Opinion by David Von Drehle Columnist Washington Post October 5, 2021 at 3:12 p.m. EDT
Sixty years ago, on Oct. 6, 1961, the condition of the world had reached such a point that President John F. Kennedy advised Americans nationwide to prepare fortified shelters, ideally underground, and stock them with everything needed to live for weeks.
The existential menace embodied by fallout shelters has been defanged by time. Now, the little cells are part of a gauzy mid-century nostalgia, much like tail fins on cars and dancing the twist. With a little effort, though, one might imagine the dread that must have permeated a society upon learning that its preeminent leader felt nuclear war could be near.
Kennedy said, in effect: Make it a priority to have a blast-protected hole in the ground, close enough to reach in a matter of minutes, where you can wait out a lethal dose of radiation before surfacing into a hellscape where hundreds of millions of people are dead.
It is fashionable to say that the United States is at its low point, and that the rest of the world is going to blazes, too. We are more divided, more demoralized, more deceived than ever before. Our problems are too large for our leaders, who are too small for their jobs.
There is a lot of truth in that diagnosis. We have allowed ourselves to become deeply divided, living in politically homogeneous enclaves, feeding on information that reinforces our biases, waging culture wars for fun and profit. We magnify small differences even as we deny common purposes. The resulting erosion of trust cripples the nation’s ability to meet both internal and external challenges.
What the diagnosis gets wrong is the historical dimension. Little is happening now that has not happened before, in some shape or form. Today’s climate crisis, for example, only appears more menacing than the potential nuclear holocaust of the Kennedy years because one is in the foreground while the other has receded. Today’s immigration crisis feels more urgent than the immigration crisis of a century ago only because this one is ours. Today’s racial reckoning feels unusually raw because it is happening to us — not because it is somehow more painful than lynchings or chattel slavery.
Charles Dickens was on to something when he wrote of the French Revolution: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Every era and generation contains elements of both: concurrent seasons of light and darkness. To deny this is to reveal a shortage of historical understanding.
What distinguishes the present age is the widespread and lucrative focus on the apocalyptic: the magnification of threats and minimizing of opportunities; the exaggeration of differences; the desire to see things as worse than they are. We invent ever-more-outlandish conspiracies, impute ever-baser motives, foretell ever-bleaker futures.
Fear sells.
This is why courage has been revered throughout history as a cardinal human virtue. Courage has many facets, but each reflects an individual’s choice to be the best person possible in even the worst of times. Courage is not the antithesis of fear, for it would not have any meaning in the absence of fear. Rather, courage acknowledges fear but refuses to be mastered by it.
Like all virtues, courage is an individual choice — though tremendous damage can be done by leaders who operate on fear rather than courage. Those with open eyes can see such leaders everywhere they look: leaders in government and industry stoking fear of enemies, fear of conspiracies, fear of calamities, fear of the future.
The moral weakness of these fearmongers demands courage from the rest of us. We must recognize appeals to fear and reject them — even if the fear being invoked feels real and true and justified to us. Indeed, seductive fears are the ones we are especially called to rise above.
A healthy society is not a society without problems, because no society has ever been without problems. A healthy society is one that faces problems without fear because its people have courage — and their courage raises courageous leaders. History records that 1933 was the worst of times, when the global economy was sunk in the Great Depression and tyranny was on the march across Europe and Asia. A turning point was marked by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ringing declaration: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
If you feel, as so many do today, that these are some of America’s worst days, if you fear for the future of this democratic republic, then your duty is to master the fear and refuse to be governed by it. If the voice on TV is trying to scare you, turn it off. If your social media leave you anxious, shut them down. Let the worst of times bring out the best of you, for a light shines brightest in the dark.
Everybody loves a good story. Little did we know how much.
From cavemen to scholars, people have been drawn to fire pits, water coolers, theaters and grave sites to share stories, which have long been at the core of the arts, novels, movies and plays. But since the postmodern literary movement of the 1960s swept out of academia and into the wider culture, narrative thinking has seeped into other fields. Historians, lawyers, physicians, economists and psychologists have all rediscovered the power of stories to frame reality, and storytelling has come to rival logic as a way to understand legal cases, geography, illness or war. Stories have become so pervasive, critics fear they have become a dangerous replacement for facts and reasoned argument.
In these tale-telling times, the crisis ignited on Sept. 11 has been called a clash of narratives between the stories that terrorists use and those Westerners believe. And literary debates about whether a story describes what is real or determines reality have gained a new relevance.
“We always knew stories are really powerful. They’ve probably never been treated before as if they mattered” in shaping our public and private lives, said Paul Costello, co-founder of the small Center for Narrative Studies in Washington, D.C., which was formed six years ago to track the spreading use and practice of narrative. “Before, it was always ‘That’s only a story, give me the facts.”’ Now, he said, more people are realizing that “stories have real effects that have got to be looked at seriously.”
Interest in narrative arose spontaneously among a handful of intellectuals in the late 1950s, said Stanley Fish, dean of the college of liberal arts and sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Between 1958 and 1963, a bunch of books appeared in a number of disciplines, all written independently, all making the same point: Our sense of fact and of the shape of events always follows from an unarticulated set of assumptions,” he said. Thomas G. Kuhn, John Langshaw Austin, Clifford Geertz, Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault shared similar insights in science, culture, philosophy, anthropology and sociolinguistics.
“When we see things, we don’t see them directly and immediately. That generalized way of looking at things, we didn’t choose. We more or less fall into it by virtue of our nationality, ethnicity, etc.”
Since then, he said, the idea of the narrative construction of reality has been like “something in the water.” In some cases, scholars said, academic insights passed more form than substance into the wider culture, as, for instance, deconstruction came to be an advertising slogan for jeans.
Yet people widely absorbed the scholars’ argument that at some level stories are the most powerful form of discourse, stronger than logic, stronger than reason, stronger than bare fact. Stories explain, justify and inspire in a way that abstract reasoning just can’t do, said Yale University’s Peter Brooks, author of “Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative.” In fact, he said, “I don’t think we would have that much of a perception of reality without constructing it in a narrative.”
Popular historians such as Joseph Ellis and David McCullough have revived narrative techniques to engage readers, and even the most seemingly fact-based fields have felt the pull toward storytelling. “There’s been a claim that economics is really about stories,” Brooks said.
Narrative is seen by business consultants as a way to improve “knowledge management,” Costello said. In geography, he said, “a story is what converts space into a place. Mention the Mississippi and people immediately evoke a story, Mark Twain or the floods.”
In law, storytelling has been rediscovered as a way to counter legal abstraction, and its use has raised a new consciousness about the malleability of the story. “People are more self-conscious about the fact that narrative is selective,” said Martha Nussbaum, a University of Chicago philosopher who has taught law students about the value of narrative. “The way you tell a story is quite crucial to the legal issues involved.
“This is popping up not only in the teaching of law, but in the awareness of judges, who recognize a story can reveal or can obscure. We want to make sure we get the right stories.”
She described one sexual harassment case, for instance, in which a judge ruled that a woman was not harmed by crude language in the workplace, partly because the woman herself had also used such language. However, an appellate judge overruled the lower court, saying the story painted by the defense had left out features that were legally relevant, such as the fact that the woman was in the minority in a system that used intimidation, and that she had only been trying to fit in, Nussbaum said.
