Introduction

Story can be the hardest! Do you ever feel this?
A while back, when teaching the Story of Us to a group of new facilitators, I found I wasn’t making inroads.
I had heard that allowing students to reach their own conclusions was a great way of making sure that the content was well understood – but I found teaching story this way was hard. Even a two-minute story can be quite complex with many different interpretations. So, since you are an LCN member with experience training and coaching public narrative, I need your help.
I have developed a couple of new tools to help me teach narrative that I will be sharing at LCN’s first Innovation Hub session “New Tools to Teach Story”.
The challenge I was facing was two fold:
1) navigate the complexities and nuances of story, and
2) reach clearly defined teaching goals and learning points. All this without telling the students about the Story of US.
The basis for the process was such, we would start by showing a video of the Story of US, I would then lead a simple debrief using the following questions as a base:
1. What happened?
2. What does it mean?
3. How can you apply it?
We got stuck on “What does it mean?”. It felt like I wasn’t moving towards key learning points and that the process was creating chaos rather than finding meaning together.
That’s when it hit me: we need to create structures that can help people find meaning in the story.
Since then, I have developed a few new tools to help derive meaning from a story, with the help of a debriefing. These tools have helped me teach story, some can even be used for brainstorming story, but I’d really love to get your feedback. We can really make these even better together. So join us as we test them together.
Includes debriefings of:

• Story of Us, Susan, Camp Obama
• Story of Self, Us, Now – James Croft

Watch video