I have a tiny pill that is completely safe, easy to administer, and you can give it to your students every day. It is absolutely guaranteed to make them attentive listeners, clear thinkers, careful speakers, expressive writers and lovers of books. Would you be willing to try it? I’d ask them to line up and stick out their tongues.
I actually have something that is better than a pill. It is a tried and true instructional method that works for students of all ages and abilities, and is especially effective for students with learning differences.
The method is narration. Narration is retelling. It is not memorization or parroting. Narration includes feelings and reactions that merge the spirit of the teller with the spirit of the author. It is an essay response to a broad, open-ended question, testing what the learner knows, not what he doesn’t know.
The primary purpose of narration is to glean understanding of material the first time it is presented and to make it one’s own.
Charlotte Mason developed this learning technique, like she did all of her methods, by observing students. She did not try to impose practices on them based on the work of some educational theorist. She did not try to teach as she was taught. She observed her students and prepared ways of learning that suited them. Benjamin Bloom, whose Educational Taxonomy we studied and were tested on in college, was not born until a century after the height of Mason’s work, yet she incorporated the Educational Taxonomy in her method of narration.
We use language to make sense of life. Our children are bursting forth with descriptions of events they have witnessed. We need to listen and encourage them to retell. All too soon we will say, “What did you do in school today?” and they will answer, “Nuthin.’” Listen while you can.
Mason teaches us that children’s minds reject “twaddle” or stale, dry texts. Therefore, until approximately the age of 14, she believed that children’s knowledge should come to them through “living books”: books written by the best writers a culture has to offer. These books should make events, people’s lives, and the stories of history live in the imagination of the child. These are not condensed books with watered down vocabulary, void of description, which qualify as twaddle.
Another educator, Neil Postman, says, “Without stories as organizing frameworks we are swamped by the volume of our own experience, adrift in a sea of facts. Merely listing them cannot help us, because without some tale to guide us there is no limit to the list.” That is why I love to read historical fiction. If I were given facts, for example, regarding the history of NYC, I would struggle to remember them. Instead, I am reading Edward Rutherfurd’s book, New York: The Novel, and I am absorbing fascinating details through the story. Stories can serve students just as well in math or science as they learn about the difficulties researchers had to overcome and the talents or hardships that brought them to their place of achievement. They will become champions of these people through stories, not sidebars in a textbook.Why are stories a better avenue for learning than facts? Professor of Education at Gardner-Webb University, Carroll Smith, writes that stories are charged with emotion. Emotion is the cord that binds the reader to a text. For people of all ages the story provides the emotional energy needed to help us attend. Emotion drives attention. This attentiveness or engagement then helps the child in the narrating process.
What do you think of this idea? Next week I’ll share narration “how-tos.”