A school of narrative medicine aims to discern patients’ stories in addition to their symptoms. Writing in the October issue of the Journal of the American Medical Assn., Dr. Rita Charon from Columbia University, noted literature seminars and reading groups have become common in medical schools and hospitals. Physicians, taught in the ‘60s to practice “detached concern,” now collaborate with their patients to publish their stories in popular journals as a way to engage and develop a therapeutic alliance for proper diagnosis and care.
If physicians cannot perform “narrative tasks,” she wrote, “the patient might not tell the whole story, might not ask the most frightening questions, and might not feel heard.”
Narrative ideas fit so well with psychology that at least two narrative-based branches of therapy have developed. In one, clients are led to replace old personal stories of themselves as victims, for instance, with healthier new versions. In the more analytic view, the new story is always under construction. “Their understanding would be less that they are victims of events, or genes or energies in them which only their analyst can understand, and more as an understanding of themselves as creators of their present, their view of the past, and their relationships with others,” said Robert Moore, a Bay Area psychotherapist and author of “Creation of Reality in Psychoanalysis” (1999).
And of course, storytelling has come to occupy a central spot in the world of politics. Brooks noted that in his inaugural address, George W. Bush used the word story 10 times, starting with, “We have a place, all of us in a long story…. ” and ending with, “This story goes on.” He introduced his Secretary of State Colin Powell as “a great American story.” Of Transportation Secretary Normal Y. Mineta, Bush said, “I love his story.”
Hardly a political debate goes by without a candidate bringing in a constituent to tell a tale illustrating an issue like prescription drug abuse, he said, leading some to complain about making policy by anecdote. “Sometimes, you would prefer them to argue their points logically with principles and so on,” Brooks said, wistfully.
Critics note that persuasive stories can be spun out of false memories or into propaganda. People deceive themselves with their own stories. A story that provides a reassuring explanation of events can also mislead by leaving out contradictions and complexities.
On the other hand, Fish and others contend that people cannot lose an objectivity they never had in the first place.
“We don’t understand things as we experience them,” said UCLA anthropologist Elinor Ochs. “Milan Kundera says remembering is not the opposite of forgetting. It’s a form of forgetting. We can never really capture our experiences. We can only construe them after the fact. When we’re in the middle of it, it’s like we’re going through a fog. Especially if it’s distressful.”
Wanting desperately to make sense of their everyday lives, people not only order their stories in a plot, but also tell them to others and use the feedback to clarify the meaning of the events, she said.
Some stories just don’t fit into a framework or feel authentic, she said.
Someone from a minority group, for instance, might not think generic stories about an “American childhood” or “American family” are the same as theirs.
And that makes it harder for politicians and the public to agree on an official story about war. “Someone may say Johnny went off to fight in Vietnam because of our interests, as part of a larger national story. That may all make coherent sense on another level for many people involved in the war. Other people may feel this is one story, but it’s not the only story. There are alternative ways of construing things that happened,” she said.
“People are split between two desires: the desire for coherence and a desire for authenticity. Usually coherence wins out.”
In the view of some experts, looking at current world events through the lens of narrative theory is a way to find clarity in what appears to be incomprehensible. It’s important to understand that the terrorists’ narratives make sense to them, Brooks said, but they seem like poison to us. “What is terror to us is holy war to someone else. That’s a very terrifying discovery.”
Novelist Robert Stone concurs. The shock of Sept. 11 was so great, he has written, “our conscious minds denied the violent assault of one narrative system upon another. People deeply enclosed in their sanctified worldview were carrying out what they experienced as a sacred command to annihilate the Other…” But rather than dismissing such a narrative, Costello said, it is to vital to take seriously an opponent’s story. “One of the narrative principles we teach is to say unless we have the terrorist’s story out of which they’re acting, then we don’t have the full story.” Unless we find out why it did make sense to them, he said, “we haven’t done the homework that would help us combat it,” he said. “If you only go with one story, there’s a danger of editing out too much of the other reality that’s part of the picture.”
Brooks said, “The narratives we reached for first were standard military narratives of rooting out and destroying the enemy. Now the problem may be those narratives seem a little bit simplistic or un-nuanced for the actual situation. People are baffled as to what the right narrative is, and particularly baffled because any good narrative for something like this has an end in sight. The end is by no means clear,” he said. Nor is it clear what victory would mean.”
Brooks, who is currently teaching in England, said he’s picked up hints of a new narrative from speeches by Tony Blair and other writers’ reactions about the impossibility of American isolation and the need to engage the Islamic world.
In the U.S., leaders could tell a new story, for instance, that might portray a humble America, Costello said. “Our stories can join a lot of other stories now of people who have had to deal with adversity,” he said.
And these new stories, he added, can come from familiar wellsprings. Costello approves of recent collaborations between the White House and Hollywood producers to clarify America’s image on screen. “Entertainment is America’s largest export. It is exporting who it is, what it believes. Maybe we’ve got to rethink America’s story in the world and what America wants to stand for.”
“We say the story always comes late to the reality, and we’ve got to keep the story open. We might discover things that totally overthrow our earlier presumptions.”
Until a new story emerges, Costello says the story needs to remain uncomfortably ambiguous. Watching the collapsing towers, he said, reminded him of a scene in an English movie version of the sinking of the Titanic. Two men in a lifeboat watch the ship as it goes down. Rather than encapsulating the catastrophe in a tidy moral, one man shakes his head in disbelief and says, “We were so sure of ourselves. I don’t think I’ll ever be sure of anything ever again.”
by Steve Denning in Harvard Business Review May 2004
Summary. Reprint: R0405H A carefully chosen story can help the leader of an organization translate an abstract concept into a meaningful mandate for employees. The key is to know which narrative strategies are right for what circumstances. Knowledge management expert Stephen Denning explains that, for optimal effect, form should follow function. Challenging one professional storyteller’s view that more is better, Denning points out that it’s not always desirable (or practical) to launch into an epic that’s jam-packed with complex characters, cleverly placed plot points, an intricate rising action, and a neatly resolved denouement. True, if listeners have time and interest, a narrative-savvy leader can use a vividly rendered tale to promote communication between management and staff, for instance, or even to foster collaboration—especially when the story is emotionally moving. However, if the aim is to motivate people to act when they might not be inclined to do so, it’s best to take an approach that’s light on detail. Otherwise, the particulars can bog listeners down and prevent them from focusing on the message.
Drawing on his experiences at the World Bank and observations made elsewhere, the author provides several dos and don’ts for organizational storytellers, along with examples of narratives that get results. The sidebar “A Storytelling Catalog” presents seven distinct types of stories, the situations in which they should be told, and tips on how to tell them. Many of these aren’t even stories in the “well-told” sense—they run the rhetorical gamut from one-liners to full-blown speeches—but they succeed because they’re tailored to fit the situation. So even though it’s common in business to favor the analytical over the anecdotal, leaders with the strength to push past some initial skepticism about the enterprise of storytelling will find that the creative effort pays off.
