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The Transform your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Join Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles as they seek to inspire higher education faculty to adopt innovative teaching and learning practices.
Story is the most potent form of human expression. I didn't say it's the most important form of human communication, That would be listening. But storytelling is what really, really works. It has a potency to it.
Narrator:This is the Transform Your Teaching podcast. The Transform Your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Hello, and
Ryan:welcome to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. In today's episode, Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles chat with a favorite guest of ours, Doctor. Quentin Schultz, to discuss storytelling as part of our series, Have You Tried?
Rob:Thanks for joining us. So here we are again, Doctor Pyles, and we are meeting with Dr. Quentin Schultze.
Jared:Our good friend.
Rob:Our good friend, guest on our podcast. Yeah. So gracious to us even in the midst of our back. He does. We we're so appreciative of your your ministry, your work, and your willingness to share with us, and we are doing a new series called have you tried?
Rob:And one of those things that we're working on is bringing storytelling not only to the face to face classroom, but, you know, thinking about how can we inspire others in any modality to bring storytelling in, and we thought, we know somebody Yeah. That's done a lot of work in this area. So we're so thankful that you're here with us. Let me just kick it right off with with our first question. So just like I said, you spent a lot of time in your career, helping people become better communicators.
Rob:So from your perspective, why is story such a powerful form of human communication?
Dr. Q:Rob, thanks, and it's a joy to be with you guys again. I'm really honored, and I appreciate your work. I don't wanna spend a lot of time building you guys up right now, but I hope you're getting it from other people too because you're doing wonderful things. I always drop in and see what some of the latest podcasts are with you guys, and I continue to learn even in my seventies as a retired teacher, because I still do teaching all the time in one form or another about story. It is not just really important, it is essential.
Dr. Q:In fact, I'm going to put it this way. Story is the most potent form of human expression. Story is the most potent form of human expression. I didn't say it's the most important form of human communication. That would be listening because listening gets us oriented to reality before we communicate, say anything, text or whatever.
Dr. Q:But storytelling is what really, really works. It has a potency to it. It's interesting that scripture is in the form of story. It's interesting that what brings us to, seduces us really into the media so much of the time, in TV and movies and short form stuff on YouTube and all this story, we seem to be made as storied creatures. And let me just say four things about this from a pedagogical standpoint.
Dr. Q:Number one is story gains attention. Anytime things are wavering in class and I need to get students' attention back again, I say, okay, what's an example or illustration I can use in the form of a story? Attention. The second thing is identification. I think we're all made to identify with other people.
Dr. Q:It starts with kids when you're really young, identifying with your parents, and so on, and then it it gets to the point where in in the Christian faith, let's say, we begin to identify with Jesus and and say, I want to be more like him, and so on. Identification is really, really important, and if students can identify with us as a teacher through the stories that we use, we will gain a lot of impact upon them. Same thing if we identify with students, but that's another topic in a way. Thing is anticipation. What often holds us to something, anything is anticipation.
Dr. Q:You're reading a novel and you want to know how it ends. You're watching a film, you want to know how it ends. There's anticipation. How many times do students come in the classroom with us and they're anticipating where this class is going or what the ending is? I always wanted to create that through the stories I was using, so the students were wondering where this is going go.
Dr. Q:They want to stay with me because story creates anticipation. And the last one is memory. We tend to remember many, many things because they're in the form of a story, not because they're a fact or information, but they're in the form of a story, and I still have this happening. I will meet a former student from twenty or thirty years ago. This just happened.
Dr. Q:I met a student from thirty years ago on campus who was there with a son to look at the campus, and I just happened to run into him around Christmas, he came over to me and he said, Oh, you're Doctor. Schultz? I said, Yes. He said, I'm so and so. I was your student and I did remember him.
Dr. Q:And then he said, Boy, I remember the story that you told about X and it had to do with communication. And he remembered that story. And then I said, Do you remember the point of it? And he said, of course, and he remembered the point of it. Wow.
Dr. Q:So four ways that I think stories work that are just so important for us.
Rob:AIAM. AIAM.
Jared:Attention, identification, anticipation, memory.
Dr. Q:There you go.
Rob:Now if we were really wanting to press him, we'd say, create a story that exemplifies
Jared:AIAM.
Rob:AIAM. Yeah.
Dr. Q:Yeah. In fact, I just used the story. I ended with the story of meeting the student on campus. Man.
Jared:He's he beat you right to it. He did. You didn't even realize it. You got storied. You didn't even realize
Dr. Q:it.
Rob:I couldn't even
Jared:You got storied, man. I love it. So you mentioned media and culture, and you mentioned how movies and everything else, that we see that the same idea of attention, identification, anticipation, and memory in media and culture. How do you think that has kind of shaped we as society learn and remember ideas? Do you see how maybe media and culture has sculpted us in a way that storytelling can help us remember and learn ideas?
