Using Stories for Professional Development

35 Tales to Promote Reflection and Discussion in Schools

James Dillon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429536670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This book offers a selection of stories about teaching, learning, and school life that you can use in a variety of PD formats and settings.

Grouped into four categories—students, teachers, administrators, and parents—these tales offer a powerful entry point for thinking and reflecting on your school environment in a new and meaningful way. Each brief tale is presented to spark a 10–15 minute group discussion that will help educators think more deeply about the complex, human problems they confront on a daily basis. Suggested questions and a brief commentary following each tale can be used to explore the issues embedded in the tale and, thereby, empower staff to generate creative responses to them.

Ditch your "sit and get" professional development and "tap into the wisdom of the ages" by using these powerful tales to give educators the gift of time to think and talk about what it really means to educate hearts and minds.

1

Why This Book?

There is a simple answer to the question of “why this book”? Because, it’s a book educators don’t have to read. They can listen to it.

Although reading is at the heart of all learning, most educators would probably admit that finding time to read is a luxury few of them can afford.

Educators have a multitude of demands and responsibilities placed on them. They work long hours beyond their time in the classroom. Consequently, it’s not surprising that their time for reading boils down to a few minutes before they fall asleep at night. (Ironically, professional books are good sleep inducers—I know, I have written three of them.)

To better understand why educators don’t have to read this book, here is a list of what it does not contain:

♦ No program or initiative that promises to solve a problem at school.

♦ No theory to comprehend or defend.

♦ No criticism of policies or practices.

♦ No data to share.

♦ No data to justify what to do or not do.

♦ No proposal for increasing student engagement, participation and achievement.

♦ No research to apply to educational practices.

♦ No strategy to improve your climate, increase test scores, engage the community or inspire teachers.

♦ No stated outcomes or goals listed at the start of each chapter.

♦ No lengthy quotations, no charts or figures, no footnotes or bibliography and only one citation.

Here is what is in this book: stories to hear, think about and discuss with colleagues.

Professional Development from Outside In to the Inside Out

Most professional books are concerned with increasing an educator’s professional knowledge, so they contain most of what is on that list. These books provide content (something outside of the educators) that educators are expected to absorb and ultimately integrate into their practice. The type of professional development reflected in these books offers an outside in approach, i.e. adding to or supplying something that is missing from an educator’s knowledge base or skill repertoire.

Using Stories for Professional Development: 35 Tales to Promote Reflection and Discussion in Schools deliberately chooses not to have those items from that list. Instead, the book removes this content along with the implication that professionals need to absorb something more to get better at their jobs.

For Seinfeld fans, this book could be considered to be about nothing: having no “educational content.” But the benefit of being about nothing removes the distraction of content to consider, thereby, allowing educators to look inward to discover and explore their values, beliefs and assumptions and then to share them with colleagues.

Instead of bringing something outside to the educators and their school environment to improve it, this approach is inside out: bringing what’s inside educators’ hearts and minds out to the light of a professional community to foster its growth.

Necessity of Reflection

This inside out process of professional development requires time and space for reflection.

Without reflection, our experiences tend to replicate themselves, only perpetuating established habits of thinking, talking and acting. Meaningful change, therefore, is dependent upon being able to gain perspective: seeing ourselves in the context of our environment. This is extremely difficult for educators, or anyone, to do.

Which is why the saying that “fish would be the last to discover water” rings true: people are sealed into their subjective experience of the world.

John Dewey recognized this difficulty when he said, “We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience.”

Meaningful reflection, therefore, requires more than just looking at the surface of things; it should provide insight and deepen our thinking. It should help us discover and understand the values and beliefs that underlie our words and actions.

Mental and emotional reflection, like a physical reflection, requires some type of mirror: a way to look outward at ourselves in order to see into ourselves.

All mirrors, however, must be used cautiously. Most people when they unexpectedly see themselves in a mirror are usually taken aback and quickly look away.

For mirrors to be helpful, therefore, they must be gentle and offer a safe way of looking at and seeing who we are.

Seeing Our Scripts

What do we see when we look at ourselves? We see ourselves living out our stories—the ones we write for ourselves.

(This is my way of understanding how we function in the world, formulated from my readings in psychology, sociology, philosophy and my own experiences.)