In 1998, I made a pilgrimage to the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tennessee, seeking some enlightenment. Several years earlier, as the program director of knowledge management at the World Bank, I had stumbled onto the power of storytelling. Despite a career of scoffing at such touchy-feely stuff—like most business executives, I knew that analytical was good, anecdotal was bad—I had changed my thinking because I’d seen stories help galvanize an organization around a defined business goal.
In the mid-1990s, that goal was to get people at the World Bank to support efforts at knowledge management—a pretty foreign notion within the organization at the time. I offered people cogent arguments about the need to gather the knowledge that was scattered throughout the organization. They didn’t listen. I gave PowerPoint presentations that compellingly demonstrated the importance of sharing and leveraging this information. My audiences merely looked dazed. In desperation, I was ready to try almost anything.
Then in 1996 I began telling people a story:
In June of 1995, a health worker in a tiny town in Zambia went to the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control and got the answer to a question about the treatment for malaria. Remember that this was in Zambia, one of the poorest countries in the world, and it happened in a tiny place 600 kilometers from the capital city. But the most striking thing about this picture, at least for us, is that the World Bank isn’t in it. Despite our know-how on all kinds of poverty-related issues, that knowledge isn’t available to the millions of people who could use it. Imagine if it were. Think what an organization we could become.
This simple story helped World Bank staff and managers envision a different kind of future for the organization. When knowledge management later became an official corporate priority, I used similar stories to maintain the momentum. So I began to wonder how the tool of narrative might be put to work even more effectively. Being a typically rational manager, I decided to consult the experts.
At the International Storytelling Center, I told the Zambia story to a professional storyteller, J.G. “Paw-Paw” Pinkerton, and asked the master what he thought. You can imagine my chagrin when he said he didn’t hear a story at all. There was no real telling. There was no plot. There was no building up of the characters. Who was this health worker in Zambia? And what was her world like? What did it feel like to be in the exotic environment of Zambia, facing the problems she faced? My anecdote, he said, was a pathetic thing, not a story at all. I needed to start from scratch if I hoped to turn it into a “real story.”
Was I surprised? Well, not exactly. The story was pretty bland. There was a problem with this advice from the expert, though. I knew in my heart it was wrong. And with that realization, I was on the brink of an important insight: Beware the well-told story!
The Power of Narrative
But let’s back up a bit. Do stories really have a role to play in the business world? Believe me, I’m familiar with the skepticism about them. When you talk about “storytelling” to a group of hardheaded executives, you’d better be prepared for some eye rolling. If the group is polite as well as tough, don’t be surprised if the eyes simply glaze over.
That’s because most executives operate with a particular—and generally justified—mind-set. Analysis is what drives business thinking. It cuts through the fog of myth, gossip, and speculation to get to the hard facts. It goes wherever the observations and premises and conclusions take it, undistorted by the hopes or fears of the analyst. Its strength lies in its objectivity, its impersonality, its heartlessness.
Yet this strength is also a weakness. Analysis might excite the mind, but it hardly offers a route to the heart. And that’s where we must go if we are to motivate people not only to take action but to do so with energy and enthusiasm. At a time when corporate survival often requires disruptive change, leadership involves inspiring people to act in unfamiliar, and often unwelcome, ways. Mind-numbing cascades of numbers or daze-inducing PowerPoint slides won’t achieve this goal. Even the most logical arguments usually won’t do the trick.
Analysis might excite the mind, but it hardly offers a route to the heart—and that’s where we must go to motivate people.
But effective storytelling often does. In fact, in certain situations nothing else works. Although good business arguments are developed through the use of numbers, they are typically approved on the basis of a story—that is, a narrative that links a set of events in some kind of causal sequence. Storytelling can translate those dry and abstract numbers into compelling pictures of a leader’s goals. I saw this happen at the World Bank—by 2000, we were increasingly recognized as leaders in the area of knowledge management—and have seen it in numerous other large organizations since then.
So why was I having problems with the advice I had received from the professional storyteller in Jonesborough?
A “Poorly Told” Story
The timing of my trip to Tennessee was fortunate. If I had sought expert advice two years earlier, I might have taken the master’s recommendations without question. But I’d had some time to approach the idea of organizational storytelling with a beginner’s mind, free of strictures about “the right way” to tell a story.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t follow Paw-Paw Pinkerton’s recommendations. I saw immediately how to flesh out my modest anecdote about the health worker in Zambia: You’d dramatically depict her life, the scourge of malaria that she faced in her work, and perhaps the pain and suffering of the patient she was treating that day. You’d describe the extraordinary set of events that had led to her being seated in front of a computer screen deep in the hinterland of Zambia. You’d describe the false leads she had followed before she came across the CDC Web site. You’d build up to the moment of triumph when she found the answer to her question about malaria and vividly describe how that answer was about to transform the life of her patient. The story would be a veritable epic.
This “maximalist” account would be more engrossing than my relatively dry anecdote. But I had learned enough by then to realize that telling the story in this way to a corporate audience would not galvanize implementation of a strange new idea like knowledge management. I knew that in the modern workplace, people had neither the time nor the patience—remember executives’ general skepticism about storytelling in the first place—to absorb a richly detailed narrative. If I was going to hold the attention of my audience, I had to make my point in seconds, not in minutes.
There was another problem. Even if my audience did take the time to listen to a fully developed tale, my telling it in that fashion would not allow listeners the mental space to relate the story to their own quite different worlds. Although I was describing a health worker in Zambia, I wanted everyone to focus not on Zambia but on their own situations. I hoped they would think, “If the CDC can reach a health worker in Zambia, why can’t the World Bank? Why don’t we put our knowledge on the Web and broaden our scope?” But if my listeners were immersed in a saga about that health worker and her patient, they might not have any attention left to ask themselves these questions—or to provide answers. In other words, I didn’t want my audience too interested in Zambia. A minimalist narrative was effective, in fact, because it lacked detail and texture. The same characteristic that the professional storyteller saw as a flaw was, for my purposes, a strength.
The professional storyteller saw minimalism as a flaw; for my purposes, it was a strength.
On my return from Jonesborough, I educated myself about the principles of traditional storytelling. More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle, in his Poetics, said stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They should include complex characters as well as a plot that incorporates a reversal of fortune and a lesson learned. Furthermore, the storyteller should be so engaged with the story—visualizing the action, feeling what the characters feel—that the listeners become drawn into the narrative’s world. Aristotle’s formula has proved successful over the ages, from The Arabian Nights to The Decameron to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and most Hollywood screenplays.
Despite the narrative power of the traditional story, I knew that it probably wouldn’t spark action in an organization. In retrospect, though, I realize that my insight blinded me to something else. Believing that this wonderful and rich tradition had no place in the time-constrained world of modern business was as wrongheaded as thinking that all stories had to be full of detail and color. I would later see that the well-told story is relevant in a modern organization. Indeed, a number of surprises about the use of storytelling in organizations awaited me.
Tales of Success and Failure
In December 2000, I left the World Bank and began to consult with companies on their knowledge management and, by extension, their use of organizational stories. As part of this work, I once found myself in London with Dave Snowden, a director of IBM’s Institute of Knowledge Management, teaching a master class on storytelling to around 70 executives from private- and public-sector organizations.
