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 Neither facilitating nor teaching are easy to do in a room full of students whose minds may or may not be focused on the topic being discussed. The students often have a lot on their minds that is not relevant to whatever you are telling them. Therefore it is very important to find a way to engage each student and hopefully gain his or attention; storytelling is a good way of doing this. It helps to engage a classroom full of individuals, and provides a forum for them to learn by listening, or by engaging an idea and showing a side of themselves as storytellers (maybe imagined, maybe not) that they may not have otherwise. This form of being both on the receiving end of a story, and on the storytelling side, appeals to people at an emotional (or cognitive neocortex) level that helps one to remember a story later on.

Our experience taught us that part of the difficulty of facilitating is that there are many constraints and opportunities to succeed or fall. There are time limits (thankfully extendable), miscues along the way, and the barrier of getting an audience to trust that what you are telling them is interesting, somehow applicable, and possibly both at once. It is very easy to derail and to feel defeated if the students aren’t engaging with the material or body language is discouraging, etc. There was a point last night when we felt that things could have flown off track very easily, but there are always creative ways to bring students back. Perhaps storytelling and role play are two examples of creative ways to get people to loosen up and have fun being someone who they would not normally be, but they are also great ways to get students to see a topic through the eyes of an individual who they feel that they have no connection to. This is the powerful piece that enables the interaction and growth of the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd loops in the brain, and, ultimately, leads to the development of a deeper level of understanding and new knowledge on a given topic.  By allowing students to interact with each other in a more organized fashion, whether though a story that can bind the audiences attention or through leading the students to become the storytellers, the role of the teacher is to guide. This is a trait that can be taught to teachers to a certain extent, but it is best learned and mastered by experience interacting with students. Activities like storytelling and role play are techniques that are meant to make the facilitator’s attempts to convey information and provoke thoughts more effective, as well as to generate new knowledge in the classroom by engaging both the neocortex and the cognitive unconscious.

Questions for Reflections (please engage as many or few of these questions as you like, both depth and breadth are super!):

At what point(s) did you feel most engaged during our presentation/facilitation? When didn’t you? Why?

How could you imagine techniques such as role play and storytelling being used in a lower-level science classroom? Introductory physics class? What are helpful situations? What are barriers? 

Is there a need for balance between creative interactive exercises and a more didactic style of teaching (maybe to incorporate more facts)?  How do you imagine it to shape the dynamic between the students in the classroom and facilitator/teacher? How does the rules and/or decorum differ between the contexts?