Narrative Inquiry 16:1 (2006), 220–228.issn 1387–6740 / e-issn 1569–9935 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

Living storiesDesigning story-based educational experiences

Roger Schank and Tammy BermanSocratic Arts

Knowledge is composed of stories — primarily the stories we experience, and much less the stories we are told. We have difficulty remembering what others tell us, but schools are designed to teach by telling. Story Centered Curricula place learners in stories that mirror the real life world of working professionals, enabling them to learn through experience, and to remember the stories they have lived. (Stories, Learning, Curriculum, Knowledge, Schools, Story-Centered Curriculum)

Roger Schank has written many times in the past about how all knowledge is com-prised of stories, and about how curious it is that we are not capable of remembering most of what anyone else tells us (e.g., Schank, 1995; 1995; 1999). It is rare that we learn from others’ stories, but stories play a key role in our day to day conversation. Why do we tell stories if others will not remember them? The answer is that we like to hear ourselves talk, and actually, we learn from hearing ourselves talk. So we (pretend to) listen to others to get them to listen to us. We are not consciously pretending, but we also are not really gaining much from what we hear.

One wonders why we don’t realize that no one really is listening to us. Except that in the end, it doesn’t matter if the listener is really listening or remembering what has been said. If people like talking, let them talk. If sometimes you can resonate to a story that someone else tells you and become in some way different because of this experi-ence, well that’s nice to know. It gives us hope that not all of our stories will fall on deaf ears. But really gaining from someone else’s story is the exception, not the rule. This is because there are so many conditions required of the story we are hearing to make it memorable, as is explained in Roger’s previous work, e.g., it has to relate to some-thing we know and care about, it has to be surprising in some way or change what we thought before in some way, etc.

Our knowledge base is composed of our own stories. It really doesn’t matter that much if others profit from hearing our stories. We profit from telling them because

Requests for further information should be directed to Roger Schank at Socratic Arts. E-mail: roger@socraticarts.com

Living stories 221

we solidify what we know. Each time we tell stories, we teach ourselves the point of the stories. The more stories we experience that share the same point, the more we can glean a larger lesson about the point itself, apart from the specific memories that illustrate it. In this way, when we tell stories, we create for ourselves lessons about our own views.

Do we ever learn from others’ stories? Yes. We profit from others’ stories when they are told “just in time” — at a moment when we are ready to compare them to the stories that define us, to perhaps become more sophisticated about what we know. When you deeply care about what is being said, you can ponder a story you have heard and make it your own. Unfortunately, that just doesn’t happen very much of the time.

So, the key point is, in order to comprehend, learn from, and remember what you hear, you have to already think something about what you are being told, you have to care about it, and it has to cause you to revisit what you thought you knew, and modify your thought. But then along comes school…

Stories in school

In school you are supposed to comprehend and learn from the stories that are being told to you. You are supposed to know them and talk about them and write about them. But, what if you just don’t care? What if you don’t have stories of your own to relate them to? What if they aren’t being told “just in time” to help with anything you care about doing?

In school people talk and no one listens, as is normative in everyday listening. But when it comes to the school context everyone gets upset about it. The talker (otherwise known as the teacher) gets upset that his listeners (otherwise known as students) are not listening. Parents and administrators (and these days, politicians) get upset about the bad test scores that result from this lack of attention to what is being said. Children don’t learn and people are amazed that children don’t learn. The reason is simple: they don’t hear what you are saying to them.

The amazing thing is that these people actually expect that students will learn from a lecturer who drones on and on about the Smoot-Hawley tariff (as Ferris Buel-ler’s teacher did in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Movie makers have been making fun of the nonsense that passes itself off as teaching for a long time. Monty Python did a skit in The Meaning of Life where the teacher has sex in front of the class as part of a sex ed course and the students aren’t even paying attention to that.

Wait. Now that was Roger’s memory — and did you notice what he did? He re-membered something. Ah, but it was something he saw, something he identified with, something he found funny (because it was surprising in comparison to what he knew and expected) — something that was so well done that it seemed to him like he had actually experienced it. Why do we remember movies and neat stuff that happens in them when we fail to remember what teachers and other speakers tell us?

This is worth thinking about.

222 Roger Schank and Tammy Berman

People remember stories that are well told, and that are centered on ideas the listeners either know well or want to know well. People remember experiences they have been a part of. And, a good story teller makes listeners become part of an experience. They make you feel that you are there. Schools, for the most part, do nothing of the sort.

