We remember stories better than bullets. But are characters and drama really needed to learn better? A guide to storytelling in education that keeps the focus on outcomes.
Storytelling is such a massive topic, I love how you've broken this down. As a former language teacher and textbook content editor, a lot of this resonated with me, but also showed how much at odds the education system is with real-world teaching.
Instructional design, for ESL/EFL in my case, is based on modelling the language. In my teacher training this was always a story, "Yesterday, I went shopping and found my favourite snack was on sale..." but it's a solid part of, as you as described, context-based, task-based learning where you're a part of the story. Students always remembered the stories I told, the wackier the better, and it allowed me to inject a little personality into my work.
Ha, and those textbook universes were SO painful when the syllabus or course you taught wasn't following the textbook. "Hang on, what did Sarah do before this?!" was a constant panic before stepping into the classroom because I knew I'd get questions about what we'd missed and I'd have to fill in the gaps. They were also painfully written in the Western context which meant my students in Sri Lanka had very little frame of reference, I'd do what you've said - rewrite them...it's not like teachers have anything better to do with their time than rewrite textbooks, right?
I loved listening to The Hero's Journey and hearing Campbell's analysis of storytelling. It's served humankind for generations - the ability to tell stories and learn from them is in our discourse DNA.
Thank you for your very kind words! I'm sure the mastery of storytelling in learning can support across different areas that involve clarity of communication and training. Have a look at the other articles, I'm sure you'll find other ones that are also interesting!
Thank you. I have been deep diving into his idea whilst designing a new curriculum with a narrative drive built in to enhance schema building. Using the idea of a story to build a sense of cultural capital is very powerful and, as an English literature teacher, it packs a double punch - enhanced engagement and retention combined with understanding the deep charge elements of a good plot. Thanks for the detailed overview.
That sounds like a fantastic approach. Designing a curriculum with narrative as the backbone is such a powerful way to help students connect ideas and remember them. I love that you’re linking it to cultural capital too. It really amplifies how stories shape understanding, not just engagement. The key, as you said, is keeping every narrative element in service of the learning outcome rather than the story itself and avoiding the temptation of stories for stories' sake. That balance is where storytelling really shines.
This is so interesting! We’ve been using stories to anchor our science concepts and so far, students have always said that the lessons they remember the most are the ones with stories. Our focus is to humanize science but also to provide a context for the discoveries themselves.
I’ve also been reading up a lot on the science of learning and this is the first article Ive seen that mentions them both. I love the short discussion on why storytelling is effective and I’m excited to read more! Do you have any more articles or resources? Thank you!
So glad this resonated! Love your approach: stories are the perfect bridge between scientific discovery and human curiosity. I'd recommend reading the article you can find linked in "Keep learning" on the topic of seductive details. It's sadly the only one I could find without a paywall. Specifically on storytelling for science, you might find this article interesting: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11792018/
If you enjoyed this one, you might like a few of my other pieces on the science of learning (retrieval, interleaving, desirable difficulties). If you can only read one, I'd recommend the one on desirable difficulties. https://www.kognitivo.net/p/desirable-difficulties
The next piece is going to be on the power of analogies in learning, so keep an eye out for that!
I'm wondering: Do any of those findings about stories and story-telling bear upon other domains than only for teachers or others trying to foster learning? For example, what about for story-telling in public speaking? When speakers speak, any stories they include in their speeches are supposed to be the parts of their speeches that their audiences most recall after the speakers have delivered their speeches. Stories are supposed to be recalled much better than any facts or whatever else speakers may have presented to their audiences. And what about for any other areas? Such as if a job applicant would include a brief story about him- or herself in a cover letter? Is there any way in which the findings might be adapted to other domains, in other words? Even perhaps, maybe, by reasoning by analogy, somehow? Are my musings here relevant?
Absolutely, though with an important caveat. These findings are relevant whenever the goal is for the audience to learn something. In public speaking, for example, if you want your listeners to understand and remember a concept, then the same rules apply: define the learning outcome, build a story that serves it and trim the fluff.
But the goal of many speeches (and job interviews, cover letters, etc.) isn't really to make someone learn something. They’re about persuading, convincing, negotiating or often simply entertaining, even when they’re framed as ‘informational.’ In those cases, emotions play a stronger role. Rich detail, immersion and narrative tension can be powerful for persuasion, even though the same techniques might distract in a learning context. The key question is: what’s the goal of the speech? Is it to make the audience learn?