Dr. Q:It's interesting, Jared, when you think about it, that most of the successful media forms we talk about modalities and all in education. Let's say media modalities are in story form because the creators know that that's how to get attention and identification and so on, and so these become part of our imagination as as well as part of our our memory, and the imagination part is interesting because we relate A to B. So, we see something in a film or on a TV show, we watch an episode of Seinfeld, and some kind of crazy thing is happening there, and we remember things in our own life that were similarly goofy, and so we're constantly doing this, and we could say, if I really want to stretch this far enough, that whoever controls the stories of a culture controls the culture, the imagination, the meaning, the morality, and so on of a culture. We live, human beings always do at a time of competing stories, And so when we enter, let's say a religion, typically religions are in a story. So if we have the gospel story or the story of scripture overall, the Old and New Testament combined, we enter into that story and it begins to shape our imagination.
Dr. Q:And that's the way the media work. Now, two things real quickly that are so important for education on this. One is with younger people, like my kids, when they were five, six, seven, eight, in that range, they started to use the media as role models. They wanted to be like the people that were in the stories that they would have access to, whether it was a story of a book we were reading or whether it was a TV show. I have a wonderful story I use to get at this point with my students about my son really getting into He Man TV show.
Dr. Q:I mean, he was so into this and I mistakenly bought him a pair of He Man underpants. And he wanted to wear this one pair of He Man underpants. It was really too small for him every day and he would hide them so we wouldn't wash them and he would smell because, oh yeah, it was terrible. And they had Skeletor, the bad guy, he man, the good guy's on the front, you know, in full color and then on the back is Skeletor, the bad guy whose bones. Yeah.
Dr. Q:Little kids, especially boys, are not the cleanest creatures on the Skeletor side. So I could smell him coming when I'd get home and he would come running to me, finally we had to have a talk about him having to wash those occasionally. Then he said to me this, he said, But dad, I have to wear those because when I wear those, I feel like He Man. That's the power of the role model.
Rob:And
Dr. Q:so I use that story in class, and the students get it right away because they can all think of times when they were younger, they have younger brothers or sisters. So the media control role models, and then when you get a little bit older, and so now we're talking about middle school, and then into early high school and all, it works a little bit different, less in terms of role models and more in terms of giving you direction for how to form intimacy and identity in your life. How to form intimacy that is get relationships going and then form your identity, who you want to be. So the media provide resources for this, and we're in competition with this stuff all the time.
Rob:Interesting. It sounds to me that you are basically following a line of development in when we're talking about education here. You're following a line of development of the student and then checking to see what stories or what types of stories would be effective given their particular development, which I would think we can generalize, I think, for the most part, but I think there's probably some nuance to that as well. Have you found that to be the case for your your teaching and and how you use story?
Dr. Q:Yes, exactly. In fact, one of the techniques I talk about in my book on teaching called servant teaching is getting to class early to listen to what the students are talking about. The stories that they're telling each other and what they're talking about in the culture currently, maybe a movie they've seen or something else that they're talking about. I want to know the stories that are part of their imagination to see if I can tap into those and, what level they're at in those stories, how important they are for them.
Jared:So it sounds like your storytelling is there's an element of universality to it, or you told the story of your son. That's almost a timeless story. Maybe after a while, you may have to define who He Man is based on how further away we get from that part. But there's also, it sounds like there's a sense of temporality or relevance to storytelling as well, where you want to keep things universal, but at the same time be cognizant of what's going on around you at the moment for your students.
Dr. Q:There you go. Yeah. And I think that's what Jesus does with the parables too. He's using a a distinctive place and time and things that they were doing, in the culture then, but he's also getting at a universal point, and so, that's the trick, and it means with students, you have to kind of stay with one foot in the current culture that they're in, and then your other foot as a teacher in the universal things that you're teaching or what you hope are universal principles in your teaching.
Jared:I like it.
Rob:Yeah. I wanna continue to kinda dive into the educational aspects a little bit here with you and speak to our listeners. They're k through 12. They're higher ed. They're teaching, and maybe they've never really thought about this before.
Rob:Maybe they use story all the time and they don't realize it. But what would be, like, just the first thing? You gave us those principles of why story is effective. Can you give us principles that would help just engage, bring some out of your servant teaching book, which I know you have there. You've already mentioned one about listening.
Rob:But what's another one that that could really be effective or one of the most effective things that a teacher who has never really given it tons of thought get this out, start using it in their classroom?
Dr. Q:That's the key question, I think, Rob. And here's the way I do it. I have this stuff, this material which I think is important. I vetted it that it's worth teaching. In other words, there are some things in a textbook, let's say, that I think, well, that's really not worth teaching.
