TITLE: Storytelling as a Source of Insight
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 09, 2014  5:40 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Last week, someone tweeted a link to
<A HREF="http://sellsbrothers.com/posts/details/12544">
   Learning to Learn</A>,
a decade-old blog entry by Chris Sells.  His lesson is two-fold.
To build a foundation of knowledge, he asks "why?" a lot.  That
is a good tactic in many settings.

He learned a method for gaining deeper insight by accident.  He
was tabbed to teach a five-day course.  When he reached Day 5,
he realized that he didn't know the material well enough -- he
didn't know what to say.  The only person who could take over
for him was out of town.  So he hyperventilated for a while,
then decided to fake it.

That's when learning happened:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 As I was giving the slides that morning on COM structured
 storage (a particularly nasty topic in COM), I found myself
 learning how it it worked as I told the story to my audience.
 All the studying and experimentation I'd done had given me
 the foundation, but not the insights.  The insights I gained
 as I explained the technology.  It was like fireworks.  I
 went from through those topics in a state of bliss as all of
 what was really going on underneath exploded in my head.  That
 moment taught me the value of teaching as a way of learning
 that I've used since.  Now, I always explain stuff as a way to
 gain insight into whatever I'm struggling with, whether it's
 through speaking or writing.  For me, and for lots of others,
 story telling is where real insight comes from.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I have been teaching long enough to know that it doesn't always
go this smoothly.  Often, when I don't know what to say, I
don't do a very good job.  Occasionally, I fail spectacularly.
But it happens surprisingly often just as Sells describes.  If
we have a base of knowledge, the words come, and in explaining
an idea for the first time -- or the hundredth -- we come to
understand it in a new, deeper way.  Sometimes, we
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2008-07.html#e2008-07-09T13_57_17.htm">
   write to learn</A>.
Other times, we teach.

We can help our students benefit from this phenomenon, too.  Of
course, we ask them to write.  But we can go further with
in-class activities in which students discuss topics and explain
them to one another.  Important cognitive processing happens
when students explain a concept that doesn't happen when they
study on our own.

I think the teach-to-learn phenomenon is at play in the "why?"
tactic we use to learn in the first place.  The answer to a why
is an reason, an explanation.  Asking "why?" is the beginning of
telling stories to ourselves.

Story telling is, indeed, a source of deeper insight.
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