During the class’s morning session, I spoke about my experience at the World Bank and how a positive orientation was essential if a narrative like the one about Zambia was to be effective. But in the afternoon, to my dismay, my fellow presenter emphatically asserted the opposite. At IBM and elsewhere, Dave had found purely positive stories to be problematic. They were, he said, like the Janet and John children’s stories in the United Kingdom or the Dick and Jane stories in the United States: The characters were so good they made you feel queasy. The naughtiest thing Janet and John would do was spill a bottle of water in the yard. Then they would go and tell their mother about it and promise never to do it again. Janet would volunteer to help out with the cleanup and John would offer to help wash the car. These stories for children reflected a desire to show things as they should be rather than as they are. In a corporate environment, Dave told his audience, listeners would respond to such rosy tales by conjuring up negative “antistories” about what must have actually happened. His message: Beware the positive story!
After the workshop, Dave and I discussed why his stories focused on the negative while mine accentuated the positive. I could see he had a point, that negative stories can be more powerful than positive ones. I’d used negative stories myself when trying to teach people the nitty-gritty of any subject. The fact is, people learn more from their mistakes than from their successes.
Eventually, however, it dawned on me that our points of view were complementary and that our stories served different purposes: My stories were crafted to motivate people, and Dave’s were designed to share knowledge. His stories might describe how and why a team failed to accomplish an objective, with the aim of helping others avoid the same mistakes. (To elicit such stories, Dave often had to start by getting people to talk about their successes, even if these accounts were ultimately less useful vehicles for conveying knowledge.) It was then I began to realize that the purpose of telling a story might determine its form.
Granted, even optimistic stories have to be true and believable, since jaded corporate audiences know too well the experience of being presented with half-truths. Stories told in order to spur action need to make good on their promises and contain sufficient evidence of a positive outcome. But stories intended mainly to transfer knowledge must be more than true. Because their objective is to generate understanding and not action, they tend to highlight the pitfalls of ignorance; they are meant not to inspire people but to make them cautious. Just as the minimalist stories that I told to spark action were different from traditional entertainment stories, so effective knowledge-sharing stories would have negative rather than positive overtones.
A Collective Yawn
Once I saw that different narrative forms could further different business goals, I looked for other ways that managers could make stories work for them. A number of distinct story types began to emerge—ones that didn’t necessarily follow Aristotelian guidelines but were nonetheless used to good effect in a variety of organizations. (For descriptions of some of them and the purposes for which they might be used, see the sidebar “A Storytelling Catalog.”) I continued to come across unexpected insights about the nature of storytelling within organizations.
A Storytelling Catalog
Storytelling is an increasingly accepted way to achieve management goals. But leaders need to use a variety of …
For instance, if negative stories have their place, so do “boring” ones. In his book Talking about Machines, Julian Orr recounts a number of stories that have circulated among Xerox repair technicians. While rich in detail, they are even less storylike than my little anecdote about the health care worker in Zambia. Most of these tales, which present solutions to technical problems, lack a plot and a distinct character. In fact, they are hardly stories at all, with little to hold the interest of anyone except those close to the often esoteric subject matter. Why are they compelling even to this limited audience? Because they are driven by a detailed explanation of the cause-and-effect relationship between an action and its consequence. For example:
You’ve got a malfunctioning copy machine with an E053 error code, which is supposed to mean a problem in the 24-volt Interlock Power Supply. But you could chase the source of that 24-volt Interlock problem forever, and you’d never, ever find out what it is. If you’re lucky enough, you’ll eventually get an F066 error code, which indicates the true source of the malfunction—namely, a shorted dicorotron. Apparently, this is happening because the circuitry in the XER board has been changed to prevent the damage that would otherwise occur when a dicorotron shorted. Before the change in circuitry, a shorted dicorotron would have fried the whole XER board. Changing the circuitry has prevented damage to the XER board, but it’s created a different issue. Now an E053 error message doesn’t give you the true source of the machine’s malfunction.
This story, slightly condensed here, doesn’t just describe the technician’s accurate diagnosis of a problem; it also relates why things happened as they did. So the account, negative in tone and almost unintelligible to an outsider, is both informative and interesting to its intended audience.
As I continued my investigation, one area of particular interest to me was the link between storytelling and leadership. I already knew from personal experience how stories could be used as a catalyst for organizational action. And I had read in two influential books about leadership—Leading Minds by Howard Gardner and The Leadership Engine by Noel Tichy—how stories could help leaders define their personality for their followers, boosting others’ confidence in the leaders’ integrity and providing some idea of how they might act in a given situation.
I also had seen leaders using narrative to inculcate a positive set of corporate values and beliefs in the hearts and minds of their employees. Think, for example, of Tyco’s effort to repair its battered value system. The company began by creating a straightforward manual that outlined new rules in such areas as sexual harassment, conflicts of interest, and fraud. But Eric Pillmore, senior vice president of corporate governance, quickly figured out that, as written, the booklet would merely gather dust on people’s shelves. So he threw out what he had done and started again in an attempt to bring the principles alive through narrative. The story below became part of the revised guide, as a sidebar in the section on sexual harassment and other forms of intimidating behavior in the workplace:
The entire team jokes about Tom being gay. Tom has never complained and doesn’t seem to mind, but when Mark is assigned to work with Tom, the jokes turn on Mark. Now that Mark receives the brunt of the jokes, he tells his supervisor he wants to be reassigned. His supervisor complies with Mark’s request.
While the guide clearly lays out the company’s policy on harassment, the simple narrative helps bring the policy to life and provides a starting point for thinking about and discussing the complex issues involved. Dozens of similar stories illustrate an array of company policies.
An Enticing but Hazy Future
Although these types of stories furthered leadership goals in a relatively predictable way, others I came across were more quirky—particularly ones used to communicate vision. Noel Tichy writes in The Leadership Engine about the importance of preparing an organization for change. He notes that “the best way to get humans to venture into unknown terrain is to make that terrain familiar and desirable by taking them there first in their imaginations.” Aha! I thought. Here is a place where storytelling, perhaps the most powerful route to people’s imaginations, could prove indispensable.
But as I looked at examples of such stories in a number of arenas, I discovered that most of the successful ones were surprisingly sketchy about the details of the imagined future. Consider Winston Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Neither of these famous addresses came close to describing the future in enough detail that it became, in listeners’ minds, “familiar terrain.”
Over time—and, in part, through my work in corporate scenario planning—I realized why. Specific predictions about the future are likely to be proved wrong. Because such predictions almost inevitably differ in major or minor ways from what eventually happens, leaders who proclaim them risk losing people’s confidence. Consequently, a story designed to prepare people for change needs to evoke the future and conjure up a direction for getting there—but without being too precise. Think of the corporate future that was laid out in a famous mandate by Jack Welch: “General Electric will be either number one or number two in the field, or we will exit the sector.” This is a clear, but general, description of where Welch wanted to take the company. Like my Zambia story, although for different reasons, this statement doesn’t convey too much information.
