140 ¦ Making the input stick through narrative and story

I'm named Bridger and this is the Motivated Classroom. Hello again, Fulcher Arash, welcome back to the Motivated Classroom podcast. Well, that previous episode generated a lot of discussion, didn't it? Episode 138 about is input alone enough. There were a lot of emails and comments. Some really fascinating things it was just so lovely here and so many people talk about. Yes, we need so much more compelling, comfortable input. But then also some people agree and saying, I think maybe we went too far in that direction and just completely ignored the value of any kind of interaction or any kind of low-stakes, safe, interactive output piece, whether that's writing, on a mini-wipeboard or interacting in pairs. Again, all that thing about building a sense of competence and confidence and language development, being able to have a goal at it, like that's always my goal. But input being the absolute bedrock and foundation, we need loads and loads of interesting input. Everyone is agreeing with that now, but I think we was also just so interesting to see that we can't be kind of demonizing output or interaction in a busy classroom environment with young people and teenagers and children that's part of being a social human being. So, just some amazing stuff, but one of the biggest questions I got was, I really get it. We need laws of interesting, really fascinating, compelling input to drive the acquisitions of the students want to pay attention. But how do we do that? So, I'm going to try and have a little goal at answering that question today. But of course, this is the motivated classroom podcast, so we need some Irish. I think I gave this word about five years ago, right at the beginning of the podcast, but it's really necessary for today, and that is the word "scale", meaning "story". In Irish, we often use the phrase "ange scale", meaning any story, kind of like an Irish from people say, "any crack", which does not mean you're asking for crack cocaine. It does not mean you're asking for drugs. In Ireland, if you say, "any crack", it means how are things? How are you? How's it going? I often used in the West of Ireland to say, "How are you?" Any crack, any scale, "ange scale" means any story, so we use that a lot, and that shows you how story is at the foundation of what it is to be Irish, really. We are storytellers, we've always done this, but it's also why we talk so much. Irish people are known for talking lords and lords, and my wife being English will tell you that I never shut up, and you probably think that too. But the word "scale" is part of our culture and storytelling, and again, this comes back to the more you talk to people, then the more they'll have to talk about. Because we are always telling stories and they're passed on, then we've got lots to talk about. We've had lords of inputs, so now we're able to output, and that's all linked, of course, to what we're going to look at today. Before we go any further, just again, I want to start with a girl, Mila Mahogav, thank you so much. Quite a few people joined the Patreon last week after that episode, so thank you. It's just patreon.com, look for the motivated classroom, early in printer, and lots of people on my bite me a coffee page, again, girl, Mila Mahogav, thank you so much. You are keeping the lights on, and here I am in the studio doing another episode. So let's get straight into this whole thing about how do we make the input compelling? Well, basically, it comes down to narrative and story. Input becomes compelling when there is a narrative arc to that input. If we are just teaching and giving input that is de-contextualized sentences and gapfills where the input we're giving has no overarching narrative or no underlying story to us, no content to bind it all together, then people will of course zone out. You think about the best marketing campaigns in the world. They're all built around a story. Why? Because it keeps your attention. You want to know what happens next, you want to know about the characters, the places, the feelings where they're going, what's going to happen, so you stay engaged. That is the same in the language classroom. Now, there are loads of ways to bring narrative and story into the classroom, and I would really urge you to go back and listen to episode 109 on story telling as part of pedagogy. That's episode 109, and I talked just before that to Beniko Mason and Alisa Yel, and then after that to Cecille Lene about using story listening. So in the language classroom, we have loads of ways to do this. You can use a picture and create a narrative about that picture that's often called picture talk. You can use a little movie or a movie clip co-creating a narrative with your students, what's the name of the character, where they're going, what to do yesterday, what's their brothers and sisters called and you build this whole narrative. You can use special person interviews, you're getting a narrative from the person and you're talking about them and their lives. You can use novels, I've talked about them loads on the podcast, little graded C.I. novels, they've got a narrative behind them, of course, their story, their book. You can use co-created stories like silly funny stories, like TPRS stories to co-create a narrative together with your class. You can build an invisible character that's creating a narrative around the character. So there are so many different ways, but the key is there's always a narrative and a story. It's not just some, here's the grammar, here's the decontextualized language, here's the list of things in your room, let's learn them off and do some exercises. There's no narrative there, there's no content, there's nothing holding it together. And Jonathan McBride, who is on, he spoke about this a lot, he of course came here to observe me for a few weeks, he observed Adriane Ramirez and he observed Tina Abor and her colleagues in Germany. And that was the first thing he said, he said, the common feature is that you all have some kind of underlying narrative that binds the class, the kids of something to talk about. They've got some kind of content or question or narrative or some kind of journey to talk about in every unit. Now, I'm not saying that every single individual moment