Dr. Q:I don't think that's important. I don't think that's as helpful for the students, so I vetted everything, but now what do I do? How do I present this? How do I get into it in a way that will engage students? And so then I think of four different ways related to story.
Dr. Q:The first one is the story of the original discoveries behind whatever it is I'm teaching. So if it's, let's say, I'm teaching about storytelling, how do you tell a story well? I'll go back to Aristotle, who said some fantastic things about story in the form of what they would then call poetry. And I might say, Hey, here's a principle that I use, and it's from this guy called Aristotle who lived in such and such a time. Here's what he said, and then he has the story about why he said this in his time.
Dr. Q:So I'm going to present Aristotle telling that story, and then we're going to talk about it. I may not be as quite explicit there in how I'm pulling that apart the way I am with you right now because I'm talking about the pedagogy behind pedagogy in a sense, but I want to go back and find what are the stories? So there are some great experiments that I rely on, the first time where somebody did research on how you get to the point of, let's say, forgiving someone. Great communication act, forgiveness, And one of the lessons there is that forgiveness is typically something that takes patience and it begins indirect. Somebody So forgives someone else by changing how they act toward them or how they look at them or something without actually saying the words of forgiveness.
Dr. Q:It starts that way, and then I'll use so this is the second one. The first one was the discovery of the original material. Now it's a story of my own discovery of that material in my own life, so I will maybe use a story about how I came to forgive my father after twenty five years for being an abusive alcoholic and creating a terrible situation in my home to the point where I hated him and I hated my mother and so on, and I got to the point, and I'll bring a photograph of me standing over the grave of my father where I'm reading a letter that I wrote to him to forgive him. It took a long time, patience involved there, and it was indirect for a while. I started changing my thinking toward him saying, well, he grew in difficult times and all.
Dr. Q:So the story of our own discovery of the material that we're teaching about. The third is the story of how others have applied whatever it is we're teaching about. So I could talk about my neighbor, or I could talk about my wife, or I could talk, let's say, the story of the He Man Underpants about my son and role models. And so, I'm going through this material now that I've got planned, and I'm thinking, where are the points of connection between these three areas of story? And then the last one, which for me as a Christian educator, is how what I'm teaching connects to God's overall narrative.
Dr. Q:Scripture overall and points of Scripture that are, for my field of communication, communication intensive. So I might ask the students, for example, is it ever good that we cannot communicate, that we have difficulty communicating? And of course, students will always say, No, no, no, that's not good. And I will say, Well, let's talk about the Tower Of Babel and how they were building this great tower into heavens. Were going to become godlike.
Dr. Q:The best we know it was a pyramid like structure, and they're going up and up. They're going get up there and shake hands with God, you know, and say, Hey, dude, how are you doing? We're as good as you are. In other words, as it says in scripture, they were making a name for themselves. And what does God do?
Dr. Q:He confuses their language because by confusing their language, he is retarding the spread of their arrogance. Okay? He is deconstructing their communication in their midst to get them back down to earth, the humus, the soil, and so I might tell a story like that from using scripture. So those are four ways that I always think about how to relate using story, the material that I'm teaching about to the students.
Jared:How do you keep, in the midst of all that, how do you keep your storytelling intentional? Like, do you have guidelines for yourself as far as practically speaking, I want them to be x amount of minutes? I want them to have a central theme or I want a tie back kinda like a Aesop's fable where you have the lesson comes at the end. Do you have a a mental structure that you use when you're constructing these?
Dr. Q:Jared, you know, one thing is the shorter, the better, but it has to be long enough that it's actually a story, and it's not just a point. So you have to have a beginning, middle, and end. There has to be some significance within it, some message that you can talk about. Shorter, the better. Early on, when I started to learn storytelling from Jean, j e a n, Shepard, who wrote the movie A Christmas Story.
Dr. Q:I learned storytelling from him. Christmas Story is about the kid that wants the Red Rider BB rifle.
Jared:Yes. One of my favorite movies. Okay.
Dr. Q:So it's the most popular movie in America now. 50,000,000 people annually see it. Wow. And so if I'm out speaking on some topic and I use something from that movie, it's one of the few things that I can use that most people will be familiar with. Okay?
Dr. Q:Yeah. And he was such a great storyteller. So, but I know I've got to keep it short, and and by the way, early on when I started getting into storytelling, learning it from Jean and then using it in lectures, maybe my wife would be there sometimes if I was speaking at a university or some other group, she would always tell me the story was too long. In fact, I'm editing a piece of video that I shot a couple of days ago, and I showed her what I had edited down to, and she said, these two parts of your these two stories that you tell there are too long. And so and and I the more I thought about it, yeah, it's too long.