I also came across stories used in somewhat unusual situations that called for reactive rather than proactive measures. These stories counteracted negative ones that circulated like a virus within an organization and threatened to infect the entire body. Dave Snowden of IBM first pointed out to me how stories could be used in this manner. His hypothesis was that you could attach a positive story to a negative one in order to defuse it, as an antibody would neutralize an antigen.
For example, at an IBM manufacturing site for laptop computers in the United Kingdom, stories circulated among the blue-collar workers about the facility’s managers, who were accused of “not doing any real work,” “being overpaid,” and “having no idea what it’s like on the manufacturing line.” But an additional story was injected into the mix: One day, a new site director turned up in a white coat, unannounced and unaccompanied, and sat on the line making ThinkPads. He asked workers on the assembly line for help. In response, someone asked him, “Why do you earn so much more than I do?” His simple reply: “If you screw up badly, you lose your job. If I screw up badly, 3,000 people lose their jobs.”
While not a story in the traditional sense, the manager’s words—and actions—served as a seed for the story that eventually circulated in opposition to the one about managers’ being lazy and overpaid. You can imagine the buzz: “Blimey, you should’ve seen how he fumbled with those circuit boards. I guess he’ll never work on the line. But you know, he does have a point about his pay.” The atmosphere at the facility began improving within weeks.• • •
Much work remains to be done in developing a menu of narrative patterns that can be used for different purposes in an organizational setting. Although the handful of story types that I’ve identified is no more than a start, I hope it inspires leaders to consider the various ways storytelling might be used. Certainly, the ability to tell the right story at the right time is emerging as an essential leadership skill, one that can help managers cope with, and get business results in, the turbulent world of the twenty-first century.
A version of this article appeared in the May 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review.
What Makes Storytelling So Effective For Learning?
by Vanessa Boris | December 20, 2017 Harvard Business Publishing
This is the second of two posts co-written by Vanessa and Lani Peterson, Psy.D., a psychologist, professional storyteller and executive coach.
Telling stories is one of the most powerful means that leaders have to influence, teach, and inspire. What makes storytelling so effective for learning? For starters, storytelling forges connections among people, and between people and ideas. Stories convey the culture, history, and values that unite people. When it comes to our countries, our communities, and our families, we understand intuitively that the stories we hold in common are an important part of the ties that bind.
This understanding also holds true in the business world, where an organization’s stories, and the stories its leaders tell, help solidify relationships in a way that factual statements encapsulated in bullet points or numbers don’t.
Connecting learners Good stories do more than create a sense of connection. They build familiarity and trust, and allow the listener to enter the story where they are, making them more open to learning. Good stories can contain multiple meanings so they’re surprisingly economical in conveying complex ideas in graspable ways. And stories are more engaging than a dry recitation of data points or a discussion of abstract ideas. Take the example of a company meeting.
At Company A, the leader presents the financial results for the quarter. At Company B, the leader tells a rich story about what went into the “win” that put the quarter over the top. Company A employees come away from the meeting knowing that they made their numbers. Company B employees learned about an effective strategy in which sales, marketing, and product development came together to secure a major deal. Employees now have new knowledge, new thinking, to draw on. They’ve been influenced. They’ve learned.
Something for everyone Another storytelling aspect that makes it so effective is that it works for all types of learners. Paul Smith, in “Leader as Storyteller: 10 Reasons It Makes a Better Business Connection”, wrote:
In any group, roughly 40 percent will be predominantly visual learners who learn best from videos, diagrams, or illustrations. Another 40 percent will be auditory, learning best through lectures and discussions. The remaining 20 percent are kinesthetic learners, who learn best by doing, experiencing, or feeling. Storytelling has aspects that work for all three types. Visual learners appreciate the mental pictures storytelling evokes. Auditory learners focus on the words and the storyteller’s voice. Kinesthetic learners remember the emotional connections and feelings from the story.
Stories stick Storytelling also helps with learning because stories are easy to remember. Organizational psychologist Peg Neuhauser found that learning which stems from a well-told story is remembered more accurately, and for far longer, than learning derived from facts and figures. Similarly, psychologist Jerome Bruner’s research suggest that facts are 20 times more likely to be remembered if they’re part of a story.
Kendall Haven, author of Story Proof and Story Smart, considers storytelling serious business for business. He has written:
Your goal in every communication is to influence your target audience (change their current attitudes, belief, knowledge, and behavior). Information alone rarely changes any of these. Research confirms that well-designed stories are the most effective vehicle for exerting influence.
Stories about professional mistakes and what leaders learned from them are another great avenue for learning. Because people identify so closely with stories, imagining how they would have acted in similar circumstances, they’re able to work through situations in a way that’s risk free. The extra benefit for leaders: with a simple personal story they’ve conveyed underlying values, offered insight into the evolution of their own experience and knowledge, presented themselves as more approachable, AND most likely inspired others to want to know more.
Connection. Engagement. Appealing to all sorts of learners. Risk-free learning. Inspiring motivation. Conveying learning that sticks. It’s no wonder that more and more organizations are embracing storytelling as an effective way for their leaders to influence, inspire, and teach.
Perhaps the thing that makes us human is the stories (real and imagined) that each of us has inside. Many people think that the gift of storytelling belongs only to writers, shamans, and the very old. The reality is we are all storytellers from the very earliest days of our lives. Children who are blind and visually impaired or deafblind also have stories inside them. Helping them to tell their stories is very important to their social, emotional and cognitive development, especially communication and literacy.
Stories come in different forms and mediums.
Stories come in a variety of forms: poetry, song, movement, pictures, plays and even Dad Jokes. The creators of the stories use various mediums such as braille, sign language, movies, and dance to share the stories with others.
Some stories are dynamic, we hear them or experience them and then they are gone. Stories become static when we write them down or record them in some way so we can revisit them over-and-over again.
Children who are visually impaired or Deafblind, may experience a story by tactually exploring items collected on a walk or playing with the materials used to take a bath if these are placed in an experience box or bag. Another child with low vision may enjoy simple picture books with limited print. Audio and braille are other mediums that may be used to share a story with others.
The form or the medium are not as important as the story itself or the creation of the story.
Stories help us cope.
We make sense of our life experiences in part by the stories we learn or tell ourselves. Imagine a story the young child might create and revisit.
“It is dark and stormy. I am frightened. I think I see a monster in my closet. Will it hurt me? If I cry out loud Dad or Mom will come save me.”
At the time the child tells himself the story he doesn’t know if it is fiction or nonfiction. He is just building a story based on his experience of what happens when he cries out at night. But the power of that story may help to calm him and take action to meet his own needs. This can be true of many stories we read or hear.
Even stories that might frighten us a bit, help us to cope because the outcome for the protagonist or hero ultimately turns out well. So, when we face challenges in our own lives we may have a certain belief that everything will be alright eventually if we take action.
Research actually shows that using expressive writing can help us deal with stressful and traumatic events and can even positively impact our health. (Opening Up by Writing It Down, Pennebaker, J.W. and Smyth, J. M., 2016)
Stories help us remember and imagine.
Humans are constantly creating stories. We make up stories in our heads about how our day will go before we head for the office. We tell ourselves stories about the amazing places we will see and exciting things we will do as we plan our vacations. We tell ourselves stories about how people treat us and how we treat them. We are our stories.