in the class must be around this unifying narrative, but if you think about your, you've got an academic year and that's typically broken up into units, so you might have four or five units. And they're broken up into lesson plans and schemes of work and you have your individual lesson each day. You can have a narrative or a story that's just kind of on its own and it's just done for a couple of weeks, which is your TPRS co-created narrative. It can be in between two units or alongside a unit, maybe it's got some vocabulary related to what your unit is, which isn't really the point of a story. The story is really to just give you that wide net of inputs so you acquire what you acquire. But that's just one way to do it if you have to. Then of course, you've got story listening. These could be individual short stories for 10 to 15 minutes on maybe every Friday or you're telling a story, drawing it on the board, but you've got that narrative. But then you might have a larger underlying narrative throughout the whole unit. So maybe your whole unit is on difficult decisions. And how do we overcome obstacles and challenges? And maybe you read a little book like Maria Cano from Adriano Ramirez about an amazing revolutionary feminist who changed the world and who was really wanting to go out there and change the way things were for women in Colombia at the time and went and spoke to people and became educated. That's the narrative that brings the whole unit together. And then I might talk about times that I had to come over obstacles. We might do a picture talk about someone who had to overcome some typical challenges. We might do a silly little movie talk about an animal who couldn't overcome this particular obstacle, but it's all around this kind of core concept of overcoming adversity, overcoming challenges. Maybe we're looking at the concepts of perspective and context, but that's what holds it all together. It's not, we're looking at the present tense. We're looking at the items in the house. There's no narrative to this. Even if you've told you must do, I don't know, sports, like you have to do a unit on sports. OK, how can we build a narrative or some kind of story around sports that goes throughout my unit? Is it a book on sports? No, I couldn't find one that would work. OK, so maybe we'll have five or six different stories about individual athletes and their careers and what they did and let's compare them and talk about who's was better and who made better decisions. But that's how they get the input and that's how you keep it compelling. That's how you keep the students engaged, it's through this narrative, through the story, through the underlying bits and the concepts that hold it all together. Now, for those of you who are teaching with the traditional textbook and it's broken up into units by vocab, like clothes and then going out and then friends and then pastimes, look at that and think, OK, I'm going to just change one unit. Let's look at the unit on fashion and clothing. How can I change this and make some kind of story or narrative out of it? And this is where AI can be kind of useful and helpful. Before I go further with AI, I know lots of people use it a lot and I do use it for image creation that's going to help in my classroom, for helping me with kind of bringing together some story and narrative ideas just like I'm about to explain. But I try not to just use it for any old whim or thing. It's quite bad for the environment, it uses a lot of resources and I'm kind of worried about just giving it too much information and too many things. So hold my hands up and say, yes, I absolutely use it for certain tasks, but I try not to use it for everything. But I do think this is useful. It's just a few messages back and forth. I might say, as I've said, I've got a unit on clothing, but I want to have an underlying narrative. How could we make this funny and interesting for 14-year-olds living in, let's say, the north of Canada and they've been studying Spanish for one year, their level is beginner, low-intermediate, how could we make some kind of narrative? And it'll give you some ideas. It'll give you some ideas. It might give you four or five little silly stories. You could compare. It might give you an overarching narrative from beginning to end about looking at different things, but it'll it starts the idea generation and then you can go back and forth. Oh, I like that. Don't really like that. This one's a good idea. Let's build a text on that or let's build a story on that. So in the past, when we just had these textbooks and everything else was just kind of down to us to create and it felt really overwhelming. With AI now, it does give us that power to create some good resources very quickly and to create some texts and stories that we can compare. But be up front with your kids and explain, I used AI to create these stories. What do you think? Which one is best? Like be up front and show your students how you use it and how you think a responsible use of it is. I think that that's that's something we can learn from. But the key comes back to this narrative and story. Everything I do has got that. I've got that in mind. And when I see that drop is when I'm getting close to the end of unit assessments because I start to have them to prepare them for the formatting and how they're going to answer questions and even if the assessment is based on the narrative and even if it's based on telling a story, I still have to talk to them about the exam technique and that's where I can see the motivation drain that I'm taking away the autonomy and taking away the relatedness. So again, the tip would be if you've any assessments, you can just scratch off and you don't have to do them, do that. So you've got more time for story and narrative in your classroom. It does feel a bit overwhelming to flip and think about narrative and story at the center of every unit. I would say just start small, start with one unit, one thing and see what happens. After that, have a look and see, can you find a CI or graded reader that you like that kind of fits a little bit with it, read it, decide if you think it's good enough or just start to build some stories either on your own or with the use of other teachers or with AI to kind of build some narrative and