Tell Students To Tell Stories

Tell Students To Tell Stories

Don’t raise your eyebrows yet, this actually makes sense

Once upon a time there was a legendary copywriter names David Ogilvy and his own wise words were: “Where people aren’t having any fun, they seldom produce good work.” 

If you think just passing on what’s inside the syllabus is adequate for imparting knowledge and instilling wisdom, you couldn’t be more mistaken. This is an era where people have attention spans of four seconds or 140 characters, thanks to the attack of technology in everyone’s life.

Teaching is also so much plain vanilla these days, for almost every syllabus and every class that it’s hard to scoop out real involvement and genuine assimilation from students.

This is an odd problem and possibly, calls for a lateral solution.

Have you ever wondered if your mundane teaching ways are stifling the spark that every student is originally born with? Have you noticed why kids snore in a classroom but stay awake on the pillow no matter how hard a grandma or Dad tries to put them to sleep by reading a bed-time story?

That’s the irony my friend. Why not leverage that conflict in your own classroom and try spreading the magic of listening and telling stories! Say shoo to boring chapters and bring on some stardust of stories.

Why stories?

It was in 2012 when ‘stifling of creativity’ was unearthed as an attitude held by a majority of Americans, according to a worldwide survey focusing on attitudes toward creativity in schools, as per Adobe’s benchmark study.

In the report titled, ‘State of Create Study’, it was spotted and 62 percent of respondents agreed that, US was not living up to our creative potential when the figure stood at 59 percent for other parts of the globe. But about half of Americans said they're being increasingly asked to think creatively at work (versus 55 percent worldwide), and some 80 percent pointed at an increasing pressure to be productive rather than creative in the workplace. The figure stood at 75 percent worldwide.

Now, it’s 2014 and the latest study from under Adobe’s roof accentuates the contradiction.

Findings of a study, Seeking Creative Candidates: Hiring for the Future

It is not hard to guess that creative skills are gaining significance in the career terrains out there and creativity, as a whole, is witnessing changing mindsets. In such shifting times, is it right to continue with old stereotypes that only a few students are creative and that uniformity, standardization and problem-solving skills should still have precedence over other skills?

Dealing with tech-savvy students: Image courtesy 3 .bp.blogspot.com

What’s wrong in giving ‘creative skills’ their much due importance and using tools like stories for informative writing, explaining an idea, sketching a concept well and asking students too to reverberate their level of understanding and application in forms of stories? Research nuggets from social psychologists like Melanie Green and Timothy Brock explain why stories are so persuasive. They encapsulate it well – Stories have a tendency to transport people to another place and take a break from the real world.

This will not only make the whole rigmarole of class-room learning more comfortable for today’s tech-overwhelmed generation but will also instill more fun and increased engagement among the students. Plus, it will help in nurturing natural creative powers of students which will be a big advantage in several walks of life and career lying ahead of them.

So let those story-making juices pour out in full torrents.

Now - How to prepare students as story-tellers

Many experts have opened the treasure chest of ideas that go a long way in manufacturing stories and narratives for every possible concept.

For instance, Peter Guber, chairman and CEO of the Mandalay Entertainment Group, stresses on firming up an emotional connection with any audience. He points it well: Every time you tell a joke or sell and ad, there is a story there. Navigation to render an experience to your audience, with a framework and some components, make it amenable to an active listener, make it empathetic, make it engaging – are just some ways that he cobbles together for making a good story format in this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-KtR4vM4eg

Students can be guided to sharpen their story-sculpting capabilities by having a sharp idea on their exact audience, using the power of empathy or emotional elements, using argumentative spins (just the way a study by Charlan Nemeth, a social psychologist, emphasized), exploring persuasive powers, using detailed imagery, mystery or suspense twists, some metaphors, modeling techniques, a good overarching theme, characters, style, tone, setting, and other story-telling nuances.

Now the ‘what’ well cemented here leaves us some room for the ‘how’. Thankfully we have umpteen good tools and applications that students can easily leverage in honing their story-telling skills and present their assignments, projects, ideas or general exploration areas into a story format.

Here are a few worth mentioning:

1. Abode’s new iPad app is an apt way for visual storytelling and Adobe Slate has been claimed to be designed to help in creating a visual story from the pictures on an iPad, from the web, from an Adobe online account, or from a Dropbox account.
2.  Doodlecast for Kids-  an iPad app that the company boasts about confidently when it comes to letting students create short whiteboard videos. Other iPad apps like Collins Big Cat apps come in as part short story and part story creation tool and entail a short story that students can read to themselves or have narrated to them, thus using interactive elements on each page of the stories and also allowing students to create their own stories using settings and characters that match the theme of the story they just read. This, as explained, can be done by  selecting a background, dragging design features into the background, pulling characters into the story, layering text, and recording own narrations for a story.
3. Story Wheel is another app for the iPad and where one can dictate a short story based on an image spun upon. Then there is Little Story Maker with people can use to create their own custom books on their iPads with the help of book templates and complimenting images, text, and voice narration.
4. Adobe Voice is a tool where a student can record voice, import pictures, and write text to create a short video and also tap a huge gallery of images, icons, and music tracks, story templates etc.

6. From Microsoft’s stable there is iXplain -a screencasting app for recording a lesson or explaining something wherein it records a voice and pen, and then images can be used to annotate on them and also creating a mp4 video file with the added function of importing and exporting images.

5. Meet Fresh Paint is another app that houses oil, watercolors, pencils, and other tools for turning photos  into beautiful paintings and thus creates a space for turning a concept or diagram into a visually-aesthetic and simple pictorial format.
6. Other tools like Storehouse, Tackk, Haiku Deck  etc or Book Creator

The last page

Put some wings to your approach in the class and on your expectations from students and free them from the burdens mounted by typical routines.

The students can very well surprise teachers with their latent but potent creativity dimensions and together make class-room learning more exciting.

Courtesy https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com

Students of today would be soon writing an admissions letter or a resume or other crucial career presentation work tomorrow. Why not prepare them in the art of presentation of information right away?

Another well-accomplished copywriter Leo Burnett advised well: "Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read."

Through what, need we say? Through STORIES!