Best Practice

The stories we tell: Using story to organise curriculum

Lesson planning Curriculum Pedagogy
Storytelling can be incredibly powerful. In this four-part series, Matt Bromley considers how can we use story to improve our teaching and curriculum delivery. In part two, he explores practical ideas and suggestions for using stories to bring the curriculum and our lessons to life

There are, to my mind, six ways of using story and storytelling in our teaching. These are:

Last time, we explored the power of story in the classroom. In the next three articles of this series, we will look at each of the six ways listed above in turn…

 

1, To organise the curriculum and structure lessons

In his paper, The privileged status of story, cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham (2004) says: “Stories are special. There is something inherent in the story format that makes them easy to understand and remember.”

As such, he adds: “Teachers can (use) the basic elements of story structure to organise lessons, even if they don't plan to tell a story in class.”

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