Storytelling

Stories are the inspired fields of our brains. Elie Wiesel once commented, ‘‘God made man because He loves stories.’’ The outstanding virtue of stories is that they are archetypical in nature and inspire, when shared, a relational partnership in teaching and in learning. Relish the story! Humans have been referred to as storytelling machines. Why? Because of our profound hunger for narrative. It is instinctive. And because, even when delivered in plain language, stories are crammed full of undercurrents and subtle nuances. Our lives are filled and revealed in stories. Their allure resides in their transcendent quality—transcending person, place, culture, ideologies, and academic disciplines. Although cousins of case studies, critical incidents, and role playing, stories are a fresh and unique breed. They draw us out, lead us beyond ourselves and our immediate situation in special ways. Stories rise above a totally logical and straightforward approach to learning and shuttle back and forth between facts and feelings. They echo Schon’s (1983) assertion that stories trigger reflection in a context that presents material differently. We think in terms of stories. New events and experiences are cast in stories that are linked to previously understood stories and experiences. Knowing them, finding them, reflecting on and reconsidering them—massaging them, as it were—help students to understand and operate in the world of professional practice. Students easily apprehend their meaning and adapt them to their own purposes, eventually capturing or inventing their own. Our ability to tell stories in novel ways is a hallmark of wisdom, maturity, and careful judgment. Stories from our own practice, from students, even from folklore, movies, and mythology can be usefully employed to build motivation in learning environments. Verisimilitude is the stuff of stories. They cannot be reduced to facts. Stories tell so much more. Words turn into pictures, providing a kaleidoscope of human nature—the ordinary and the extraordinary—about fallibility, about changing the human condition. Stories are a triumph of ordinary and extraordinary humanity and fallibility. What is a story? Bruner (1996) deems a story as a mode of thinking, a means of organizing experience and knowledge.

Reflection and Self-awareness

‘‘Know thyself,’’ advises Socrates. ‘‘To thine own self be true,’’ recommends Shakespeare. Being cognizant of your attributes, limitations, and style heightens your ability to draw selectively upon your own resources and fuels students’ strengths. It kindles expanding levels of awareness, competence, and confidence in all of you. Awareness of self as person, practitioner, and as teacher is critical. Competencies distinguishing the best from the worst in the helping professions have little to do with theory and technical acumen. They have everything to do with emotional and social know-how. Such know-how is cultivated though an intensive reflective process, the cornerstone of which exceeds abstract theoretical or technical knowledge. Experience and tacit knowledge upon which you rely everyday, almost automatically, when raised to the conscious level, is even more important. As a teacher, reflection goes well beyond improving performance in one particular course. It concentrates as well on consideration about your teaching in general and awareness of your own reflective processes. Practitioners, as well as teachers, include understanding, as contrasted with explanation, as essential to their work. Understanding entails the discipline of attending, noticing, and appreciating others as human subjects. It is very different from explaining and can emerge only gradually when it is tended and nurtured by reflection. Understanding transcends translating or reducing experience to interpretation. As you teach, engage the left hemisphere, chiefly responsible for explanation of data, in tandem with the right hemisphere, chiefly responsible for overall representation, to engender context-rich understanding. All this is not to say that practitioners and teachers are not scientists and do not think critically, but rather that their unique stance concentrates on their heart as well as their head. Talented practitioners think critically and systematically about client needs, practice tasks, and service outcomes. They possess the ability to incorporate knowledge and skills into their work. That is, they understand client behaviors and concerns, the forces and factors that affect clients’ lives, and are able to select strategies and techniques appropriate to their clients’ conditions.

