Storytelling

Challenge & Selection

Storytelling is an excellent tool I’ve used from time to time in order to get my thoughts across people  easily. I’m a college student and have been a teacher’s assistant for a few years now. My job consists  primarily in solving any questions or inquiries any student that comes to me has. The subject I assist on  is Microeconomics and after a few years the tool that has helped the most to connect to students and  help them grasp complex or abstract topics is storytelling. Moreover, I’ve seen that students can  understand ideas better once they can imagine them in a real-life situation or context. The main issue  with teaching Microeconomics is that many topics are abstract and don’t have an apparent real-life  materialization or aren’t tangible; as such, students fail to grasp the concept or idea simply because they  can’t connect to it. I’ve tried several other tools, most notably visualization, but graphing or drawing  complex mathematical formulas didn’t generate the impact I hoped for. Then I began telling them  stories of examples of how those concepts or ideas could be seen in their daily lives and then I saw how  students responded and I’ve been using storytelling ever since to get students to incorporate abstract  concepts. When people relate to something, they understand it

Application

The storytelling process I’ve done is mostly the same every time. Most recently, with the start of the  new semester, I had a new group of students begin a virtual semester and they were having a rough  time trying to understand the lecture professor with the fundamental economic principles (supply,  demand, optimization, income restriction, deriving optimized demand functions, etc.). This was the  biggest issue I’ve had an assistant since virtual college is practically a new concept. So, face to face  interactions were impossible, working with them in workshops was out of the question and all I can use  is Microsoft Teams and Excel to teach.

Well, two weeks in and my traditional methods were not getting to the students. Then I decided to go  full throttle with storytelling and life examples. The response was immediate. The objective was to get  them to understand the marginal rate of substitution, a basis for the optimization process later and a  topic they need to understand. Just with the name, students lost their focus and interest, and with class  being virtual, they had plenty distractions. The story wasn’t a highly complex or long one, but it related  to something they could at least see in an everyday situation. I began the story with them as the main  characters. I then told them that they and their friend wanted to buy a sandwich and a coke. However,  when they went to buy, the friend got his sandwich and coke first but then the sandwiches ran out and  they offered their friend 2 wraps for the sandwich and he denied, but when they offered 3, he accepted.  That was the concept. How much of one item you are willing to give up in exchange for 1 unit of another  item. In this story, the marginal rate of substitution would be 3:1, 3 wraps for 1 sandwich. Seems easy,  but when they were in class all they saw were X goods, or n number of X in exchange for n number of Y.  People don’t relate with letter variables.

Insight & Approach

Well, storytelling works! Students often complain that the professor doesn’t make any sense and I know  for a fact that’s no it. I had that class and it’s just that mathematical and abstract thinking is not easy to  grasp unless you can relate. This was just the most recent and helpful case, yet I’ve using this tool for

years and even told the teacher about it. We’ve been working together, and he began to use it more  often and that has led students would come to me with less inquiries. Even so, after using it so often I  have come to realize that storytelling is just another expression of empathy. The better you can place  yourself in the other person’s shoes, the more relatable the stories I’ve come up with and the better  real-life examples I can imagine. The more relatable, the better the understanding, the better their  performance, and the greater my satisfaction.

I had never realized I was storytelling all along. Even though my example was not very elaborate it did  the job. I have done countless trying to get students to understand different topics, and sometimes they  work and sometimes they don’t, but when they don’t, I can work out why they didn’t work. This course  pointed out very key and important characteristics of successful storytelling that I will incorporate to  improve. It’s a matter of practice and working with the person in front of you, placing yourself in their  shoes and taking them along in a story that can make them part of the idea.

