Week 3: Telling your school story #BastowLSDA

We are surrounded by theories of action, ideas that inform change and exemplars of how to do it...but the reality is that, like the students we teach, we've got to be critical and think carefully, strategically and authentically about what will work in our given context and what won't...and not afraid to personalise or customise the approach to meet our needs.

Sometimes this can feel overwhelming, but with a clear idea of our needs based on data and informed by knowledge of our situation, armed with a sound moral purpose and vision...we can move forward.

But how do we communicate this for buy-in?

Humans tell stories. 

We have a history of storytelling dating back millenia. 

We are hard wired to do this. And we remember stories long after the facts and stats are lost.

Stories resonate because:

1.You are more likely to remember a story than a set of facts

2.Stories are the currency of our thoughts – they store value and enable exchange

3.Stories are the flight simulators of the brain – they enable us to rehearse before we do….

Stories enable us to:

1.Share a credible idea – which makes others believe

2.Share an emotional idea – so others care (our moral purpose)

3.Encourage us to take action 

Why Do We Tell Stories?
Whether in caves or in cities, storytelling remains the most innate and important form of communication. All of us tell stories. The story of your day, the story of your life, workplace gossip, the horrors on the news. Our brains are hard-wired to think and express in terms of a beginning, middle and end. It's how we understand the world. Storytelling is the oldest form of teaching. It bonded the early human communities, giving children the answers to the biggest questions of creation, life, and the afterlife. Stories define us, shape us, control us, and make us. Not every human culture in the world is literate, but every single culture tells stories.

Can You Be a Storyteller and a Teacher and a Leader?
You already are. Teachers are storytellers, and storytellers have been teachers for millennia.

Although narrative inquiry has a long intellectual history both in and out of education, it is increasingly used in studies of educational experience. 

One theory in educational research holds that humans are storytelling organisms who, individually and socially, lead storied lives. Thus, the study of narrative is the study of the ways humans experience the world. 

This general concept is refined into the view that education and educational research is the construction and reconstruction of personal and social stories; learners, teachers, and researchers are storytellers and characters in their own and other's stories. 

How to start
A good story always begins with a moral purpose – a clear idea of the beliefs and vision. This is what engages others in your story.

The ability of purposefully doing rather than simply doing - every aspect of your experience has strategic intent based on learning. If you can explain how and why you the teaching and learning in your school is effective- you are in a good place.

One key strategy is to maintain a record – you’re used to the old ‘running records’ in primary school, and those who have done the #BastowLSDA course know all about the Action Research Projects  – but, more importantly the e-journals which are a place on Blogger where each course participant maintains a weekly reflective blog on their learning.

Purpose? To record the tacit – implicit and explicit feelings, learnings, ‘aha!’ moments of the course experience.

So, think about this – how are you going to record and then tell your school’s story?

The narrative will develop over time and help you gain that clarity – but it needs a structure, or it can be a rambling, amorphous mess.

Make it a record that you can use and can be a resource for other schools in the future.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What will our school’s story and message be?
• Will we let others tell it for us?
• What available tools can we use to easily share the great learning experiences that take place in our school?
• Do our stakeholders fully understand what is going on in our school?
• How will others benefit from our story? How will  we share it?

Use social media to capture and tell your story:

• Google+ and Blogger– personal spaces, school networks
• Twitter – for tracking key events, thinking, ideas #BastowLSDA
• Facebook – how could this be used to capture your thinking and learning?
• Pinterest – discover and save your own or the group’s aha! moments
• Diigo – for interesting readings
• Youtube – set up a YouTube channel for your school / Vimeo
• GoogleDrive
• Instagram - This very popular social media site, Instagram, communicates with images, instead of status updates or 140 character updates. Make “instagrammer” one of the classroom jobs. Assign one specific device to the instagram account and let one or two students post a few pictures each day to the stream. An ongoing feed like that will keep parents clued in and is so easy to integrate into the workflow of the classroom.
• Take a Photography Safari https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6xs8WLadso
• Perhaps a blog – updated weekly, fortnightly or monthly – from school teams is an idea – you can do this via one person’s account, or create your own on the school network or on Blogger.

Tell your story as it happens, take pictures of kids doing great work when observing, blog about successes / teachers making new pedagogical changes/innovations, those ‘aha!’ moments.

The challenge is to maintain this regularly – to even reply to and feed back to the blogs of others – so this can trace your learning journey over time.

Think outside the box – film, photos, artefacts, reflections.
These are valuable and rich artefacts of your learning journey through this change. But, don’t stop there – this is  ongoing and requires an iterative review – constantly revisit this ‘elevator pitch’ – what can you communicate about your school’s journey in 60 seconds?

Constantly try and identify the themes that are emerging…what’s trending for you?

INVOLVE YOUR STUDENTS in identifying what matters to them (Think about #putyourbatout and #iwillridewithyou or #dancingguy - what can you learn from these?), in data capture and curation – where is their place in all of this?

Let them help lead the way. 

What problems will they find in the process?

How is this ACTIVATING learning for our students?

How is their enthusiasm being grabbed and sustained? 

What channels are you using to do this?

Take time to reflect on, digest, analyse and synthesise your story – each time taking it back to your moral purpose – and to that ‘elevator pitch’ and think about:

• Where are we now compared to where we were before?
• What are we doing?
• What do we know about change and digital leadership?
• Why is this making a difference?
• How is this ACTIVATING learning for our students?
• How are our TEACHERS learning – how is their capacity building? What does this look like?
• How might another school, in another context, use these reflections of ours to begin their own change journey?

Be consistent, persistent, imaginative and agile.

This is YOUR change journey – but you are part of something much bigger and it is your responsibility to capture and disseminate the learnings.

Understand that each of you come from a different context – and while themes and trends will emerge, it cannot be one-size-fits-all.

One-stop-shop, locked in, one-size solutions don’t and can’t exist any more in such the rich, changing, diverse and dynamic modern world.

But themes and trends can….

So, what's your story going to be?