Lesson Architecture

This remark says it clearly: the best teaching sets learners on their own path to discovery. Appeal to students’ hearts as well as filling their heads; it is sustenance for their professional journey. Effective, engaging, and enjoyable lessons do not happen automatically. They take effort. They demand attention to striking the right balance between content and process, to meeting the requirements of the curriculum and the distinctive needs of students. Every course is different. Every class is organic. Every group of students is distinctive. A tightly framed lesson leaves room for the unexpected and exceptional—a corollary to the apparent paradox stated earlier—structure frees you to be spontaneous. It affords room for you to weave teachable moments into the overall fabric of the lesson. Curricula and syllabi are basically fixed, general, and inflexible. Without compromising the integrity of the prescribed content, a solidly designed lesson creatively customizes classes to reflect your particular expertise, preferences, and manner. At the same time it takes into account students’ experience, strengths, and styles. Pre-reflection lesson planning—pulling it all together, in other words—is a kind of mental rehearsal. It focuses on desired changes in students, envisions the optimal conditions for creating a context for learning, and generates a strategy to intertwine process and content into a vibrant tapestry. Weaving it together calls for a self-conscious and conscientious effort. The lesson plan takes stock of the characteristics and conditions associated with you (personality, knowledge, skills, experiences, style), with students (receptivity, motivation, attitude toward the subject, style), with classroom milieu (number of students, physical environment, room temperature, acoustics), and with varied modes of instruction. It increases the likelihood of achieving greater student participation and optimizing learning. It makes teaching more stimulating and gratifying for both students and you. A lesson plan arises from pre-reflection and buttresses both reflection-in- action, and reflection-on-action. It harnesses your ingenuity to coalesce a multitude of factors—goals, themes, patterns, assignments, exercises, and enhancement materials (e.g., handouts) into a coherent and unified presentation. The lesson plan plots a path through this complex terrain by synchronizing this panoply of variables.

Intersecting Styles: Teaching to Strengths

While there may be ‘‘born teachers’’ with superb potential, no one is born a teacher ready simply to walk into a classroom and shine. They are born as persons who become teachers shaped by life, which influences the style they bring to the classroom to empower students. It makes sense as well to ensure that students learn in ways that are relevant to their preferred learning styles. It ensures learning that is meaningful, exciting, and challenging. No two people learn in the same way. No two people teach or practice the same way. Research on personality, left/right brain functioning, and on learning suggest that learning and teaching is a uniquely personal process. Each of you has a different speed, rhythm, and attention span. While we possess a variety of common characteristics as learners and as teachers, you also have discrete differences. These individual patterns are referred to as styles. Style is a pattern of preferences displayed for associating information with other stored experiences. Each of you as well as each of your students has a uniquely personal style. Style refers to how learning occurs, rather than how well it occurs. How do these styles intersect? Can they be matched? We know that when an alien speed, rhythm, or attention span is imposed on us, little or no learning occurs. Resistance and fatigue result. Teaching style consists of your personal conduct and preferences for the content and the way you transmit it. It depends as well on your conception of education. People learn in different ways, and your own style makes demands on learners and influences your use of materials and structure. Stretching your style and using different methods, observing and discussing students’ styles, and becoming acquainted with techniques that appeal to both right and left brain functions intensify learning. Aligning these factors places considerable demands on you. Teachers well-versed in their disciplines are naturally concerned about covering the topics in syllabi. Too often, however, they over-rely on packaged lectures to do so.

Musings about Teaching and Learning

This book underscores two deep-seated convictions about teaching. The first abandons the idea that learning simply amounts to filling students’ blank minds with missing supplies of theories, perspectives, statistics, and research reports. The second accepts the ideas that personal presence is the sine qua non of both professional practice and professional education. Learning necessarily involves action and interaction. You, your students, and the context produced by your exchange is crucial. The single most important catalyst in this matrix is you—your self. Your personhood affects this exchange in a most significant way. Flowing from this overarching conviction are yet other intermingled building blocks of professional education. Among these are that professional education needs to be learner-focused, not content-centered; it needs to be active, collaborative, emotionally tinged, and tailored to students’ styles. In addition, professional education rests upon certain fundamental beliefs: learning accrues from facilitation; content and its conveyance should mesh; knowledge mastery is but one aspect of learning; thinking and feeling are inseparable; and effective teaching emanates from questioning, responding, and, most important of all, listening. The chief vehicle for advancing professional education is initiating and sustaining a solid and positive relationship. Within a relational milieu, students feel free to examine assumptions, test values, share mistakes, experiment with alternative theories, try out new behaviors, and ultimately make strides toward professional development as self-aware, disciplined practitioners. Teaching involves more than delivery. It stimulates discovery, elicits wonder. Your role mandates your understanding of how students learn and work, and your ability to enable them to draw upon your wisdom and talent as well as the resources you make available. It requires your finding out what they need to know and generating ways to convey it. Your challenge is to make your art so powerful that it appeals at the same time to the intellectual as well as to the emotional lives of students in a visceral way.

