The holidays are upon us and the nights are getting longer and darker, the waves on the coast getting bigger and wilder. It’s a good time to recall the warmth of storytime, for teachers and students alike. Can we slow down and immerse ourselves in shared imagination?
Read Me a Story
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
Are you ready? Manderley! Just for a moment: Imagine the dream.
I remember reading those opening words from Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier) aloud to students. The room fell silent. It was storytime, a reprieve from extracting worksheet answers or requirements we equate with high school. Storytime has no answers, just wonderings, and it is about being transported.
We’re coming into the holiday season, and I want to share something as warm as a cup of cocoa under your nose: storytelling.
First, though, let’s hear it for career teachers. They teach thousands of classes using a wide variety of teaching methodologies—mastering various methodologies is thought to be the mark of great teachers today. We are expected to master clinical teaching methods, project-based learning, inquiry-based learning, experiential education, differentiated instruction, flipped classrooms, collaborative learning, problem-solving techniques, constructivist methods, gamification, outdoor education, mobile learning, augmented and virtual reality enhanced teaching, and of course Socratic questioning.
But if you really want the real Socratic questioning, the original teaching method, try starting with this one:
“Have the Highlanders been out again?”
I love the opening line of The Two Drovers, how it pulls students into a world of cultural clashes and justice, and straight into the warmth that only great story provides. When I read this story of a classic legal and cultural battle to classes, everything seems possible for my students: debate, reflection, wild visuals, and the deepest-ever engagement in human nature and morality. Great story is a separate peace.
Few if any methods of teaching will ever yield as warm and engaging an experience as just reading a story out loud. Few activities turn out to be more mutually gratifying for teachers and learners than when a class asks, “Read me a story,” and the teacher obliges. And still, “Read me a story” is an age-old, loving request that we rarely see fulfilled today.
Schools have gradually transformed the way students engage with books, and I’m not sure why. There is no mandate against it, as far as I know. It simply doesn’t seem to be viewed as enough rigor, enough of a challenge, or a demonstration of teacher virtuosity or student high achievement.
Breaking the Link
“Reading (or being read to) is no longer seen as an act that has intrinsic value, a joy worth pursuing for its own sake,” writes Jesse Pearson, a middle school humanities teacher and high school placement counselor at Marin Horizon School. “By reading aloud to older students, I’m exploring what it means to decouple these things, to periodically break the link between reading and working.” To break the link!
What about that link? When we select our story well, students do not think they are at work and teachers are beyond what a lesson plan can do. We are experiencing literature in its pure form: transportive, immersive. If it is a well-selected story, everyone “gets it” and “goes there.” Sure, we debate and fight about the motives of the characters. We stop and talk about complexities or interpretations, we share our mental pictures of the settings, and those are huge parts of the journey, but like on the great trips, we are not lost—we are finding our way into the author’s world, and our own.
A Real Immersion
If the class is struggling the whole time to understand what the story is about, that’s not a story. When I read to students, I feel enveloped in a shared experience as we pause to discuss images and themes. These moments lead to some of the most beautiful conversations of my life. I have my favorites, too, that I know challenge and stimulate: The BFG with seventh graders, The Two Drovers with eleventh graders, or parables with teachers in workshops. I have in my library a row of favorite books that I have taught to literature classes through the years, and most of them look like they have been through a warzone with me, annotated and dogeared, torn and maybe de-covered. A book you love becomes a character in the book itself.
Reading short stories and accessible novels to students, and having students read them, I feel a connection to the ancient lineage of teachers. This is not just a tieback to that tradition—I feel the holiday-like warmth of a room alive with shared curiosity, eyes alight, and that sense of nonthreatening, nurtured wonder that great teachers and parents are going for.
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
I rarely pick complex or verbose readings. Teachers are supposed to start their lessons with the “anticipatory set,” that preface material that piques student curiosity and appeals to their imaginations. The opening lines to a great book like The Hobbit don’t just set the tone for student curiosity, they set the tone for the safe magic of story. Almost instantly, we are descending into Middle-earth, leaving our everyday lives behind.
Recently, an October 2024 article in The Atlantic titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” highlighted a concerning trend that I think we all can sense: many students are entering universities having graduated high school without ever having read a complete novel. This shift reflects an approach where texts are treated as tools for skill acquisition rather than as works to be fully experienced. A well-chosen novel is digestible by all, not a grueling march through the semester. Why are they avoided?
I’m going to be brutally honest. I’ve known teachers who choose the most complex, even byzantine readings, believing them to be scholarly challenges. And I understand why—they feel driven to provide that level of rigor. The pressure is real. But I often wonder, who is that challenge really for? Too often, I’ve seen classes shift from a shared effort to appreciate and process the story into a collective struggle to grasp the teacher’s interpretation—because only the teacher has actually understood the book, and everyone knows it. Anyone who has ever observed King Lear being taught knows this on some level—sorry, Shakespeare!
I am generally a fan of shorter works. I want my students fully immersed in the pages of the text. Teachers assigning dense works need to face a hard truth: an opening line like, “I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall,” not to mention the following pages of scrambled complexity, however brilliantly turned the phrases, has a higher a chance of sending students scrambling straight for CliffsNotes or AI as it does of engaging then in the actual story. Some writings can turn 120 pages into what seems like 999, and the only thing I have ever seen students do when they confront such works is try to learn what the teacher thinks they mean, or what the supposed meaning will be on the test.
I want story to be the way of creating whole ecosystems out of classrooms, forests of shared learning and journeying—those are where we find the real challenges, journeys that mean something to us personally. A great class becomes a world unto itself. "You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop…” you are Rod Serling. The Twilight Zone is real now because you are sharing it. It is shared liminality. You can do no better as a teacher, offer up no greater challenge, nor get better education as a student. It is collective immersion.
The Transformative Power of Reading Aloud
One of the greatest yet often overlooked teaching skills is the use of voice. Students listen to their teacher's voice more than any other sound throughout the year. Research shows that a teacher’s voice—its tone, pitch, and rhythm—can reduce stress, enhance attention, and improve retention. When I read aloud, I can channel my own excitement and curiosity, and it changes the room. My greatest teachers’ voices were instruments they played that you could not hear enough of.
“There is nothing, absolutely nothing, quite so satisfying as simply messing about in boats,” said Kenneth Grahame in The Wind in the Willows. Well, actually, there is, because what Grahame was messing around in was not boats—it was story. I have learned this because decades of former students have told me so.
Why do so many educators abandon beautiful, warm, and engaging practices like storytelling for its own sake almost the moment students reach secondary school? They need not, but the pressure they may feel to race through an overstuffed curriculum is real, and it is a pressure educational leaders have a role in alleviating.
Immersion takes time. Teachers everywhere need permission, from leaders, to close the classroom door, abandon the race, and read with students. Great teaching is best reflected in the imaginations of the students. Stories take us there together.
Reading aloud is transformative. It engages reluctant readers, models a love of literature, and builds a shared experience that leads to the greatest conversations in the world. The mark of great teaching is rarely determined by the teacher’s checking off another curricular mandate, or even high test scores, but often when students are still talking about or resuming a lesson even long after they leave the classroom. Two, three and even four decades later, my students still remember stories we read together.
"And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea," or so closes the story of Rebecca. Slow down. Let go. It is a good time of season for a story from far away.
COMMENT! Click on the "Comments" drop-down box below to share a comment.
SHARE! Click on the social media icons below to share this column.