P’s of Presentations and the descriptions - and have been done with it. It would’ve taken me much less time and effort and it would take the reader much less time and effort as well. But there wouldn’t be any emotions involved. That method wouldn’t have portrayed public-speaking as interesting and would’ve been less likely to engage the reader at their level. The book’s main characters are sixth-graders starting middle school and going through changes that are relevant to the audience.
Instead of having the kids listen to an adult lecturing them about why they better learn public-speaking, they are treated to a story that elicits emotions and hopefully makes them want to continue reading. As they learn the steps, they are also exposed to the importance of public-speaking, but not as a skill that they’ll use someday somehow as an adult. Instead, they can see how they could use it in their current world along with practical steps that they can use.