The opposite problem also happens in education. Teachers and writers often focus on entertaining or persuading, which leads to over-the-top characters or irrelevant seductive details. That’s why I argued for keeping stories lean and tightly tied to the learning goal.
I'm planning a whole article on analogies by the way!
I strongly recommend reading Kieran Egan's "The Educated Mind" and exploring the mythic understanding and romantic understanding cognative tools he outlined.
Like you, he really captures why storytelling is such an important tool.
I've been applying the principles of this book and his "imaginative approach to teaching" for over a year now. I honestly don't recognise my old lesson plans anymore.
I don't believe this claim. Stories are complex and multilayered so how do they reduce load.
I think you are saying this because they work and you have a model for learning that says for learning to work it must have low cognitive load.
The thing is learning doesn't happen the way CLT says because learning is not confined to the brain. It is embodied and affective too. Stories capture these other channels.
It looks like your comment is driven by a strong personal preference against cognitive load theory so I’ll try to let the scientific evidence speak and I’ll base my reply on peer-reviewed articles. Otherwise this is just an “I believe vs you believe” debate that isn’t really constructive.
Before getting into the broader debate of cognitive load theory, the claim that “stories reduce cognitive load” aims to highlight the consistent finding that information presented in a narrative format is understood more easily and recalled more accurately than the same information presented in an expository format, such as an essay or a technical manual. This isn’t a controversial claim and there’s plenty of scientific evidente supporting it. The superiority of narrative is attributed by many studies to "story grammar" (a highly familiar mental template consisting of a setting, protagonists, goals, conflicts, and resolutions, etc.). Because human experience is naturally structured around chronological sequences, information that’s structured that way relies on a common pattern. The use of this common pattern reduces the mental effort needed to understand information because less effort needs to go into the structuring of the information (as the structure of the information is provided by a pattern that’s well known). So, it’s not just that “I believe in a model, stories work, so they must follow that model”, it’s rather that the specific way in which stories work follows the model of reducing the mental effort needed to understand the information, which is what “reduce cognitive load” means. Here’s a link to a meta-analysis on the scientific evidence regarding this: “Memory and comprehension of narrative versus expository texts: A meta-analysis” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8219577/
Now, on the general topic of Cognitive Load Theory, I think the scope of that debate is too big for a comment but I can point you to this great article reviewing the studies on CLT, I really think you should have a look at it before replying: “How scientific is cognitive load theory?” https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/14/8/920
Hi thanks for the links. I have read lots of CLT articles and I fully concur (as a science teacher myself) that CLT has a strong evidence base. It does what it is measured for.
Get a bunch of randomised students into the lab and teach them something they are not interested in (because affection for a thing introduces an extraneous factor into the fair test) then employ a testing system for memory of the items taught according to CLT principles gets the best outcomes.
This is very much in keeping with the model of research Ebbinghausen used when he introduced the calculations for the forgetting curve. He got his subjects to memorise trigrams of nonsense consonants.
So yes CLT works damm well for learning something you don't care about. 4 - 7 items is about what one can bear of something you care not a jot about. You might trick the brain to remember rhar thing with some spaced repetition for about 8 weeks (just enough to sit the exam but not enough to get through the holiday until pist exams and Uni starts)
I remember my wedding day. Not because I practiced spaced repetition, not because I kept the inputs down to 4-7 bits of cognitive load. I remember it because of emotion.
CLT is a good but deficient theory because it just about completely disregard emotion and affect in the model.
Further is takes no regards of latest research into the brain networks in particular the interaction between the Default Mode Network, the Executive Control Network and the Salience Network.
Fundamentally it sees the brain as a single entity and not as an embodied whole (there are neurons in the gut) , it sees cognition in a limited sense and fundamentally misses the role of affect on learning.
Let me offer in return you a great study into how effective learning becomes when meaning and a transcendant awareness of their own place in the story of the learning changes life outcomes (not just improved memory)
Further to that here's a research article that echos this sense that CLT is ok as a theory except it misses out on too many aspects of what is going on in learning.
Storytelling is such a massive topic, I love how you've broken this down. As a former language teacher and textbook content editor, a lot of this resonated with me, but also showed how much at odds the education system is with real-world teaching.
