3/4/2024

How Personal Stories Drive Student and Educator Success

How can stories drive student and educator success in the classrooms?

In Season 2, Episode 4 of the All For Literacy podcast, host Dr. Liz Brooke has a compassionate discussion with Dr. Gretchen Generett about the importance of understanding the lived experiences of students and educators and how these stories influence actions and growth.

Generett currently serves as dean, professor, and the Noble J. Dick Endowed Chair of Community Outreach at the School of Education at Duquesne University. She is also the co-author of Five Practices for Equity-Focused School Leadership. This episode covers thoughtful and research-backed insight into how educators can create truly equitable systems, understand education as a human system, and foster meaningful learning and relationships while considering diverse histories and lived experiences.

Generett says understanding each other’s stories and learning to tell the right stories can help drive student and educator success in the classroom and beyond. “...Embedded within stories is the unique opportunity to reclaim and reimagine how things might be if we can use stories as the beginning of our own self-reflection and growth and as a way to listen to and lean into the development of others,” Generett says.

The episode highlights the two sides of stories—personal histories and the stories each student and teacher hears consistently. Taking the time to understand the personal stories of others while also remaining cognizant of the stories often told in classrooms and districts can lead to greater student and educator success.

Understanding Each Other’s Stories to Foster a Productive Learning Environment

Taking the time to understand a story outside of one’s own—whether that be of a student, teacher, family, colleague, or community—can often lead to great benefits for all parties. Generett uses stories to refer to the histories and experiences that shape people’s and community’s actions, thoughts, and feelings.

Every student and educator is going to have a different story to tell. Everyone in a school district, school, or even classroom will have differing experiences that affect their relationship with learning. Personal experiences, familial experiences, and even where certain identities are situated in relation to local, domestic, and international history can all play into a person’s relationship with education.

Generett often shares a powerful phrase with educators and leaders during leadership workshops—“Once I know your story, I can never not see you.” Taking the time to learn about the experiences of others can lead to higher levels of compassion and understanding, allowing both parties to really “see” the other and recognize the motivation and reasoning behind actions, reactions, and desires. “[The] more we’re able to unearth [stories] in our relationships with each other, the more we understand what drives people, what they’re bringing to the table,” Generett says.

It can be tempting to make assumptions about others, but truly equitable educational systems cannot be formed until the time is taken to understand others’ stories. In Episode 2 of All For Literacy, Kareem Weaver, co-founder and executive director of FULCRUM-Oakland, discussed how it's easy to incorrectly believe students and educators in certain districts are not facing problems. “We have to stop assuming that other people's issues don't matter because of their context,” he reminds listeners, emphasizing the importance of drilling down into others’ stories to create true equity in the classroom.

Understanding others’ stories allows educators and school leaders to create spaces and systems that honor student beliefs and needs and meet students exactly where they are. “We’re able to work more in these complicated areas and spaces…where we’re able to honor the individual at the same time that we’re moving a system to be more equitable,” Generett says. Thus, taking the time and making the space to understand student and educator stories is an integral part of changing the educational system to drive greater success in the classroom.

Telling the Right Stories to Drive Student and Educator Success

The other side of using stories to foster student and educator success relies on telling the right stories. Frequently told stories become part of the culture and, ultimately, the belief system within a school or classroom. “[Stories] shape reality and our understanding in ways that become common and become embedded in our culture,” Generett says.

To ensure the right stories are being told, educators and leaders must ask themselves if they are telling deficit-oriented or possibility-focused stories to their students, educators, and peers. Deficit-oriented stories include ideas like “parents don’t care,” “kids don’t want to learn,” or “the educational gap after COVID cannot be fixed.” These stories focus on lack, what’s missing from a situation, and/or excuses for less-than-ideal situations, outcomes, and systems.

Perpetuating deficit-oriented stories negatively impact the ability to create transformative change. “[If] these are the stories we’re telling, then the solutions we come up with are going to be built on the backs of these deficit-oriented stories. So, it’s not the story of possibilities,” Generett says. These types of stories discourage students, educators, and leaders and can lead them to believe what they hear, creating hefty roadblocks for change and success.

Generett stresses the importance of flipping the script to possibility-focused stories and then using those stories to make systematic changes to support these opportunities. “If we're saying that these [students] are scholars, and if we're saying that they can go to college, then we have to create structures that make that possible,” Generett says. “We have to create learning opportunities in our building that make it possible. We have to create financial pathways that make it possible.”

Telling the right stories in schools and classrooms not only builds hope and encourages students and educators about the possibilities available to them, but it also is the foundation for systemwide change. And it’s this system wide change stemming from personal and possibility-focused stories that drive student and educator success.

Support Success With Stories

Understanding someone’s story and then telling them possibility-focused stories in return fosters effective communication, compassion, and, ultimately, higher rates of success in the learning environment. Tune into Season 2, Episode 4 of All For Literacy with Dr. Gretchen Generett for a deeper look into the importance of stories when driving change and supporting student and educator success.