Many people may not agree that this is storytelling, but it is where many of us begin to learn the power our own memory and imagination. Stories told within a family or in a culture become even more powerful as they are shared year after year. They become part of who we are, what we believe, and how we see our future.
When we preserve stories in some static form like a book or a recording or a movie, people from different times and places can share that story. Many of these stories guide whole populations in learning how to live their lives (e.g., religious and spiritual texts, the Constitution).
Using our imaginations to modify an existing story or create a fictional world allows us to create solutions to existing problems or imagine places where other challenges exist. For example, think of the different real-life devices that reflect the long-ago creations of Jules Verne in his stories, such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea or From the Earth to the Moon.
Stories help us solve problems and try on solutions.
Stories also help us to solve problems by providing opportunities to try out different actions that might lead to different outcomes. This is especially true if another person is helping to co-create the story.
When someone is creating a story with us, he or she might suggest a different action than we would suggest. What will be the outcome of the story with this new twist? What might I learn from their suggestion or solution? We can often work through a problem or situation by writing about it or creating a story.
Two students collaborate to co-create a play-based story.
Stories engage our attention.
When we find ourselves sitting in an airport or waiting to see the dentist, reading a magazine or book engages our attention and helps to make time pass more easily. For many of us, there is no better form of escape than to stick our noses in a book and vanish into the story. With the advent of audiobooks and podcasts, many of us listen to stories as we jog or walk or ride in a car or airplane. For many of us, reading or listening to stories is our favorite form of recreation.
Stories help us understand others.
Stories have the ability to help us learn about others and to find understanding and empathy for them and their situations. Whether we actually know the individual or not, hearing their story evokes feelings within us. Learning to relate to others and empathize with them is so important in developing social skills and making friends.
We need stories.
Stories serve so many purposes in our lives. Stories are about so much more than just reading or listening. They are instrumental in cognitive, social and emotional development.
Literacy begins with stories others tell us or we tell ourselves. Co-creating stories with an adult or peers helps our children and students begin to create stories they can share with others.
Adults begin “storytelling” with infants and toddlers by sharing nursery rhymes, songs, and bedtime stories. Then we help them to learn to read others’ stories and write their own.
Stories help us understand others and ourselves. We feel empathy with the characters we encounter in stories. This ability to learn from stories is a skill that will help our students throughout their lives. In addition to academic goals, stories enrich lives and provide guidance to living.
If you want to do something great for your child or student, explore the ways you can begin to co-create stories with them.
Kids right now are making more than the usual amount of noise. In Congress and state houses, they’re at the center of public-policy debates on issues such as the child tax credit, Covid-19 vaccines and mask mandates, and the long-term effects of climate change.
For the first time in many years, advocates have a real chance to get something done for children. To take advantage of this opportunity, nonprofits and foundations need to reconsider how they talk about the problems facing kids. They need to recognize that the words they use have the power to shift how legislators, governments, and the public as a whole think about children and what they need.
While many nonprofit organizations are remarkably effective at showing concern for America’s kids, they rarely frame problems affecting them in ways that encourage public action and solutions. A new report released by the organization’s we lead — FrameWorks and Leading for Kids — makes this abundantly clear. The report, How are Advocates Talking About Children’s Issues?, sampled communications materials from 25 organizations that advocate for policies and programs to help children. We found that much of the messaging focuses on fear and crisis, not efficacy or solutions.
Most nonprofits, as well as the media outlets that cover their work, use terms like “vulnerable” or “at risk” to describe the primarily low-income children of color they serve. This is understandable given the significant challenges facing children historically harmed by societal and cultural institutions. But our research shows such language often backfires. The idea of “vulnerability” puts the focus on deficits and sets up a fatalistic perspective. Even if no ill intent exists, such language can be demeaning and paternalistic and can perpetuate racist stereotypes.
Vague and Uninspiring Language
Instead, rather than using language that emphasizes the suffering of oppressed groups, the focus should be on the policies and social structures that cause harm — and what decision makers need to do to fix them. Those discussions should offer clear and concise solutions. Unfortunately, our research found that messages about solutions are themselves often nonspecific and fail to inspire action.
Part of the problem is an overuse of the amorphous term “child well-being” in nonprofit narratives. While “well-being” is a strong, positive word and a rich concept, without clarification it is merely shorthand for a broad set of outcomes and fails to convey the types of solutions that will make a difference. Left in the dark, many people, including policy makers, default to their own interpretation. For instance, we found that people often think about children’s issues solely in terms of child care and education. This narrow focus leaves out many solutions that advocates know would benefit kids.
A better approach is to specifically show what well-being looks like for children and what is necessary to achieve it. An explanation of the child tax credit, for instance, could include a discussion about how the credit helps parents pay the rent, buy healthy food, and provide their children with opportunities, such as camp or music lessons, all of which are essential to a child’s well-being.
When discussing children’s issues, it’s important to translate collective concern for kids into a collective sense of responsibility — and action. That requires demonstrating that these aren’t just problems experienced by some kids but are part of a larger systemwide set of issues that demand a societal response.
Contextualizing the latest research from across the field of philanthropy, the Snapshot of Today’s Philanthropic Landscape provides nonprofits with the information they need to create informed fundraising strategies.
The Black Lives Matter movement, for example, showed that racism isn’t just perpetrated by a few bad cops or some guys waving Confederate flags. It’s deeply embedded in societal systems that, over centuries, favored white people over Black people — from slavery to Jim Crow to housing and employment discrimination to today’s harmful policing practices. Addressing racism requires dismantling these larger systems, not just taking one-off actions.
Show the Impact of Racism
Similarly, when addressing problems affecting children, nonprofits need to clearly explain why creating a new child-care center or education program isn’t nearly enough. Frequently that involves discussions about how racial inequities that permeate institutions and societal systems have hurt children and their families.
Nearly 40 percent of the communications materials we analyzed mentioned issues involving race, using terms such as “racial equity,” “diversity equity, and inclusion,” and “systemic racism.” While such terms are commonplace in the nonprofit world, we found that most people, both white and Black, either don’t understand what they mean or have a different view of their meaning than advocates. Our focus groups, for example, revealed that many people think of equity as a financial term, associating it with home or business equity.
Such terminology needs to be explained in relatable ways that invite more people into the conversation rather than putting up barriers to involvement. One way to do that is by using examples to show what these concepts look like in real life. Again, in the context of the child tax credit, explaining the rationale behind the policy could begin with a discussion of how unequal employment opportunities in this country have created large wealth disparities between both races and immigrant populations. That would lead to the proposed solution: how a tax credit to boost incomes would help alleviate the effects of such systemic inequity and help all children and their families.
A similar approach should be taken when data is used to illustrate challenges confronting children. Too often we found that data presented in reports and other materials about racial disparities were expected to speak for themselves, with little or no explanation provided for why those disparities existed. Here’s an example of a typical sentence from materials we examined: “In 2018, Black children represented 14 percent of the total child population but 23 percent of all kids in foster care.” Without explaining the causes of such disparities, people fill in their own explanations, frequently relying on racist assumptions about people of color.