Introduction

While certainly a mystery, as Palmer suggests, a teacher’s mission, as well as reward, is educating, drawing out from students what lies dormant while proposing the new, the exhilarating, the as-yet undiscovered. Professors, especially those new to academe, frequently find themselves in the classroom with little preparation, guidance, or direction about how to convey the knowledge and skill set of the profession. The prevailing assumption is that advanced knowledge of subject matter itself is sufficient preparation to teach the subject. The unofficial credential for teaching is completion of a research doctorate in a particular discipline. This narrow position is reinforced by the belief that students will learn from a one-way transmission of information. Many of us have learned to teach the hard way, by the seat of our pants, by circumstance, or by necessity. We often teach unaware of how we teach, both at the surface level of recognizing and identifying what we do in the classroom, and at the philosophical level of considering why we do what we do. Theoretical frameworks and findings from research studies provide only limited assistance in mastering the art and craft of teaching. Between the ideas that research provides and the kinds of direction and decisions you, the teacher, must make, there is a gulf. Teachers, both new and experienced, seek practical yet innovative suggestions for creatively working with students. They need help with difficult questions. How do I divide my focus between establishing a relationship, developing a learning contract, and plunging into content? How can I enhance the learning process without actually getting in the way? How do I best connect with students? How can I make learning active? In what ways can I personalize the teaching/learning environment? How do I adapt the method of teaching to students’ differing learning styles? How do I keep content fresh for them and for me? How do I create a climate that is calming while challenging? How do I build a secure place to invite learning and change? Themes in this book resemble those in my other books that concentrate on clinical practice. They are heartfelt and basic.

Case/Critical Incident

The core of teaching is the serious obligation to ‘‘touch’’ students. Providing more than the mere rudiments of knowledge is essential. Involvement is critical. Case study and critical incident examination are means to that end. To become competent practitioners, students need to develop the ability to incorporate knowledge, and, more important, to apply it in their practice. At the end of the day, student/practitioners will have clients in front of them for whom they need to decide what action to take. Prerequisite know-how and skill involve understanding clients’ motivation, background, thinking, behavior, affects, and concerns, combined with external forces affecting their lives. It includes the disciplined ability to select strategies and techniques appropriate to clients’ conditions and circumstances. Lead by example. Students pick up what they observe you do. Just as you endeavor to provide a rationale for what you do with students, so students gather how to provide a rationale for what they do with clients. Disciplined practice demands that practitioners continually monitor and evaluate their efforts to assure consonance with professional values and ethics. The case method encompasses all of these facets. Before entering the workforce to face flesh-and-bone clients, the case method provides students with an impressionistic chunk of reality. They become stakeholders in credible dilemmas. While certainly not perfect recreations of true situations, case studies, compared to other methods, bring students closer to what they need to keep in mind when dealing with real people. The case can be the lesson. As mentioned throughout this book, a parallel exists between what happens in the classroom and what happens in clinical practice. Cases—particularly in the manner in which you draw upon them interactively—exemplifies for students how they might deal with similar client situations. To use it to its best advantage, consider that the very manner you respond and interact with students as you ponder cases demonstrates for them ways to respond and interact with clients. The case method is predicated on three key notions of instruction.

Movies: Media as Message

Media are powerful and creative instruments for stimulating motivation, arousing interest, and sustaining engagement in the educational process. McLuhan stresses the importance of vision in the broadest sense. Movies enhance and enrich the learning atmosphere as they depict universal themes and compel attention to essential interactions. Making visual the radiance of humanity, media unify the learner and teacher in mutual and mindful reflection. Movies constitute one among many forms of media—including music, television shows, and literature—available for you to enliven lessons, to provide variety in class presentations, to augment conceptual frameworks, and to help your students better understand themselves, their clients, and the transactions between them. Movies can shed new light on themes, situations, and dilemmas students face daily. They can also cast into the foreground themes, situations, and dilemmas with which students have no previous firsthand acquaintance. Movies enhance deepened reflection. They endow lessons with added value. This chapter suggests movies suitable for use in courses in family treatment, teaching, and clinical practice. It focuses on the compelling nature of films and offers some guideposts for considering and selecting movies for your own courses. Popular culture engages us with the world. Students are exquisitely attracted and attuned to visual stimulation. Portraying some of the most basic issues in human existence, movies can prompt students to take a more thoughtful look at the dynamics influencing clients and their environment. Such portrayal becomes an indelible lesson. ‘‘Moving pictures’’ are ‘‘moving’’ in a number of respects. They are active. They are compelling. They touch an emotional chord. They move students toward lively discussion. They move, supplement, and augment textual and case material. Movies poignantly capture relevant issues in the human condition—such as the suffering of physical illness and its consequences as portrayed in Lorenzo’s Oil, the emotional isolation of a family as shown in Ordinary People, the tumult depicted in Babe, the question of mental illness as seen in Don Juan DeMarco, and clinicians’ angst as in Equus.