This is why we have been on a campaign for the last few years to simply eliminate courses, classes, and lectures from school. No one remembers what takes place in a classroom unless something funny or scary happens or they are flirting with an attrac-tive classmate or trying to avoid a frightening bully. People remember what they feel (and care about), and usually in a classroom all they feel is that the clock is moving very slowly, and they care when the class will be over so they can join life again. In life they pursue the goals they care about, like making friends and finding a mate.

Story-centered curricula for schools

As you may imagine, the world of schooling is not exactly beating down the door to eliminate the nonsense they have been selling all these years. Telling the schools to stop telling students stuff is a waste of time because nobody can learn by being told — not even those running schools. (This is a paraphrase of Dewey, by the way.) In any case the schools don’t want to change. They are sure that telling kids about algebra and Dickens and the Entente Cordial will be of great import — at least in raising test scores — which is all anyone seems to care about. The fact that this isn’t working in any way doesn’t seem to bother anyone very much.

But it bothers us. People learn by telling stories not listening to them. And they create stories to tell from their own experiences. So, the job of school would be….?

While we may forget what we are told we rarely forget what we ourselves have done. We like to tell stories about what we have done. The more important we believe these stories to be, the more we tell them and the more they begin to define who we are. We are our favorite stories. They define our views. To put it another way, we never forget the experiences that have had a real impact on us and we like to talk about them.

This tells you all you need to know about what education should be (and what it is outside of school). Natural education is simply a combination of the experiences that we have had that made us reflect on them, talk about them, and become wiser because of them.

This point of view caused us to redefine the notion of curriculum at Carnegie Mellon’s West Coast campus. Curiously, we got a chance to implement an experience-based curriculum there, something Roger has officially named a story-centered cur-riculum (SCC).

A curriculum should be seen as an elaborate story — not a story to be told, but a story to be lived. The curricula at CMU-West were master’s degree programs in com-puter science. The story we created for each degree program lasted an entire year and reflected the faculty’s view of what a professional in a related field might experience in an idealized world. “Idealized world” in an educational context means, things go

Living stories 223

wrong in just the right way to teach learners important lessons in a timely fashion, preparing them for the next more complex experience.

In a story-centered curriculum a student plays one or more roles that are like a role someone in real life plays, which requires such a person to practice a targeted skill-set. For example, a business consultant has typical things they must do when pro-posing work to a client (research, analysis, presentation preparation); a hospital chief of staff has classes of problems he or she must contend with in certain ways (find opti-mally safe and efficient ways to move patients through the care and recovery process). Because the curriculum is intended to teach the student how to do various things, the roles are ones that the graduate of such a program might actually do in real life work or might actually need to know about (possibly because he is likely to manage or work with someone who performs that role).

If you want to create an effective SCC, you need to start by thinking about what skills your students are preparing to do, who uses that set of skills in real life, when they use them, and why. Answering the question of who uses them will tell you the role your students should play. Figuring out when they use the set of skills should elicit the kinds of stories or situations in which you want your students to live. Why they use the skills provides the goal that you use to cause your students to want to practice the target skill set. They will use the skills to solve the same kinds of problems that real world practitioners solve.

In SCCs, teachers act as Socratic mentors to provide just-in-time guidance to the students, and to tell the kinds of stories from which students learn. They tell students what the students want to know or guide them in figuring it out. They do not tell stu-dents whatever they, the mentors, want to tell them.

The tasks the students do to achieve the goal in the situation come from the real-life situations that people in that role might be called upon to deal with. When we build SCCs, we talk to experts to learn about their experiences in the real world and we turn those stories into stories in which students play the roles being discussed. In other words, our students get to live the story instead of hearing about it, which is typical in schools. The story provides for students a context for what they are learning, a real world purpose, and motivation to learn it.

Of course not everyone will be motivated to play any and every role. If the set up for the story is gripping enough, it may be possible to convince a student to be inter-ested if he or she wasn’t initially. However, it is best to create enough stories that stu-dents can play the roles they think they might actually want to play in real life. This is very easy when it comes to advanced degrees and corporate training, and a little more complicated when it comes to lower levels of school. We simply need lots and lots of SCCs to illustrate for students the many career choices they have.