For example, people might explain differences in income or wealth by suggesting that work or education isn’t valued in “some communities” and that this explains why “those” (Black and brown) families are less successful. In other words, when context isn’t provided, data are often interpreted in ways that reinforce the assumptions about race that communicators are trying to dispel.
Most Americans, including most policy makers, want to solve the problems facing our kids today. To take full advantage of the increased focus on children’s issues, advocates and foundations need to choose their words carefully. That includes recognizing that few people outside their bubbles understand how public policy relates to children. Rather than reflexively using language that doesn’t mean much to most people — or may even alienate them — advocates need to create narratives that pull people in and compel them to fight for the changes we know kids need.
Vaccinations are one of the most critical strategies to help schools resume and maintain regular operations. On Sept. 9, 2021, the Montgomery County School Board of Education unanimously passed a resolution mandating that all MCPS staff be vaccinated against COVID-19.
Exceptions will be made for employees who provide documentation of and are approved for a medical exemption. In the absence of a medically authorized exemption every MCPS employee must be fully vaccinated by Oct. 29, 2021.
Important Note: Vaccination or authorized medical exemption are a condition of employment. Failure to comply will result in progressive discipline up to and including termination from MCPS. By working together, we can ensure our students are able to safely learn and thrive as they return to school. Our commitments to the entire MCPS community are critical steps to maintaining a successful start to the school year for all students.
Reporting Vaccination Status and Uploading Your COVID-19 Vaccination Certificate
All staff are required to be fully vaccinated and report their vaccination status by Oct. 29, 2021. Please click here to report your status and/or begin the process of uploading your COVID-19 certificate or medical exemption documentation.
For those employees who have submitted the required proof of vaccination no further action is required.
Instructions and more information to both report your vaccination status and upload proof of vaccination can be found at the end of this correspondence.
Proof of Vaccination Procedures
Staff may provide any of the following to satisfy proof of vaccination:
Maryland Department of Health Certificate of COVID-19 Vaccination (or equivalent documentation from employee state of residence). Staff who received their vaccination in the state of Maryland can obtain a copy of their vaccination certificate from the state at the following link: https://app.myirmobile.com/
vaccination verification provided by your health insurance provider; or
a letter from your primary care physician attesting to the employee’s vaccine status.
All information submitted will be protected and kept confidential.
No employee will be required to provide any medical information beyond the vaccination status and the medical exemption documentation, if applicable.For a comprehensive list of free vaccination sites, please click here.
Weekly Testing
Employees who are in the process of completing their vaccinations must continue to comply with the weekly testing requirement until becoming fully vaccinated. Employees who are medically exempt must comply with the weekly testing requirement.
Thank you for all you are doing to keep our students and community safe and healthy. For any technical difficulties, call the MCPS Help Desk at 301-517-5800 or visit their website. If you have questions about COVID leave, please call 301-517-8100, email ERSC@mcpsmd.org
Technical Support Resources
To Report Your Vaccination Status and to Upload Your Proof of Vaccination. If you are having a problem accessing the Vaccination Status form please refer to the support resources provided below.
If you are still having difficulty reporting your vaccination status, reach out to your supervisor for assistance. For a comprehensive list of other free vaccination sites, please click here.
Self reflection is akin to looking at yourself in the mirror. It helps you become aware of your emotions, your deep subconscious beliefs, recurrent thought patterns, inner conflicts and unresolved issues.
By becoming aware of these facets of your personality, you now have the power to discard negative and limiting beliefs and change your focus toward gratitude, abundance, inner peace and balance.
Journaling for self reflection
One of the best and most powerful ways to reflect is through writing, and in that – ‘Journaling’ as it is more structured.
As you put your thoughts on paper on a regular basis, you slowly being to de-clutter your mind and bring things into perspective leading to self awareness, clarify, alignment and inner peace.
While you can start journaling using just about any blank notebook, it is always helpful when you have something more structured. This is where journals come to your help.
Self reflection journals contain questions, prompts and activities that will motivate you to continue writing on a day to day basis. Some journals even have other add-ons like inspirational quotes, coloring pages and interactive elements to keep you motivated.
The following is our curated list of 20 all time best journals that will help you rediscover yourself.
1. Tiny Buddha’s Gratitude Journal
Find on Amazon.com
First on our list is Tiny Buddha’s gratitude journal.
This beautifully crafted journal will help you self reflect and creatively foster gratitude in your life.
This journal contains a combination of creative writing prompts and self reflection questions that are fun, inspiring and thought provoking. In addition, there are 15 beautiful coloring pages sprinkled throughout the journal.
Examples of questions/prompts in the journal:
What’s the best thing that has happened to you today (so far), and what did you most appreciate about it?
What do you most appreciate about spending time in nature?
Though they are not perfect, I appreciate that my family ______
I am grateful that I am healthy enough to _______
Which places (cities, beaches, restaurants, etc.) do you appreciate the most and why?
Example of a coloring page:
Quick facts about this journal
This is a 168-page interactive journal that contains a combination of writing and coloring pages.
Writing pages have ruled lines for you to easily jot down your responses.
You can start anywhere (on any page), no need to follow any particular order.
2. Start Where You Are: A Journal for Self-Exploration
Find on Amazon.com
The ‘Start Where You Are‘ journal is a collection of questions, prompts, exercises and inspirational quotes that will provide you with a powerful outlet to have thoughtful reflections.
Example of questions in this journal:
List five things that always and immediately bring a smile to your face.
Write down ten dreams that haven’t come true yet.
What are three thoughts that made you smile today.
What gives you light?
Quick facts about this journal:
Features vibrant hand-lettering and beautiful watercolor images.
Contains a combination of questions, prompts, exercises and quotes (There are quotes on every other page that relate to the following prompt).
Pages are unruled and there is plenty of room for writing and reflecting.
3. Story of My Life Journal
Find on Amazon.com
This is essentially a blank memoir with pages of prompts for you to ponder, this journal provides thought-provoking questions concerning all the corners of your life. Filling in a journal such as this one feels like meeting yourself for the first time, as you consider questions ranging from your childhood to your present-day self.
Examples of questions in this journal:
Write about the earliest childhood memory of your Father/Mother.
Describe the most difficult thing you’ve ever had to do, either physically or mentally. Did you do it alone or did you have support?
List the top 10 songs you have loved as a teenager. What memories stand out with those songs in the background?
CRTLE, Office of the Provost – Division of Faculty Affairs 800 Greek Row, Box 19128-Trinity Hall, Room 106, Arlington, Texas 76019
Journal writing has become a very popular educational tool which can help students learn subjects as varied as literature and psychology, and is utilized as a key component of experiential learning, where you are both a participant and observer.
As a participant, you contribute to the nonprofit organization in which you are placed. The academic component of your service results from your ability to systematically observe what is going on around you. A well- written journal is a tool which helps you practice the quick movements back and forth from the environment in which you are working to the abstract generalizations you have read or heard about in class.
HOW DO YOU WRITE A REFLECTION JOURNAL?
Buy a notebook or start a computer file – write an entry for each day you conduct your service. Your entries are based on the activities of the day, but they are more than a mere chronology of events. Include detailed descriptions of some aspect of your service environment, whether physical, behavioral, or organizational. These descriptions should sound as if you were describing them to someone who was never there.