Writing for Insightful Reflection

Nin makes a strong point: gifts accrue from delving into one’s innermost core through writing. When I first wrote about the power of words and writing in the helping professions, I was criticized. Many believed that writing diluted the therapeutic process because it disengaged the writer from the immediate experience. But, of course, that’s the point. Writing provides a resource for gaining perspective, developing self-awareness, and integrating knowledge. It involves an array of senses—sight, touch, perhaps even the sound of a pencil scratch or the smell of wet ink. The very act of writing allows you to manipulate and wrestle with thoughts in special ways because it makes thoughts visible and tangible. It makes intentional and systematic your own as well as students’ inquiry into learning and practice. Writing is a vehicle for self-study, self-reflection, and self-discovery. It is a valuable supplement to the teaching process, stimulating self-observation. You and some of your students may be intimidated by the idea of putting thoughts down in black and white; it takes courage. Multiple benefits, however, accrue from the effort. This chapter highlights the multifaceted merits and flexible use of a few different platforms of writing for you as well as students. It offers an assortment of strategies to highlight its efficacy. Jung advocated writing as a tool to make sense of our experiences, of cause-and-effect relationships, of what is happening and why. It does so because representations of the right hemisphere are integrated with interpreting ones of the left. Writing helps us to figure out our own minds as well as access others’. Pulling back from the immediate situation, writing as self-study puts Dewey’s and Schon’s ideas of reflective thinking into concrete terms. In all its forms, writing is an effective tool for observation and disclosure. It is not a substitute for, but rather an enhancement to interactive, person-to-person learning transactions. It is complementary and supplementary. It gives voice to students’ and your own ideas, feelings, and patterns. It adds coherence to memories, thoughts, and inuitions. It facilitates communication, since sharing one’s writing reduces the distance between students and each other, and between students and faculty.

Role Playing

Playing a role often provides an authentic way to learn truths about the real world. Suiting the action, as Hamlet says, by teaching with an experience simulation method such as role playing, effectively stimulates students toward their own learning. Role plays make students sit up and take notice. A variant of or an adjunct to the case method, role plays arouse students’ interest because they resemble real practice experiences. Role players speak in the first person. Rather than commenting indirectly on what they think clients might say, they speak as if they actually were the clients. Key is having students immerse themselves in a realistic situation and then imagine themselves as the person in that situation. In other words, engage fully, intellectually and emotionally, in assuming a part in the play. Effective role plays simulate reality as they stimulate learning. They support knowledge and skill attainment along the four axes identified by Kolb (1984)—concretely experiencing, observing and reflecting, abstract reasoning, and actively experimenting. At the same time, they involve learning by doing with the fundamental five-step, problem-solving paradigm proposed by Dewey—feeling a need, analyzing the difficulty, proposing alternative solutions, experimenting with various solutions, and applying the solutions to new and different settings. Role plays likewise meet Knowles’ (1980) requisites for adult learning—empowering students to take responsibility for their own learning, drawing upon their unique experiences and strengths, making learning closely parallel practice, providing opportunities for students to reflect on their work, and engaging students in critical thinking. A plastic and fluid method, role play constantly expands students’ involvement and allows them to test knowledge and skill by repeated and rehearsed use. It subsequently has educational and practice relevance. By assuming various roles in a contrived yet nevertheless authentically represented situation, students reframe their understanding and develop alternative definitions of themselves and others. Role play therefore addresses four broad categories of professional practice objectives: it assists students to implement new information, sensitizes them to their own attitudes and beliefs, enlightens them to the motives and behaviors of others, and focuses on why.