The power of story-telling in teaching

One of my PhD advisor’s most frequent recommendation is to tell a story when we start a talk. In our PhD Research Group meetings, he often pushes us to start with a main character: “Matt is a project manager in charge of scheduling for Bechtel. While working on a large bridge project in Africa, Matt faced a problem…”.

I remember the first time I came back from the field and presented my data. I had quotes, I had facts, I had concepts. I definitely did not have a story. I even thought I should not tell a story as it would be too partial and not trustworthy. I was doing a single case study and desperately trying to find the universal in the specific. Therefore, I presented concepts I thought were the main points of my case.

I did not get very useful feedback from this presentation. Indeed, it is hard to comment on concepts alone. When telling the full story, the audience can point to what they find most interesting and draw interesting links to what they know. I was later told that people retain concepts better when they themselves go through the process of abstracting the morale from a fleshed-out story. Laying out bare concepts would not give me a reaction. Showing too many details without a link between them would also not do. The story was missing.

I recently invited my advisor to teach a session of the class I lecture this quarter. It was the first time I focused on his teaching style and not on the content of his talk, and finally, I started to grasp what he meant by story-telling in the classroom.

He made each story personable. Specifically, he was letting students in on secrets. He sparkled details about CEOs of companies: what companies they just came from, how long they stayed at CEOs, a famous sentence they ushered, or a quirky detail. These CEOs were the main characters and became real through these details. I have already forgotten some of these characteristics only a few days after the session. But at that time, they made each of the students’ eyes lift from their computers.

These details were handpicked and balanced with many other illustration techniques. He used metaphors, comparing going against a company’s culture to sailing a boat into the wind: it can’t go fast and necessitates to go around many obstacles. He continued by giving an example of how Louis Gerstner did it at IBM and citing his book Who says elephant can’t dance as further reading. This was a bridge to the future, making students want to do more. Conveniently, the title itself is a memorable image of what it could be like to change large corporations’ culture.

In a class of 50 minutes, he presented a large framework, described conceptually 3 or 4 concepts and gave at least 4 or 5 more detailed examples. When he did not develop examples, he punctuated his talk with comments that anchored the concepts in a lived reality. For example, he mentioned how he had argued with the publishing company over the names of the concepts in his framework.

Some research has stated that people’s attention span is only 6 minutes. In my advisor’s session, there was always a new character entering the stage with a sparkly outfit before the 6 minutes had passed. The main challenge for me as I try to go from student to teacher is to go beyond the concepts I could abstract from my teachers’ stories. Instead, I now need to collect the details that will bring my characters to life and make my students want to abstract the concepts from my stories.