The work products students produce in SCCs also mirror real life. SCCs, like real life work situations, require real deliverables. In SCCs, we ask students to actively par-ticipate in the story and see what happens. They are not learning history but living inside a well-constructed fictional world. Thus they write reports, or build things, or perform some sort of analysis. They make presentations, try to convince clients of the benefits of a plan they have created, and so on. To help students learn to perform the

224 Roger Schank and Tammy Berman

required skills along the way, they are pointed to helpful resources and are assigned mentors who can help them on an as-needed basis. Unlike school, students in an SCC are given a complex project to accomplish prior to learning how to do it. The learning happens along the way, when the students realize they have the need to know.

A change of mindset

Use of an SCC requires one to abandon the idea that education means providing courses to students. Once one thinks in terms of courses, it is often difficult to get into a different mindset. When will the students learn algebra? What about the fundamen-tal theories they need to know in order to start out in a field? How can they not know history?

The answer to all of these kinds of questions relies on the notion of story. Where does algebra fit into the story? If it never does — if you really never have to know alge-bra in order to perform in the way an expert would perform in the field being learned, then maybe algebra needs to be abandoned as something students should be taught. If the fundamental theories really are so fundamental, then they should be needed in certain points in the story. You can, as a designer, force the point and make them needed. But, as with movies, the students can smell a rat. They know if something makes no sense in the story because they have a good sense of what the story should be. So, put your precious favorites in the story at your own risk. Students will know if they really belong there.

The SCC will work in any complex learning environment as long as there are men-tors available and realistic roles to learn. A great deal of work is required to build a realistic environment for learning. This environment can be constructed to live on the web so that it can be accessed and used either a classroom or on-line. In either case, it is often best to have students work in teams, since that format facilitates discussion, reflection, and mirrors much of real world work situations. Mentoring and the succes-sive evaluation of work products that are the result of activities are the sine qua non of the SCC.

Note that in this model, teachers may or may not be the students’ mentors, de-pending on whether they are experts in the skills and roles being practiced. Teachers can simply serve as liaisons to information and mentors can be information resources and evaluators of work products. It is most efficient if teachers can serve both roles, but it is not required.

Example SCC stories

To design good SCCs, we aim to put students in situations that require them to per-form tasks successfully, using the processes and end products that look like those of an expert in that role and that field of practice. Finding the real-world task that illustrates mastery of the target skill and knowledge set, is not simple, but neither is it impossible.

Living stories 225

Once you find it, you know the basis of the story that is the backbone of the SCC you will build.

Typically the stories we look for are ones about mistakes — gross errors that ex-perts made in attempting to perform the target skills and use the target knowledge in a difficult context. These are experiences experts learned from and would never make again. We talk to experts to find these kinds of real world stories, and use the set up and context of those stories as the model for the SCC learning- environment.

Below are some of the stories that we have developed in various SCCs we have built. They will give the flavor of what is meant by story in this context and what it means to live in a story.

Carnegie Mellon University uses web-based Story Centered Curricula for many master’s degree programs, including one in Software Engineering. The story, which all the students work on for the year, for the software engineering program is as follows:

The Vice President of Engineering for ND Systems Solutions has been working with a team of software engineers on a new product called, The Process Enactment Tool, and they successfully released the first version of the product. For the next re-lease, this VP, along with the Executive VP of the Software Engineering Division and the VP of Marketing, determined that a number of new features need to be added.

The VP Engineering provides students with a number of documents that detail the requirements of the next release of the Process Enactment Tool, such as:

– Business case and vision– User requirements document for version 1– Software requirements specifications for version 1– Configuration management plan for version 1– Release 2 requirements– Etc…

He then requests that the students develop the new version, starting by reading through the documentation, and developing a set of questions they need answered to begin their work. That becomes the students’ first task. Other representative tasks include:

– Component Design – Component Implementation – Requirements Engineering – Architecture– Construction

This approach works for business as well in courses shorter than a full year. Roger’s company, Socratic Arts, was asked to design a forty hour course for Deloitte Consult-ing for new Human Capital Analysts (which means people who consult in HR) who had just graduated college and were beginning their careers as consultants. Here is the story and some of the work that story entails:

Jackie Kane, VP of Human Resources at The Clorox Company sought Deloitte’s help in finding opportunities for growth, cost reduction, and innovation within the HR function at Clorox. She and two Deloitte partners identified some specific candi-

226 Roger Schank and Tammy Berman

date areas to transform in order to achieve those goals. Now Deloitte needed to study those areas more closely to propose changes that would result in the desired effects. In addition, they had to keep in mind that past attempts at change had failed due to lack of employee support, so their recommended solutions would need to include plans for ensuring sufficient support. Jackie was also clear that recommendations would need to align with Clorox’s corporate strategy and make sense from a business perspective.

