Chapter 9: I could learn, if you would just tell me a story!

In Chapter 9, Ohler discusses other approaches to story mapping besides the visual portrait of a story mentioned in prior chapters. Although I liked many of the structures such as Aristotle's Story Map, and the treasure maps, I was most intrigued by Kieran Egan's Story form.

"To capitalize on children's imaginative abilities in learning situations, he recommended that teachers develop lesson plans based on the story form rather than the typical task-subtask lesson plan structure that was (and still is) in such prevalent use.  To him, there was little that was inherently meaningful to the young mind in a  logically constructed sequence of tasks" (Ohler, Kindle Edition, 1610 of 2900).

In general, I am a Type A personality who likes organization, structure, and makes daily lists of tasks for both home and use at work.  When I read this statement however, I realized the implications of this statement for both the classroom or any work environment.  I immediately thought of an incident that occurred at work yesterday.  Last Monday I returned to the Department of Corrections as a budget analyst in a new unit.  After meeting with my unit to discuss upcoming assignments, I went back to my desk to review procedures for Schedule 10s.  After twenty minutes of reading through documents I learned very little and knew I would need to refer back to the procedures if I received any questions regarding this process.  Yesterday, one of my coworkers was discussing the Schedule 10s with staff from one of our programs.  Instead of asking him what the process was, I instead asked him how our work fit into the big picture of CDCR budgets.  In other words, instead of giving me the task we will be completing I wanted to know the whole story.  In about three minutes I had a clear understanding that these are documents created by the Department of Finance to track our budget authority and that our budget should tie to these documents at all points throughout the year.  The state budget cycle does not make the most entertaining story, but even this topic can be made more relevant and memorable using the story form model.  Egan is correct in stating that individual tasks are not memorable and only when students see the purpose or how the tasks related to the larger picture will they internalize this knowledge.