We claim at 4QM Teaching that there are four social studies thinking skills and that one of them is “narration,” the ability to tell a true story about human interaction accurately and coherently. Now, since storytelling is ubiquitous and, as cognitive scientists tell us, “psychologically privileged,” you might think that there’s not much there to teach or learn. If that’s your hunch, here’s a simple test of the proposition: ask a novice to try it. 

My wager is that you’ll have the same results I did. Once Jon and I figured out that our students should be telling stories in our classes, I started asking mine to do it. Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet figured out how to teach them to do it well. The results were revealing: most of them listed events. This happened, then that happened, etc. No actors, no intentions, no causal connections. More knowledgeable students provided longer lists. All were equally boring. 

If David McCullough or Jill Lepore did that, you would have no idea who they were. That you do is a result of their skillful deployment of their capacious knowledge of American history. Our students can learn their techniques. They must: it will make them more knowledgeable, more analytically precise, and happier about having to learn all this stuff anyway.

Storyboarding = Thinking

In Question One (What happened?) lessons, we ask students to learn a true story and tell it back. The tell-it-back part is crucial, and the part we history teachers most often overlook. Having students tell the story back has a bunch of benefits. First, students get to practice and consolidate what they just learned. Second, both they and you get to see what they know, what they sort-of know, and what they simply got wrong. In other words, telling a story back is a great technique for formative assessment. Third, your students get to practice narration, one of the disciplinary thinking skills that define our omnibus field, social studies. 

There are lots of ways to tell a story. Our favorite for student storytelling in a Q1 lesson is storyboarding. (Movie-makers use storyboards to plan their films. But remember: our stories are better than Pixar’s!) 

Storyboarding in history class works like this: each student gets a blank storyboard with four boxes in landscape orientation on an 8.5 x 11” sheet of paper. Their task, working cooperatively in a small group, is to chunk the story they just learned into those four boxes and assign each box a brief descriptive title and date range. Once the group has come to consensus on box titles and date ranges, each student then illustrates the main action of the box on their own. (Here’s an example of a completed storyboard from our US History course.) 

In order to complete their storyboards, students need to do a bunch of beneficial things with their brains. First, they have to decide where to begin and end their version of the story. Then they have to make decisions about how to chunk the story into coherent chapters. All of that requires decision making about the relative importance of actions and events. Given the space constraints of the storyboard, they also have to figure out what to omit entirely. As a group, they need to condense further by agreeing on a descriptive title for each box. Then, working individually, they need to figure out how to use images to represent the action they talked about. 

As we know from Daniel Willingham, we remember what we think about. Students who make storyboards remember more stories! 

Storyboarding = Engaging Assessment

In a 4QM classroom, as students work in their groups they typically check their notes and correct one another. Sometimes they call the teacher over to settle a dispute. Often they’ll settle it themselves. In any case, when they’ve completed their storyboards, we generally ask several students to present their storyboards to their classmates. (Document cameras are great tools for this job.) The presentations also allow us all to deliberate as a class about the meaning and relative merits of the inevitable variation in narrative choices. They also give our students salutary repetition of the story—more practice, more memory. 

Both activities, storyboarding and oral presentation, give us as teachers an opportunity to provide our historical narrators-in-training with low-stakes feedback on their work using our Q1 rubric. 

Students can get good at narration pretty quickly. (That may be where the psychological privilege comes in.) When they do, they feel great. And since they’re now telling stories rather than reciting arid lists, listening and responding become relatively effortless for auditors. And so, there’s one more reason—besides improving memory, stimulating thinking, and creating opportunities for feedback, metacognition and skillful practice—to have your students do storytelling in class: it’s terrifically good fun. 

G.S.