Beyond the present moment, our lives are essentially stories. What happened yesterday (or even a minute ago) is a re-construction and interpretation of events filtered through our pre-existing values shaped by prior experiences. What will happen in the future is only a projection and prediction based on experiences that have already happened.

This filtering process occurs because it is not possible for us to completely and accurately absorb all of our experiences; there is always too much going on. We need a filter to manage and make sense out of experience. We are, therefore, continually constructing a narrative about what life is and who we are. We write our story and then live it.

This story, or narrative, we create in our minds serves as an internal script that guides what we do and say in response to our experiences. These scripts help us maintain a sense of consistency, order and predictability.

These scripts, however, are works-in-progress, always subject to change. It’s similar to testing a theory or hypothesis to see if it matches the facts. We try out our scripts by interacting with others who have their own scripts.

Learning and growing, therefore, is a process of incorporating new and different experiences into our current script and then expanding and adapting it.

While our scripts are necessary navigation tools, they also can impede our learning for the following reasons:

♦ A script is like a pair of glasses. When we look at the world with glasses, we don’t see our glasses. Similarly, when we perceive the world we don’t see our script, so we think we see an unfiltered, objective reality and not our version of it, shaped by our script.

♦ Our scripts cannot account for the range of experiences we have. We tend to either ignore or resist new information that contradicts our existing script.

♦ Adjusting and adapting our script to account for the new and different information often creates discomfort, uncertainty and confusion.

♦ How much we learn therefore depends upon how we manage this stress of discovering that our script doesn’t account for new and different experiences.

As a result of these problems, we can easily deceive ourselves: we think we know what is really happening when we have a limited understanding of it. This is why we stick to our scripts and think that no other version of reality is possible.

Flipping Our Scripts

Becoming unstuck from our script usually requires a disruptive event or a series of troubling experiences: a death, an illness, a betrayal, a divorce, or any type of failure. These events signal to us that our script needs adjustment; what has gone before cannot account for what just happened. These unexpected and unwanted experiences can subtly or radically change how we view the world and ourselves: our scripts are flipped.

When our script is flipped, we simultaneously discover: that we had a script, what that script was and how incomplete it was. This discovery can be disorienting and stressful, however necessary it might be.

Ask most people about an experience when they learned the most and they will describe a crisis, problem, and/or disruption in their lives—not a time when everything was going as planned. They were stopped in their tracks and couldn’t function as they had in the past—not a good feeling to have. As a result, most of us do not want, nor like, having our scripts flipped.

The irony, however, is that having our script flipped is a much better and healthier alternative than staying stuck in a script. Having our script flipped is an opportunity, albeit in disguise, for learning and growth.

We are caught in this paradox: the experiences that flip our script are a deep source of learning and growth; they are exactly those experiences we desperately seek to avoid.

To learn from these experiences, therefore, we need a safer way to see ourselves, without the disorientation and distress of directly experiencing our scripts being flipped.

Stories: Safe and Gentle Mirrors

Throughout the ages, stories have been the safer way for dealing with this paradox: that we learn the most from the experiences we most want to avoid.

Stories are a gentle mirror. When we vicariously identify with a character whose script is played out and flipped in front of us, we can get a clearer vision of our own script.

Stories allow us to compare and contrast the characters’ scripts with our own. When we see how characters react to having their scripts flipped, we can reflect on what we would do in a similar situation. We gain insight into the problems precipitated by the script that the character was following. Stories help us step safely out of our own scripts to see the possibilities that our scripts might have blinded us from seeing.

Stories prepare us. Stories can warn us of what is to come. Stories can re-assure us.

When the characters in a story survive and grow stronger from confronting their challenges, we can envision ourselves doing the same.

Stories show a way out, a choice, an “out of the box” idea that we might not have imagined until we looked through the eyes of the character in the story.

Most importantly, stories offer hope in moments of doubt and struggle—they can keep us going when it seems like we are stuck and getting nowhere fast.

Problems of the Heart

Although some problems at school have workable solutions, the most important ones involve people living and learning together: the ones dealing with concerns of the human heart. These problems are not so much solved, as much as they must be embraced and lived. This aspect of life in school is often forgotten or ignored in our professional discourse.

As a result, educators rarely get the support they need ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Meet the Author
• Introduction: Connecting the Dots
• 1 Why This Book?
• 2 How to Use This Book
• 3 Student Tales
• 4 Teacher Tales
• 5 Administrator Tales
• 6 Parent Tales