I invite my students to travel back with me to yesteryear, a time when streaming services had not yet been born. I tell them about the anticipation I felt every Friday evening as my sisters and I parked on the couch to indulge in ABC’s TGIF line-up. I explain the tragic loss of cool points on the morning school bus ride for those who missed the previous night’s hit show and had nothing to add to the routine recap. Then, I tell them that the most memorable part of these experiences was the theme songs. These songs encapsulated the essence of each show, and inspired many sing-your-heart-out family moments in my household. Finally, I invite my students to collaboratively analyze theme as portrayed through the nostalgia of 90s sitcom theme song lyrics. This is storytelling in the classroom. It wins every single time and is a valuable, cross-curricular tool.

Get Personal

Effective classroom storytelling cannot exist apart from transparency. When you tell stories about your experiences, students get a rare and valuable window into who you are and how they can relate to you. One of my favorite ways to incorporate storytelling is telling students about my imperfections as a former student. They particularly like the story about how senioritis almost cost me my graduation due to a failing AP economics grade. These stories humanize me before my students, and it inspires them to push past their own shortcomings and give themselves grace. Believe it or not, some students who seem unmotivated are suffering from a lack of self-forgiveness for their own mistakes.

Aside from sharing about your academic experiences, you can share other personal experiences as relevancy arises. My students love hearing funny stories about sibling rivalries when we analyze family culture, and they also appreciate me sharing the challenges my Muslim-American grandfather faced following the September 11^th terrorist attacks. Personal stories can range from light-hearted to deep and will go a long way when building rapport with your students.

Storytelling Builds Valuable Skills

Storytelling isn’t only valuable because of the bridges it builds between you and your students; it also works to develop valuable skills in the classroom. Students learn to become active and critical listeners through storytelling. Stories are typically far more engaging than lectures, thus students are more likely to truly tune in and interact. They automatically begin making connections, evaluating actions and motives, and forming questions. These are the interpersonal communication skills that our students desperately need but often can’t learn through lectures and notes.

The ability to build complex questions based upon information is a key to effective communication. This is an excellent by-product of storytelling in the classroom. Students are intrigued by your story and ask questions that cause you to provide more detail. Without knowing, students are building effective interviewing skills and engaging in inquiry-based learning.

Teaching Content through Storytelling

As an English teacher, storytelling feels both natural and necessary. Teachers of other content areas may take our natural inclination to tell stories in the English classroom as evidence that storytelling is unsuitable for their classrooms. This is a misconception, however, as storytelling is applicable to all subject areas.

Math, though seemingly the most ill fit, presents a plethora of opportunities for classroom storytelling. Imbedding numbers into a story to relay a word problem is one example. In a geometry class, for example, the teacher could tell a story that includes different shapes and angles observed. This not only enhances students’ mathematical skills, but it also serves your auditory learners well and provides a different exposure to word problems.

I learned the power of storytelling in the history classroom while making historical connections in my American literature class. When we read August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, for example, I told students a story about The Great Migration and what factors persuaded African American families to move north. This piqued students’ interest in the novel and encouraged them to ask critical questions about characters and their decisions throughout our study.

Science is not excluded from the storytelling effect. I distinctly remember writing a story about a young boy who shrunk and got stuck inside a cell for my seventh-grade science class. This storytelling experience has cemented the cell parts and their functions in my brain all these years later.

Interactive Storytelling

When you implement storytelling in the classroom, the act does not have to be a one-man-show. You can include your students in your endeavors through interactive storytelling. During interactive storytelling, students are invited to pose questions, chime in, act out scenes, and much more while a teacher tells a story. The possibilities are endless, and the engagement is always high!

Unfortunately, the prevalence of storytelling has decreased in our society over the years, but we can keep this art alive in our classrooms. Listening is a most important skill of communication, and this is a sure way to build those skills. Finding ways to incorporate storytelling in your classroom will build rapport and increase engagement.

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What Types of Storytelling are There?

“Storytelling is as old as culture” says National Geographic. Oral storytelling has been used to entertain as well as educate and has been passed down as a cultural tradition. While oral storytelling has been the oldest way to communicate, there are also other forms such as digital, visual, and written.

Why is Storytelling an Effective Teaching Strategy?

According to research, storytelling is a tool that helps students better understand the world around them. It also helps children visualize themselves in similar situations with the storyteller. A common educational standard, that students need to know, is the ability to be able to recount events in chronological order. Listening to and reading stories, is an important component in a child’s reading development. Stories make learning more fun while at the same time helping students better understand relevant information.

How to Use Storytelling in Your Classroom

There are plenty of ways to bring storytelling to your classroom. Here are a few ideas.

To Introduce a New Topic

Telling a story is a great way to introduce a new topic. Think of it as an icebreaker. It can allow students to relate to a topic and get them interested in it before you even teach it. Active prior knowledge by telling a story about the new topic that you are about to introduce. If you can’t think of one on your own, you scour the internet for one that’s relatable to your topic.

Another idea for introducing a new topic using storytelling is to engage students with a reader’s theater. Simply take the topic and turn it into a script where students act it out. For example, if you are introducing the new topic of hibernating mammals, you can turn it into a story about when a bear is getting ready to hibernate and finds all his friends in the cave.

To Attract Unmotivated Learners

Storytelling can help engage your unmotivated learners as long as you do it in a creative way like through the use of a game or fun activity. Story Cubes were always a favorite in my house when my kids were little. All you had to do was throw the dice and nine different symbols would appear. You would then use these symbols to tell your story. To make it a little easier you can have students roll the first three dice to use for the introduction of the story, the next three dice for the development, then the last three dice for the conclusion. Using Story Cubes is a great way to allow students’ imaginations run wild.

Story Jars are similar to Story Cubes in the sense that students use the information in the jars to help them create a story. There is know right way to make a story jar, but the most popular way is to create three jars (characters, place, event, or beginning, middle, end) and either use pictures or written words to place in the jar. Then students randomly choose one idea from each jar to help them create their story.

To Illustrate a Concept

Retaining hard facts does not come easy for everyone. That’s where storytelling can come into save the day. In today’s world of videos, tablets, and podcasts, digital storytelling can be an effective way to illustrate a difficult concept. You can use digital storytelling through the use of videos, pictures, apps, and audio to help students retain information in a more creative and memorable way.

Digital storytelling isn’t the only way to illustrate a difficult concept, stories can also be told through pictures and illustrations. Show students a sequence of pictures or illustrations depicting a specific concept and have them transcribe the story.

To Enhance any Subject

Teaching through storytelling can bring a boring subject to life. It can make it more exciting and possibly engage students to want to know more about the topic. History is filled with people of the past; you can use storytelling to help bring historical figures to life. Math can also be hard for a lot of students to understand, but through storytelling students can come up with their own word problems to help make it easier to understand. Storytelling is a powerful tool that can turn any lesson into an adventure.

To me, storytelling is more than just telling a story, it provokes our emotions. It can make us laugh or cry, feel happy or sad, or even angry. It helps us remember things as well as connect with others. Overall, it’s a powerful method of communication that can help anyone relate or see the world from another’s perspective.

*Updated August 2021

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