The Narrative Arc Of Teaching

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This past Sunday the New York Times offered its list of 100 notable books of the year, and on it there were a couple of great nonfiction works on teaching, including Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars, which I loved and highly recommend.

That list got me thinking of the many books I’ve read this year and which ones I might strongly recommend.  One of the best books on teaching I’ve read this year just came out.  It’s Tom Newkirk’s new book, called Minds Made for Stories. 

It’s excellent, of course, as is most of the stuff Tom Newkirk writes.  I often found myself stopping to write exclamation points in the margins, thinking to myself, ‘Yes! I feel exactly the same way!’ or, ‘Yes!  I have been saying that for years!’  Too bad I didn’t get to this first, but nonetheless I’m glad these ideas are in print.

The book has many good features to offer, including great chapters on the role of narrative in science and math.  But I want to focus on what Newkirk has to say about narrative and cognition and narrative and teaching.  I don’t mean the teaching of narrative, but the relationship between narrative as a means of thinking and learning and its relationship to the art (or science) of teaching.

Newkirk makes the essential argument that narrative is not simply a genre but is both “the deep structure of all … writing” and—even more importantly—that it is the foundation of cognition, that narrative is the way we organize and make sense of the information our brains take in from our perception and our experience.  He cites authors, artists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists to support his argument. 

In the fifth chapter, where he makes the turn toward writing in the sciences and mathematics, Newkirk writes that effective teaching needs to be plotted, that is needs to have a “‘narrative arc’” for students to be successfully engaged and learning.  When I read this, I got excited and pulled out my just-finished copy of Dan Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?, in which Willingham makes an identical argument.

Dan Willingham is a cognitive scientist who does research in applications of cognitive science to K-12 education.  (He’s got a great blog, too, if you are interested).  In a section called The Power of Stories, Willingham discusses how his research demonstrates that “organizing a lesson plan like a story is an effective way to help students comprehend and remember.”  Later in the book, he reinforces this claim by providing evidence that a lesson must be designed around a conflict to be resolved, and that teachers should think of their teaching like writing.  Among other things, both writing and teaching should consider audience and how best to spark audience interest.

Newkirk discusses this idea, too.  At one point, he quotes Kenneth Burke saying that writing at its best is “‘an arousing and fulfillment of desires,’” what Newkirk sometimes calls seduction.  In his application to teaching, Newkirk pedestrianizes this phenomenon by quoting Peter Elbow, who describes writing as creating an itch that needs to be scratched, which is perhaps more appropriate for the context of K-12 education.

Although neither Newkirk nor Willingham get deep into a discussion of assignments, I think the centrality of narrative is highly relevant to the reading and writing assignments we give students, too, and not just to our lesson planning.  How often are our students bored by the reading we assign them and uninvested in the writing we require them to complete?  To be successful, to get the students truly interested in their reading and writing, we have to help them to fit both activities into their own personal narratives. 

I don’t merely mean we have to give them culturally relevant books (though that’s important) or that all writing has to be personal writing (though some should be), but that connections have to be made between the classroom and the world the students live in outside our walls. 

I think of Phillip Lopate’s dictum that the essay is “an enactment of the creation of the self” or Don Murray’s statement that “all reading is autobiography,” which concludes his essay “All Writing is Autobiography.”  We can’t settle for a situation where there is school and there is everything else, and never the twain shall meet.  In the reading and writing we assign, as well as in our teaching, we have to bridge that gap.

To quote Mark Turner, “narrative … is basic to human thinking.”  Students are inherently immersed in narrative.  The trick, for us, is to get them to integrate the narratives of school into the narratives of their lives.

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