This is Mike Ruhl from the University of Illinois and I am currently a senior preparing to begin my Student Teaching semester. I immediately thought of a speaker at the Illinois Education Association State Conference I just recently attended when I seen this article. In this speakers classroom she would always create a real-world context for her students to solve certain problems and she even had her students create a miniature version of a bus that her students could climb into and “travel” across the country while discovering how mathematics is use when creating maps for certain areas. I truly believe that providing students with a story motivates them to learn more effectively in the classroom!

Agreed. In my follow-up, I was trying to discern whether the story was just contextual drapery or a more substantial structure.

Yep.

We won’t know to a very granular level in our study, at least not beyond how we define story context vs. story (see below). I’m not sure anyone knows yet (though I admit I’m behind in the literature since moving to industry)…but I definitely agree it’s a really interesting and useful question.

Here are the definitions we used in our NSF proposal:

> For the purpose of this project, we adopt Bal’s (1997) definition of story as a particular presentation of “a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors” (p. 1). A fictional setting, or story context, is defined as the elements of a story world that provide a concrete scenario and vocabulary for the concepts to be learned and applied.

Super interesting, Gail. I think I need to know more about which elements of story are salient here — ie. which help with learning and which help with interest and curiosity, and which help with neither.

I’m involved with an NSF Pathways grant that’s looking at the use of story in teaching computer science with games (we use games because of where we want to head in a bigger project): http://gailcarmichael.com/research/projects/storycsed

In our research, we felt it was important to distinguish between story context (what you talk about inmost of your post), and story (more what you are talking about in your closing remark, with elements like “heroism, conflicts, rising action, resolution, etc.”). We developed abstract versions of games without any story or context, with story context, and with stories.

We are still working on analyzing the data, but in my earliest pilot I found that the full story was actually a bit of a distraction for the students. The story context worked better. In the pilot, I used activities that were not games strictly speaking.

I hope to delve more deeply into storytelling and whether it actually improves learning outcomes (outside of being engaging). It seems easier to use storytelling effectively in less abstract subjects than math and computer science, but it would be great to figure out how.

I taught my first two years of high school math at a school for “alternative” (i.e., “at risk”) kids. Virtually all tested at a grade 4 level or less in math and literacy. Attendance was sporadic, behavior was a nightmare, getting most of them to do any work was a fool’s errand and I was that designated fool for math (no colleagues in the school, in other words). After one semester of flailing with no set curriculum, I tried CPMP, aka Core-Plus. The first semester was a disaster, though at least I had something to focus on. The second semester (fall of my second year) wasn’t much better. Then, I hit on the idea of skipping to the unit on discrete math, which deal with, among other things, Euler paths and circuits, critical path diagrams (pretty much of a waste) and graph coloring. A few students got the Euler path and circuit stuff reasonably well, but the winner was the graph coloring sub-unit. That got one girl to suddenly write a legitimate A exam after having failed test after test with less than minimal effort. I presented on this at an NCTM annual meeting in 2000 or 2001 in which I urged people interested in using integrated curricular materials with challenging (and challenged) students not to repeat my mistakes (which were legion).

In retrospect, I would be prepared to experiment and try to find a unit that you think would get students excited. The beauty of the graph coloring and other discrete math topics is that they don’t depend so heavily on student success in other topics. Counting is counting, and there is a lot of inherent play in things like graph-coloring problems. Art gallery problems can be a lot of fun and still lead to deep mathematical thinking and learning, done right. Joe Rosenstein at Rutgers has a self-published textbook I’m going to be reviewing soon that has all sorts of material that I believe students could succeed with even if they’ve not done well in math before.

Finally, group work takes enormous seed-planting, cultivation, nurturing, and patience to be successful, even with students who have decent mathematical backgrounds. You should likely not make it the mountain you and your students die on.

Hi Matt, thanks for the question. I suspect it will be difficult for any of us to weigh in on your context while standing so far outside of it. I wouldn’t make group work the hill that good pedagogy dies on, though. I don’t know if CPM’s group work protocols have been tested in situations like yours where the students have vastly different existing prior knowledge and where attendance may be too sporadic to establish the working relationships that group work demands.

I have been unsuccessfully teaching CPM to my community school students (mostly expelled kids) for 3/4ths of the year so far. My biggest hurdles would be getting my challenging population of students to participate in group work and very sporadic student attendance. I read this blog and have read/bought in to Jo Boaler’s books/philosophy. I have not had any training with CPM. Because I have not figured out how to make CPM work for me, my very supportive admin (I’m not being sarcastic, they really want to help) wants me to “I do, we do, you do” my kids and possibly ditch the curriculum. I am not sure what to tell them.

My best approach so far is to ask for some more patience with them and let me try some different strategies for implementing CPM. The analogy that is coming to mind is that its the advent of the car, and because I cant get the engine running right, they want me to ride my bike instead of try to fix the engine. Maybe that’s a crappy analogy, but its all I’ve got at the moment.

Any advice from anyone would be much appreciated.

Interesting question, Lilian. I think this storytelling process has more to say about the floor of the task than the ceiling. if you’d like students to be able to persevere through word problems, it may be helpful to give them a way to access those problems like Anna describes here.