Tentative explanations – Speculate as to why something that you have observed firsthand is as it is. You might derive your explanation from a lecture you have heard, a book you have read, or your own reservoir of “common sense.”
Personal judgments – Make judgments about something in your community service environment. There may be people’s actions that you find unpleasant, ways of doing things that are not as you would do them, work environments in which you would not want to remain. These judgments will help you learn about yourself, your values and your limits. Journals allow you to speak your mind.
WHO WILL READ THE JOURNAL?
Journals are very private documents. You should write the entries each day you perform your community service, but you should write them after you have left the placement.
Do not let colleagues read your journal. When you hand in your journal, only the instructor will read your journal and the contents will not be shared with anyone else.
WHAT SHOULD I WRITE IN MY JOURNAL?
Here are a few of the ingredients that go into a keeping a great journal:
Journals should be snapshots filled with sights, sounds, smells, concerns, insights, doubts, fears, and critical questions about issues, people, and, most importantly, yourself.
Honesty is the most important ingredient to successful journals.
A journal is not simply a report. It’s not a work log of tasks, events, times and dates.
Write freely. Grammar/spelling should not be stressed in your writing until the final draft.
Write an entry after each visit. If you can’t write a full entry, jot down random thoughts, images, etc. which you can come back to a day or two later and expand into a colorful verbal picture.
STRUCTURING YOUR WRITING:
Read and reread your entries so that you can see your own development over the course of the semester. You should use the data you have recorded in your journal in writing your paper.
Use the journal as a time to meditate on what you’ve seen, felt, and experienced, and which aspects of the volunteer experience continues to excite, trouble, impress, or unnerve you.
Don’t simply answer the prompts given to you by your professor, but use the questions as a diving board to leap from into a clear or murky pool of thought.
Final journals need to be edited for proper grammar and spelling.
THE MIRROR (A CLEAR REFLECTION OF THE SELF)
Who am I? What are my values?
What have I learned about myself through this experience?
Do I have more/less understanding or empathy than I did before volunteering?
In what ways, if any, has your sense of self, your values, your sense of “community,” your willingness to serve others, and your self-confidence/self-esteem been impacted or altered through this experience?
Have your motivations for volunteering changed? In what ways?
How has this experience challenged stereotypes or prejudices you have/had? Any realizations, insights, or especially strong lessons learned or half-glimpsed?
Will these experiences change the way you act or think in the future? Have you given enough, opened up enough, cared enough?
How have you challenged yourself, your ideals, your philosophies, your concept of life or of the way you live?
THE MICROSCOPE (MAKES THE SMALL EXPERIENCE LARGE)
What happened? Describe your experience.
What would you change about this situation if you were in charge? What have you learned about this agency, these people, or the community?
Was there a moment of failure, success, indecision, doubt, humor, frustration, happiness, sadness?
Do you feel your actions had any impact?
What more needs to be done? Does this experience compliment or contrast with what you’re learning in class? How?
Has learning through experience taught you more, less, or the same as the class? In what ways?
THE BINOCULARS (MAKES WHAT APPEARS DISTANT, APPEAR CLOSER)
From your service experience, are you able to identify any underlying or overarching issues that influence the problem?
What could be done to change the situation?
How will this alter your future behaviors/attitudes/and career?
How is the issue/agency you’re serving impacted by what is going on in the larger political/social sphere?
What does the future hold?
What can be done?
FIRST EXCERPT
Today I got to really to really help people. It was such a thrill to use my knowledge to really help people. Generally I see my skills as somewhat esoteric. Being a history student sometimes feels a bit wasteful. But today I helped a middle-aged woman called Marie. To her passing the language section of the GED really means something concrete. My one semester of Spanish really helped. I couldn’t really say anything useful, but I could use little examples to help him: “What would the Spanish word for ‘it’ be here? ‘Los’? That’s plural isn’t it? In English ‘los’ is always ‘them’, not ‘it’.” It’s so nice to feel useful.
Apparently my background check still hasn’t gone through, and I’m not supposed to be helping. I know this is a side issue, but it is one of the things about volunteering that upsets me. When a potential volunteer approaches an opportunity full of enthusiasm, and a background check takes over a week, and no one contacts her, it is easy to quickly loose that enthusiasm. I was the only person assisting the two teachers; they clearly needed me. But I no one contacted me about the classes starting. I had to take my own initiative. I don’t feel particularly wanted by the organization. This has been a problem for me in the past when I tried to volunteer. It seems sometimes organizations think people who are not being paid don’t care about details.
SECOND EXCERPT
My first day, and already I am reminded of why I love doing this…those revelations about your life that you can only acquire while being a part of others. If I wanted to be bland I could say that I spent the day teaching homeless children how to make pop up cards, but that would not do justice to what really happened. It was bitter sweet, to have the importance of a mothers care in hard times highlighted in front of me, while the pain of the recent loss of my own mother is still strong and undoubtedly will always be.
Alva didn’t think twice about who she would make a card for… “her mama” she proclaimed proudly. She chatted away on how her mother worked late at the ballpark and I could sense just how proud she was of her mother as she described her mothers work duties, “she works the register and sometimes she makes the food”. I knew the feeling, my own mother was a welder, the only woman where she worked and although many people would look down at the job, I was very proud. The burns on her arms and the dirt under her fingernails showed me just how much she loved me. She worked for all of us and it didn’t matter that I didn’t have everything because I had all that mattered. It gave me hope that, although the current situation Alva found herself in at such a young age was difficult, she was going to be alright …maybe better than a lot of kids sleeping in their own beds because in her life she had what really mattered. That can make all the difference.
Yesterday I held the card that my mother had sent me when I first went away for college. I can’t express how much it meant to me, maybe even more than when I first received it. It read, “I’m missing something…you.” Gosh, how it seems so appropriate yet so ironic. I was thinking of how exactly I would start my creative project class for this course…what better way than a scrapbook…with a card to my own mother to start.
So it’s my third week in the program and my second week with students. Last week was short because of all the Holiday and Inservice days. But this week I feel like I’m starting to hit my stride and find my place working in the classrooms with the teachers and students.
I was part of helping a student get organized. The result of which was that they realized they in fact did not need to carry their book bag from class to class, they really just needed their binder.
I also helped a student with ADHD find a positive way to get attention by contributing to the class discussion. It may have only lasted for one day this time, but it’s definitely a move in the right direction for this student.
I feel like I am actually being of service again. And that’s a wonderful feeling. I am happy to celebrate the little every day accomplishments and small victories with the students. I am enjoying getting to know them as individuals and starting to see paths to assisting them with their Social-Emotional Learing.
To this end, I have been asking students quietly while they’re working on independent assignments how they are doing. This provides an oppertunity to have a conversation about the current assignment that is more student led. And I hope over time, as we continue to build rapport, will become an avenue for students to open up about other things they may have going on and want to talk about.
I am looking forward to getting to introduce the MyScore tool to the students, to help them gauge and track their own Social-Emotional Learning. And in the meantime I will continue to build rapport as I provide steady, consistent, caring support as needed.
Posts by Paul Costello1