Instructional design, for ESL/EFL in my case, is based on modelling the language. In my teacher training this was always a story, "Yesterday, I went shopping and found my favourite snack was on sale..." but it's a solid part of, as you as described, context-based, task-based learning where you're a part of the story. Students always remembered the stories I told, the wackier the better, and it allowed me to inject a little personality into my work.
Ha, and those textbook universes were SO painful when the syllabus or course you taught wasn't following the textbook. "Hang on, what did Sarah do before this?!" was a constant panic before stepping into the classroom because I knew I'd get questions about what we'd missed and I'd have to fill in the gaps. They were also painfully written in the Western context which meant my students in Sri Lanka had very little frame of reference, I'd do what you've said - rewrite them...it's not like teachers have anything better to do with their time than rewrite textbooks, right?
I loved listening to The Hero's Journey and hearing Campbell's analysis of storytelling. It's served humankind for generations - the ability to tell stories and learn from them is in our discourse DNA.
Since impactful “leading” often includes storytelling, this enlightening article captured my attention. Thanks for it.
Thank you for your very kind words! I'm sure the mastery of storytelling in learning can support across different areas that involve clarity of communication and training. Have a look at the other articles, I'm sure you'll find other ones that are also interesting!
Thank you. I have been deep diving into his idea whilst designing a new curriculum with a narrative drive built in to enhance schema building. Using the idea of a story to build a sense of cultural capital is very powerful and, as an English literature teacher, it packs a double punch - enhanced engagement and retention combined with understanding the deep charge elements of a good plot. Thanks for the detailed overview.
That sounds like a fantastic approach. Designing a curriculum with narrative as the backbone is such a powerful way to help students connect ideas and remember them. I love that you’re linking it to cultural capital too. It really amplifies how stories shape understanding, not just engagement. The key, as you said, is keeping every narrative element in service of the learning outcome rather than the story itself and avoiding the temptation of stories for stories' sake. That balance is where storytelling really shines.
This looks like a great idea.
This is so interesting! We’ve been using stories to anchor our science concepts and so far, students have always said that the lessons they remember the most are the ones with stories. Our focus is to humanize science but also to provide a context for the discoveries themselves.
I’ve also been reading up a lot on the science of learning and this is the first article Ive seen that mentions them both. I love the short discussion on why storytelling is effective and I’m excited to read more! Do you have any more articles or resources? Thank you!
So glad this resonated! Love your approach: stories are the perfect bridge between scientific discovery and human curiosity. I'd recommend reading the article you can find linked in "Keep learning" on the topic of seductive details. It's sadly the only one I could find without a paywall. Specifically on storytelling for science, you might find this article interesting: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11792018/
If you enjoyed this one, you might like a few of my other pieces on the science of learning (retrieval, interleaving, desirable difficulties). If you can only read one, I'd recommend the one on desirable difficulties. https://www.kognitivo.net/p/desirable-difficulties
The next piece is going to be on the power of analogies in learning, so keep an eye out for that!
Thank you for the resources! I will find the time to read through them. I like the term seductive detail! Haha
I'm wondering: Do any of those findings about stories and story-telling bear upon other domains than only for teachers or others trying to foster learning? For example, what about for story-telling in public speaking? When speakers speak, any stories they include in their speeches are supposed to be the parts of their speeches that their audiences most recall after the speakers have delivered their speeches. Stories are supposed to be recalled much better than any facts or whatever else speakers may have presented to their audiences. And what about for any other areas? Such as if a job applicant would include a brief story about him- or herself in a cover letter? Is there any way in which the findings might be adapted to other domains, in other words? Even perhaps, maybe, by reasoning by analogy, somehow? Are my musings here relevant?
Absolutely, though with an important caveat. These findings are relevant whenever the goal is for the audience to learn something. In public speaking, for example, if you want your listeners to understand and remember a concept, then the same rules apply: define the learning outcome, build a story that serves it and trim the fluff.
But the goal of many speeches (and job interviews, cover letters, etc.) isn't really to make someone learn something. They’re about persuading, convincing, negotiating or often simply entertaining, even when they’re framed as ‘informational.’ In those cases, emotions play a stronger role. Rich detail, immersion and narrative tension can be powerful for persuasion, even though the same techniques might distract in a learning context. The key question is: what’s the goal of the speech? Is it to make the audience learn?
