Why “Story First”?

The Four Question Method always starts with storytelling. Here's why...

We have a motto at 4QM: Story First! We even made “Story First!” stickers. I have one on my computer. It’s a good conversation starter when I’m working at a coffee shop.

“Story First!” condenses an argument about how to teach and learn social studies well. Students can’t think about what they don’t know. Since we want our students to learn to think skillfully about the human world, we first need to make sure they acquire some knowledge about that world. “Story First!” means, then, that social studies education has to start with historical knowledge, an answer to Question One: What happened?

That’s the first part of the argument. The second part is this: the best way to build content knowledge about the human world is through learning and telling stories.

This post assumes that you’re on board already with building knowledge to enable thinking. Below, I defend the second part, about storytelling.

Why Stories Work

Daniel Willingham’s book, Why Don’t Students Like School?, explains why stories are so effective at getting students to understand, engage, and remember what we teach them.

We’ve all heard repeatedly that we should build on prior knowledge – connect what you want kids to learn to what they already know. That’s fine, but what happens when I have to teach my students about, well, anything that happened anywhere before 2011?

It turns out that story form is the prior knowledge we build on. Here’s how it works:

[S]tories are easy to comprehend, because the audience knows the structure, which helps to interpret the action. For example, the audience knows that events don’t happen randomly in stories. There must be a causal connection, so if the cause is not immediately apparent, the audience will think carefully about the previous action to try to connect it to present events (p. 67).

I may not know the story you’re about to teach me, but I do know what a story is and how it works. And I knew that as a small child. I knew, from both listening and living, that a story consists of someone doing something, which in turn triggers a reaction from someone else, and so on. Or, as Willingham puts it: “The human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories—so much so that psychologists sometimes refer to stories as ‘psychologically privileged’” (p. 65). Stories are velcro for the learning brain.

Second, according to Willingham, stories are inherently interesting. That’s because stories work like puzzles and games; all of them require problem-solving. As Willingham says, “Problem solving brings pleasure” (p. 9).

Well-crafted stories require their auditors or readers to make repeated “medium-difficulty inferences.” For example, a story will invite us to wonder what purpose an actor or character had for doing whatever they did. (We will try to infer their intentions and motivations.) We will also wonder about what will happen next – how others will respond, how the actor’s plans and projects will turn out, whether they’ll solve their problem or make it worse. We don’t have to try to do this when we audit a narrative. It’s just what our brains do in response to narration. That’s why it’s hard not to listen in at the cafe when someone at the next table is telling a juicy story.

When we guess right about a story, we feel good, just like we feel when we solve a puzzle or win a game. And if one in our series of medium-difficulty inferences turns out to be wrong – I thought the character would get away with that! – we get a backup reward: surprise. And, not to worry, another opportunity to predict will be along shortly.

Finally, stories are memorable. We want students to remember what they learn, of course. Consider, then, how stories work to make information memorable. Remember those medium-difficulty inferences? They have another, more generic name: thinking.

It turns out that, as Willingham says (in many places), “memory is the residue of thought” (p. 53). We remember what we think about. Well-told stories help our students to think and remember.

History Beats Pixar

The first question our students need to ask and answer about any topic in social studies is Question One: What Happened? And now we know: the most effective way to answer Question One is with a (true) story. Luckily for us, almost all our stories come preloaded with exactly the elements that Willingham says define an effective story: conflict, causality, complications, and character (p. 63). People pay good money to be entertained by Pixar and Disney who, notoriously, make their stories up. Our stories are better – weirder, gorier, more surprising, more dramatic – and they’re actually true!

In our last post, Jon explained why our 4QM curriculum has exactly four lesson types, one for each of the Four Questions. For us, every Question One lesson consists of two main activities. First, students need to get the story. Whatever your format, your source needs to be an actual story, not a list or compendium.

Once students have learned a story, they need to tell the story back. That’s the crucial second half of every Q1 lesson, and the part that social studies teachers most often overlook or misconstrue. Every competent teacher knows by now that we need to formatively assess the extent to which our students have learned what we’ve allegedly taught them. The problem is that we all too frequently assess our students in a granular way, abandoning the power of stories precisely when it’s most powerful for learning. Fact-checking names and dates is fine. Telling the story back is way better.

Is Storytelling a Thinking Skill?

In Question One lessons we’re giving our students practice in a disciplinary thinking skill essential to our field: narration. It takes lots of practice to get good at narration, one of the tipoffs that it is, indeed, a skillful activity. It’s worth the effort, because the payoff is enormous. As students learn to tell true stories well, they become better readers of narrative history. Telling stories themselves allows our students to see what authors do when they compose a story. In other words, they become more attentive to and knowledgeable about the genre of narrative history. That, in turn, allows them to learn more efficiently and effectively from reading.

So, yes, storytelling is a thinking skill. For history students (and their teachers), it’s the first of four essential thinking skills they’ll need to master in order to become disciplinary experts in the study of the human world. Story First!

G.S.