I was excited when Phil Venditti of Clover Park Technical College in Lakewood, WA, commented here on A Storied Career, not only because Washington is my newly adopted home (for half the year), but also because storytelling in the classroom is a huge interest for me. I’ve written before about the obstacles I’ve encountered in using storytelling with my former business students.
Venditti and Sally Gove founded the Good Stories for Good Learning Project after pondering whether their stories in class regularly caught people’s attention. “Sure enough, they seemed to,” they note on the project’s Web site.
It all started one day in 2004:
[Venditti] was telling a class at Clover Park Technical College about a communication concept. When he brought in a story from his own life which illustrated it, he noticed something: everyone in the classroom was paying attention. “What’s going on here?” he asked himself. “Is my story really that wonderful?” Probably it wasn’t, but this question led to more and more:
- Do I use stories a lot in my teaching?”
- Could I connect specific stories with specific ideas I want students to grasp?
- Does it matter if I tell a story about myself or about somebody else?
Vendetti and Gove found that not every story they told produced the outcome they wanted, the Web site notes. “A story had to be good, and it had to be relevant. So they began selecting stories carefully to introduce and reinforce ideas in their classes.”
The project collected more than 350 stories that teachers may eventually use to impart valuable concepts, skills, habits, and motivation to students. While the project’s site “currently houses only a tiny fraction of all these stories,” the intention is to grow the collection. Stories can be searched on the site by Educational Message, Speaker, Academic Discipline, Topic, Sub Topic, or Keyword. There’s also a place to submit stories.
I had a few moments of skepticism wondering how effective it is to tell stories not your own — until I remembered that I’ve told other peoples’ stories in the classroom — my husband’s, my son’s, a former boss’s.