The opposite problem also happens in education. Teachers and writers often focus on entertaining or persuading, which leads to over-the-top characters or irrelevant seductive details. That’s why I argued for keeping stories lean and tightly tied to the learning goal.
I'm planning a whole article on analogies by the way!
Super interesting 🙏
Thank you Enrique 👏
I strongly recommend reading Kieran Egan's "The Educated Mind" and exploring the mythic understanding and romantic understanding cognative tools he outlined.
Like you, he really captures why storytelling is such an important tool.
I've been applying the principles of this book and his "imaginative approach to teaching" for over a year now. I honestly don't recognise my old lesson plans anymore.
"Stories reduce cognitive load."
I don't believe this claim. Stories are complex and multilayered so how do they reduce load.
I think you are saying this because they work and you have a model for learning that says for learning to work it must have low cognitive load.
The thing is learning doesn't happen the way CLT says because learning is not confined to the brain. It is embodied and affective too. Stories capture these other channels.
It looks like your comment is driven by a strong personal preference against cognitive load theory so I’ll try to let the scientific evidence speak and I’ll base my reply on peer-reviewed articles. Otherwise this is just an “I believe vs you believe” debate that isn’t really constructive.
Before getting into the broader debate of cognitive load theory, the claim that “stories reduce cognitive load” aims to highlight the consistent finding that information presented in a narrative format is understood more easily and recalled more accurately than the same information presented in an expository format, such as an essay or a technical manual. This isn’t a controversial claim and there’s plenty of scientific evidente supporting it. The superiority of narrative is attributed by many studies to "story grammar" (a highly familiar mental template consisting of a setting, protagonists, goals, conflicts, and resolutions, etc.). Because human experience is naturally structured around chronological sequences, information that’s structured that way relies on a common pattern. The use of this common pattern reduces the mental effort needed to understand information because less effort needs to go into the structuring of the information (as the structure of the information is provided by a pattern that’s well known). So, it’s not just that “I believe in a model, stories work, so they must follow that model”, it’s rather that the specific way in which stories work follows the model of reducing the mental effort needed to understand the information, which is what “reduce cognitive load” means. Here’s a link to a meta-analysis on the scientific evidence regarding this: “Memory and comprehension of narrative versus expository texts: A meta-analysis” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8219577/
Now, on the general topic of Cognitive Load Theory, I think the scope of that debate is too big for a comment but I can point you to this great article reviewing the studies on CLT, I really think you should have a look at it before replying: “How scientific is cognitive load theory?” https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/14/8/920
Hi thanks for the links. I have read lots of CLT articles and I fully concur (as a science teacher myself) that CLT has a strong evidence base. It does what it is measured for.
Get a bunch of randomised students into the lab and teach them something they are not interested in (because affection for a thing introduces an extraneous factor into the fair test) then employ a testing system for memory of the items taught according to CLT principles gets the best outcomes.
This is very much in keeping with the model of research Ebbinghausen used when he introduced the calculations for the forgetting curve. He got his subjects to memorise trigrams of nonsense consonants.
So yes CLT works damm well for learning something you don't care about. 4 - 7 items is about what one can bear of something you care not a jot about. You might trick the brain to remember rhar thing with some spaced repetition for about 8 weeks (just enough to sit the exam but not enough to get through the holiday until pist exams and Uni starts)
I remember my wedding day. Not because I practiced spaced repetition, not because I kept the inputs down to 4-7 bits of cognitive load. I remember it because of emotion.
CLT is a good but deficient theory because it just about completely disregard emotion and affect in the model.
Further is takes no regards of latest research into the brain networks in particular the interaction between the Default Mode Network, the Executive Control Network and the Salience Network.
Fundamentally it sees the brain as a single entity and not as an embodied whole (there are neurons in the gut) , it sees cognition in a limited sense and fundamentally misses the role of affect on learning.
Let me offer in return you a great study into how effective learning becomes when meaning and a transcendant awareness of their own place in the story of the learning changes life outcomes (not just improved memory)
https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/building-meaning-builds-teens-brains
Further to that here's a research article that echos this sense that CLT is ok as a theory except it misses out on too many aspects of what is going on in learning.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/387179155_Beyond_the_theoretical_and_pedagogical_constraints_of_cognitive_load_theory_and_towards_a_new_cognitive_philosophy_in_education
And no I don't think it is just we get the template. We remember those story that touch us more than any other type.