I have been listening to teachers’ stories. A theme of resilience and insistence of life appears –not about compliance and control to follow rules, keep order, give back the right answer, rather messiness and surprise of creativity, voices, ideas and taking chances with exploration and inquiry. We enter another story–an inner reality of joy in our students’ possibilities.
I hear most about moments when something turned around. A student suddenly makes a connection from a school task to real life. An administrator includes authentic not trivial celebrations in the school’s routines that counteract heavy hearts in a turnaround school. A Social Studies department uses a protocol looking at student work that brings them from conflict to appreciation and insights to reach a student and teach better the very next day. A field trip to a college campus gives them a picture of a real place not just some abstract concept to which they are supposed to aspire.
It helps to tell our good stories, not just as anecdotes but with all the heart and guts and glory, with a hero (stories are almost always about heroes in some way), with the details that lead to somewhere different than where the story started.