Professional Learning for Busy Educators

The Moth has been around for 20 years, and is known to many who hear excerpts from the program’s live storytelling show, The Moth Radio Hour, on public radio. The program’s founder, George Dawes Green, named it after the fluttery insect when he realized that people gathered to storytellers like moths to light. Since then, The Moth has become a storytelling juggernaut, hosting up to 400 live shows a year in 25 cities and providing podcasts to interested listeners. More recently, it has moved into schools, offering afterschool workshops, a class curriculum and an intensive three-day storytelling session for teachers.

“I want to give teachers The Moth principles, and support them as they bring storytelling and listening into their classrooms,” said Micaela Blei, who along with Catherine McCarthy leads The Moth’s education team. Blei, a former teacher, performed a story at SXSWedu earlier this year to a group of educators and shared highlights of what makes a good story.

A new study uses brain scans to determine that for preschoolers, one type of story is just right.

Stories are powerful. Stories shape our ideas about what’s possible. What stories will your students choose to tell about the world? To expand your classroom toolkit of storytelling resources, try …

I had always hated math. Now I suddenly found myself teaching trigonometry. I was an English teacher in Chicago Public Schools with certification in special education, and when my school was facing a shortage of certified special education teachers, I was pulled in mid-year to co-teach a junior-level trigonometry class with the math teacher.

My students struggled with the calculations, thinking they just weren’t good at math. Like me, they hated it. What was the point in working and reworking these calculations? What were we trying to figure out anyway? And I originally agreed with them.

Yet trig slowly became my favorite class of the day. After spending years teaching English and reading, I was being challenged to move beyond what I had always been doing. When you’re new to something, you have a fresh perspective. You’re willing to take risks. You’re willing to try anything because you don’t know how something should be done.

I worked with my co-teacher to create a series of supplementary lessons through a different lens to let students experience personal meaning and creativity in their math.

"Storytelling may be as old as the hills but it remains one of the most effective tools for teaching and learning. A good story can make a child (or adult) prick up their ears and settle back into their seat to listen and learn.

But despite the power a great story can have, storytelling has an endangered status in the classroom – partly due to a huge emphasis on “active learning” in education. This is the idea that pupils learn best when they are doing something – or often, “seen to be doing” something.

Any lesson in which a teacher talks for 15 or more uninterrupted minutes would be regarded today as placing pupils in too passive a role. Indeed, even in English lessons teachers now very rarely read a whole poem or book chapter to pupils, something which now worries even OFSTED."