Dr. Q:So you you've gotta keep it under control, and you've gotta test it to see whether or not it works with students in terms of the point that you're trying to make. If it doesn't elicit any response from them and they can't come up with a parallel story from their own lives or something, chances are it's not connecting with them anymore. Doing those things, I know that, Jared, that's kind of generic, what I'm saying there, but I guess the way I'd put it, like teaching overall, you gain an instinct for certain things after you tried them and they didn't work, and you refine them and they worked better, and you refine and they worked even better. Often in my notes in classes, I will go back afterwards if students don't grab me right away to talk about different things, and I go back, immediately I make notes on the class, including grading myself on what worked and what didn't work and sometimes eliminating things to not use in the future because I didn't think they worked.
Jared:Something I want to ask, and I feel like you've made it implicit, but I really want to tease it out, is the amount of practice that you spend with these stories. I'm assuming that you don't try a new story out in front of a student body, won't you? For the first time. I assume based on what it is you told me that it takes practice, that you you at least tease it out a little bit before you try it out for the first time. Is that true, or do you like to wing it?
Dr. Q:Yeah. It depends. The if a student brings something up in class that reminds me of a story, which is usually in the form of an example or illustration
Rob:Mhmm.
Dr. Q:Okay, I may jump right into it, but I would say, you know, that reminds me of something that happened, and then I'll start to tell it. I will not tell it well, but I'll try it out a little bit, and then I'll say to the students to engage them and get them into telling stories too, to get the identification flowing both directions. Any of you had similar things happen in your life?
Rob:And
Dr. Q:then they might tell a story. It may be very short. You know, it may be fifteen seconds of what happened, but that's the place to go now. In teaching, where you're going back to teach some of the same material again, and it's important material, but you want to get at it better and better, then I do some practice. I do it in my head, and I encourage people when they're picking up storytelling to practice with friends and family.
Dr. Q:So try something at dinnertime with family or try something out at coffee with friends. Say, you know what happened the other day? And they don't necessarily know this is a story you're going to use as part of your teaching, but then you're going to tell them that, and that's a way of practicing it and see what kind of response you get.
Jared:All right. So put on your future goggles and tell me, with education and communication, how do you see storytelling continue to shape the way we teach and learn? And if you want to, throw some generative AI slash chat GPT into your answer if you want to. I'm not saying put this question in the chat GPT. What I'm saying is pepper it in there in some capacity.
Dr. Q:Well, let me stop you right there, though, Jared, because you said something very interesting. You're not saying necessarily put it in the chat, GPT or or Gemini or whatever, but here's the thing. Each time we use AI is a story. Do you know what happened when I in fact, in the about four years ago when AI was really starting to take off, one of my colleagues at university would periodically put my name in and ask it for a bio or something about me, and then it would tell my story, and then he would send that to me. It would always have certain things wrong that were hilariously wrong.
Dr. Q:It would have me at the wrong university or grew up in a different place or whatever. It was just funny, funny. Had me writing books that I never even heard of. So we had some great time with that, and so I think bringing AI into the classroom is one way of introducing story. And if I were teaching full time right now, I think in many of my courses, I would require the students as part of their research for any type of paper or project they're working on to include the results from AI, and those would have to be turned in along with what their final was because that's part of the story about what's going on and the story of their research that I can get a better angle on their research that way than if they just go to the library and start making notes on something or they go to a research database and make notes.
Dr. Q:So, but in general, my answer on this is that story is becoming increasingly important pedagogically because it is one of the few ways to really engage each other in culture today. The more traditional types of lectures, the transfer of information from A to B, from teacher to student, those are on rough times today, and the overall environment that students live in, once they get to the point where they can have a personal device, you know, as we call it, they're in this messaging chaos, bits and pieces of stuff flowing around, and the only thing that can begin to put it together and reduce the entropy is some type of story because it's very hard to get students thinking in terms of something like an outline right away. That's just not where they're at. So I think it's going to become increasingly important, and also I think we're competing as teachers more directly now with so many different forms of media that are in story.
Jared:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Q:You know, it's just when I analyze podcasts now in terms of the popular ones and why they're popular, they're bringing in guests to tell their stories and to share their stories. That's that's all they're doing. Yep. They have the advantage of bringing in people that are well known. You know?
Dr. Q:You don't get Steven Spielberg here. You get me.
Jared:Hey. Well, you never know. We might
Rob:I don't have that kind of money. Yeah.
Jared:Well, we thank you so much for your time, doctor Q. It's always a pleasure to have you on. We appreciate your time as always.
Dr. Q:Hey, thanks guys. It's always great.
Ryan:Thanks for listening to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. If you have any questions or follow-up on our conversation with Doctor. Schulz, feel free to send us an email at ctlpodcast@cedarville.edu, or you can send us a message on LinkedIn. Finally, don't forget to check out our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog. Thanks for listening.