The partners had to set up a meeting with Jackie in one week (from the start of the course), at which time they needed to present and discuss Deloitte’s recommendations for achieving Jackie’s goals. The partners asked the participants to do the necessary analyses to develop recommendations, and create a presentation for that meeting, in which they would tell a compelling story about why and how their recommendations would have a positive impact at Clorox in all the areas identified.

Some representative tasks included:

– Create a work plan for the team to get the job done– Create a storyboard for the presentation – Research the industry, client, and target areas for improvement– Analyze data from found research– Conduct a status meeting– Conduct a client interview– Rehearse presentation– Give presentation to a panel of partners who serve as judges

We have also used the story centered approach for the International Standards Orga-nization which works with developing countries to help standards workers undertake a rigorous assessment of their countries’ standardization priorities, to ensure that their countries’ limited resources are allocated for optimal impact.

Set within the context of Southistan, a fictional developing country, participants assume the role of the newly hired Assistant to the Director of Standards Development. Guided by their fictional supervisor, participants must overcome their department’s historically bureaucratic, reactive approach to standardization. Southistan’s Director of Standards Development would like the Bureau to take a more proactive approach in order to cultivate the participation of as many of the country’s major stakeholders as possible. The Bureau’s resources are limited, and it can’t afford to establish standards that are not based on need, or that are based on the needs of only a small handful of stakeholders. To this end:

– Participants must first reach out to Southistan’s stakeholders, in both economic sectors, and non-economic sectors such as public health, to gather data on South-istan’s priorities (e.g., standardization of specific medical devices, participation in the international leather market).

– They must then determine which international standards would help Southistan achieve these priorities, and therefore be worth pursuing.

Living stories 227

– Using the information they’ve gathered, participants must then put together a multi-year business plan for Southistan, which will communicate Southistan’s pri-orities and resource allocation for standardization.

Along the way, participants are faced with many of the challenges they will likely en-counter in the real world, such as reaching out to reluctant stakeholders, overcoming bureaucratic red tape, and negotiating compromises between (very vocal) stakehold-ers with conflicting priorities.

The SCC approach works in the classroom as well as in on line situations. Trump University offers on line courses in business using the SCC model. One such course is called: Think Like an Entrepreneur: Learn How to Think Critically about the Opportuni-ties and Risks of a New Business. This course was designed for budding entrepreneurs who want to develop strong and convincing business plans for their business ideas. In the course, participants critique a business plan from the perspective of a venture capitalist.

Assuming the role of an analyst for Cheslow Investments, participants carefully critique the key components of a business plan submitted to their firm for funding. The business plan, closely based upon that of a real start-up company, Surfparks, LLC, proposes a plan for developing a number of surf parks across the United States. Par-ticipants conduct their critique by thinking about questions such as “Are there enough surfers to support the numbers put forward in the plan?” “Does the market research convince me that non-surfers will likely be interested in Surfparks offerings and pay the prices set forth in the plan?” “Am I convinced that potential customers be likely to patronize Surfparks over other water parks?” Following is a list of the key areas of the plan participants analyze:

– Market analysis– Pricing strategy– Selling strategy– Advertising and promotions strategy– Sales and net income forecast– Anticipated start-up costs– Expansion plan

After conducting their analysis, participants assess the plan’s overall viability, and rec-ommend whether their fictional firm should invest in the plan, carefully justifying their recommendation.

Conclusion

The premise of the SCC is that it is used to prepare students for a world in which they expect to live by having them live in a simulation of that world while in school. Masters students are training for a profession, so simulating the life of the professional role they are training to be makes a great deal of sense. Business people are training for real roles

228 Roger Schank and Tammy Berman

they will have to play. The fact that the story centered approach has not been used in kindergarten through twelfth grade educational programs speaks more to the lack of attention paid to them by those who design such programs than it does to the need for a radical shift in perspective as to the role of experience in education. Education, real education that is, has always been about learning from experience and creating one’s own perspective from that experience. This is what stories are all about really, the gathering of experiences in a way that makes sense to the teller and the listener. We must live stories if we are to learn from them.

References

Schank, R.C., & Abelson, R.P. (1995). Knowledge and memory: The real story. In R.S. Wyer (Ed.), Knowledge and memory: The real story (pp. 1–85). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Schank, R. (1995). Tell me a story: Narrative and intelligence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Uni-versity Press.

Schank, R.C. (1999). Dynamic memory revisited. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.