Storytelling – For College Students

Challenge and Selection

Being creative is an art. Actually you cannot be creative in the place where I work atleast for the reason  it’s a college classroom. Here we have to prepare concepts from text books and deliver to the students.  We have to make sure that the concepts are delivered correctly without any errors. Because we know  that if I make an error it’s going to affect 60 students in my classroom. So there is always a risk of telling  story since different people may understand in different ways. To get the attention from the students we  should be engaging all the time with all possible ways. I have attended many Design Thinking training  sessions to make myself expert in this area. With lots of practice and thorough understanding about the  subjects, I started telling stories to my students with full confidence.

Application

All the stories are based on case study method, here I will the narrate as a story and ask everybody to put  themselves in the position of decision-makers. While narrating the story, I intentionally skip some part  and move to next step. Few students who follows very closely stop me and ask about missing part. This  shows their attention towards the discussion and they continued to understand the subjects very well. If  in case study nobody points of the gap, still I carry forward with my story. At the end, I will give two or  three questions to be solved based on case study. While solving the case study, they will recollect all the  information I shared about the case. Sometimes they may have stuck up with tricky situation or challenges  to solve the case study, it is mostly from the gap which I left out deliberately. At this moment when I  explain any concept, it is easy for them to understand because their solutions are based out of this  concept.

Insight and Approach

This exercise gives truly amazing experience, here the students comes out various questions to find out  the solutions. From the hints provided by me, they also go one step forward by referring additional  resources to find supporting documents to prove their solutions. In this way, I also learned many new  concepts and dimension from the students. This helped me to become strong in my subjects and got  rewarded for what I did so far. I also shared my experience to my fellow colleagues now they started using  this approach.

Students are very attentive when we deliver the concepts using story telling method, this not only make  them to be participative in the classroom but also make them easy to remember during exams.

Using this best practices, I am invited to other colleges to train their faculty members to deliver their class  using story telling method. This way I am also making additional income apart from my regular salary.  Money is just a small part but the exposure and the network what I am building I considered as my biggest  asset from this experience.

