Telling Stories, Sharing Stories

In his post on Friday, Justin asked: 

"What new stories will we share today? And can you really change a factory into a community garden by sharing stories?"

And Debbie, responding to my post on Friday, wrote:

"It's so easy to ask the yes/no, question/answer questions that access one neuron in the brain (you know what I mean) rather than the open-ended, thought-provoking, guiding questions that make connections, getting many, many neural pathways firing and working together."  

In my personal opinion, yes.  Yes, you can change a factory into a community by sharing stories.  Sharing stories requires asking the right questions.  Getting all the neural pathways firing and working together.  The right questions guide the stories until the students are able to ask themselves the right questions.  In other words, the right questions begin the shift from Factory to Joyful Community.  If we start by asking the right questions to our students, and model our thought process, they will pick up what we ask.

As one of my students often says, "Well, Magistra would say, 'Where would you look to find that answer?'  So let's follow that advice."  If we ask the right questions and give the right tools to begin the inquiry process, students will begin looking things up on their own--first because they have to, but then because they can.  They will start finding new resources, things I have never even heard of but are so utterly cool that they become part of our cannon of resources.

Too often, I see teachers either get frustrated because their students "just aren't getting it quickly enough."  Clearly, this means that they are just lazy.  No, it means that they need to be taught HOW to do something and WHY to do it.  Only then will they "get it."

Teachers get annoyed because their students dare to ask questions when they don't understand something.  "They don't know how to research anything!" a colleague recently complained to me.  But they are never taught HOW or WHY.  Sometimes they may be given resources to start them off, but most of the time, at least in my experience, the students are simply told "research this."

So this takes me back to my How and Why themes.  It takes me back to scaffolding, like I have mentioned. How do we guide the formation of a Joyful Community?