story to begin with. But it all comes back to this underlying narrative. Students, humans, everybody pays attention to a story. Everyone wants to know what happens next. Everyone wants to know about the feelings and there is loads of research out there on the power of storytelling and actually there's more and more research coming out trying to bring storytelling into mainstream education now into the science classroom, the geography classroom because they know this is how people learn best is when there's a story or a narrative. The best speeches in the world all have a story and a narrative. We pay attention to it. So think about that in your class. How can you bring that in? And if you're unsure about where to start, start with just one unit, look at the end of term or the end of unit assessment. How can I work that backwards and create a story out of the content that's needed rather than these lists of vocabulary and these worksheets? Now one other thing that's really interesting with story is it also taps into something in memory called episodic memory. So this is when you remember things that kind of happened to you or the emotional engagement you had, you really remember them and there's much more strength to that memory. So not only is storytelling great from pedagogy but from a neuroscience perspective as well, we know that when there's an emotional engagement there and when you've got that episodic memory, that really helps us to remember things and remember the words. And I've had this with story listening. I've done one story listen where we mentioned some random piece of vocabulary because it was part of the story. I always think of the story of the hairy toll. And then like six months later, someone will use the word toll or hairy in something they've used and like some kind of story they've told or a picture they've done or a writing and we haven't looked at those words in like six months but they remembered it because it was part of the story and Cecil Benico Alise all talked loads about this when they were on the podcast. Now I mentioned that there was loads of research and there really is so much research out there. I love Hool Roberts book and when he talks about this idea of behind every piece of content in the school, we have the four P's and I've mentioned this before and those four P's being people, problems, places and then of course possibilities. So if you think about any piece of your content, we'll have that behind it. But even just a really recent study which just gives so much more weight to this. So this was a 2026 study by Kane et al and it basically provides really strong evidence for storytelling in early language education but in language education in general. So basically they used a storytelling intervention and it was tested through randomized control trials with preschool children in very low income settings in South Africa. So randomized control trials are incredibly rare to get in education. They're very hard to do but they are the gold standard of research. They're the really robust research findings is when you have a randomized control trial. And in this study they found positive effects and vocabulary taught in the program and on broader development outcomes which show that narrative based teaching can support both language and literacy even in highly disadvantaged contexts. Now of course research with older students has very similar patterns. Studies consistently show that employing storytelling in the language classroom will harness their innate creativity imagination while it's also building confidence in the use of the language. So Anderson and Chong for example in 2011 and their paper and also Snowden is Belenal there's many studies talking about increasing oral competency through active listening skills because of the story. So essentially because it's a story they listen more attentively and therefore that helps their speaking. And in my own research of course I found exactly the same thing when the teacher brought in co-created stories to the classroom the students paid way more attention. They could engage more they understood more they felt better about it. They felt like they could understand more they felt they could retell the story. They felt more connected all because suddenly there was a narrative in the class that pulled it together. And not only that but it really raised their positive emotions and these were kids aged 17 18 some of them who had failed French many times but because there was a story in a narrative in the class they suddenly felt like oh this is fun I can do that I can follow the story I can remember it. It just makes the input compelling. So there you go or rather sharp but sweet episode this time round. Thank you so much I hope that that kind of addresses some of the questions that came up I've got some brilliant interviews coming up with some amazing people you don't want to miss. So thank you so much Karamila Mahgiv thank you for being here. If you want to support the podcast go ahead and look me up on patreon look up the motivated classroom or on buy me a coffee you can just look up Liam Printer and if you felt like you'd buy me a cappuccino or a flat white to say thank you for all these episodes what are we on 139 episodes then yeah you can do the buy me a coffee and as I always say if you're not in a financial position to do that then it's no problem at all. Keep listening for free that's the whole point of this podcast share and tell others about it and again we finished with our Irish for today which of course was ANG scale meaning any news any story like we say to each other in Ireland all the time ANG scale and which scale I got do any any story any story there so that's what we use and that is the power of story. Karamila Mahgiv I'll get to slow on a while. The motivated classroom podcast is an original production by Liam Printer. I'm @liamprinter on Twitter and my YouTube channel is Liam Printer the motivated classroom. Full podcast notes with links to resources are available on my website Liamprinter.com. For more find and follow the motivated classroom podcast on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Graphics and music are provided by Paul Mahan intro clips are thanks to the wonderful multilingual staff at the International School of Losan.