The Power of the Story: How to connect and effectively engage your audience to create a lasting memory

I think that the student-facilitated discussion on storytelling went very well. I liked the question raised concerning the difference in the stories told and how that affected our abilities to retell them. This reminded me of my topic in the last paper which discussed the impact of emotion on the ability and willingness to learn. Angela's story engaged our emotions allowing us to better connect and therefore better remember it. While the story on health care is something that directly (or indirectly) affects us, it was presented as sort of this distant issue. It was not until we were asked to read specific opinions on the matter and take on the character and opinion of our given person, that we were able to connect with the issue of health care and grasp how it might directly impact our own lives and the lives of others....drawing on connections through storytelling is critical in grasping and retelling the story itself. If no connection is made it is easy for the story to be pushed aside, sitting atop other countless stories accumulating dust.   

I agree that charisma can overpower facts and if you don't know much about something it's easy to be swayed by a charismatic argument.  It is scary how we'll believe anything if the speaker/presenter makes it sound good enough - however, since this is how we seem to take in everyday information (choosing the more appealing presentation over a less attractive option) we have to work within those boundaries.  If we more eagerly accept information delivered charismatically and with an emotional pull, we have to make sure that we teach kids (and adults) to double check their facts and really think about their sources and why they accept certain facts over others.  In order to work the charisma edge to an educational advantage we might want to find more charismatic teachers (in my opinion charisma is the x-factor that makes defining a good teacher so difficult) so that kids will be more eager to learn.  Hopefully by thinking critically about why we are so accepting of certain information - this probably also goes back to whatever is stored in our cog. unconsciousness that gets primed by certain stimulants - we can sort through the information we take in and separate the good information from good presentation.

 Neither facilitating nor teaching are easy to do in a room full of students whose minds may or may not be focused on the topic being discussed. The students often have a lot on their minds that is not relevant to whatever you are telling them. Therefore it is very important to find a way to engage each student and hopefully gain his or attention; storytelling is a good way of doing this. It helps to engage a classroom full of individuals, and provides a forum for them to learn by listening, or by engaging an idea and showing a side of themselves as storytellers (maybe imagined, maybe not) that they may not have otherwise. This form of being both on the receiving end of a story, and on the storytelling side, appeals to people at an emotional (or cognitive neocortex) level that helps one to remember a story later on.

Our experience taught us that part of the difficulty of facilitating is that there are many constraints and opportunities to succeed or fall. There are time limits (thankfully extendable), miscues along the way, and the barrier of getting an audience to trust that what you are telling them is interesting, somehow applicable, and possibly both at once. It is very easy to derail and to feel defeated if the students aren’t engaging with the material or body language is discouraging, etc. There was a point last night when we felt that things could have flown off track very easily, but there are always creative ways to bring students back. Perhaps storytelling and role play are two examples of creative ways to get people to loosen up and have fun being someone who they would not normally be, but they are also great ways to get students to see a topic through the eyes of an individual who they feel that they have no connection to. This is the powerful piece that enables the interaction and growth of the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd loops in the brain, and, ultimately, leads to the development of a deeper level of understanding and new knowledge on a given topic.  By allowing students to interact with each other in a more organized fashion, whether though a story that can bind the audiences attention or through leading the students to become the storytellers, the role of the teacher is to guide. This is a trait that can be taught to teachers to a certain extent, but it is best learned and mastered by experience interacting with students. Activities like storytelling and role play are techniques that are meant to make the facilitator’s attempts to convey information and provoke thoughts more effective, as well as to generate new knowledge in the classroom by engaging both the neocortex and the cognitive unconscious.

Questions for Reflections (please engage as many or few of these questions as you like, both depth and breadth are super!):

At what point(s) did you feel most engaged during our presentation/facilitation? When didn’t you? Why?

How could you imagine techniques such as role play and storytelling being used in a lower-level science classroom? Introductory physics class? What are helpful situations? What are barriers? 

Is there a need for balance between creative interactive exercises and a more didactic style of teaching (maybe to incorporate more facts)?  How do you imagine it to shape the dynamic between the students in the classroom and facilitator/teacher? How does the rules and/or decorum differ between the contexts?