I could usually get students to write about something that really happened, while it was more challenging to get them to make something up from scratch. In my own classroom, I tended to avoid having my students write short stories because personal narratives were more accessible. When teaching narrative writing, many teachers separate personal narratives from short stories. A Note About Form: Personal Narrative or Short Story? I used this process with middle school students, but it would work with most age groups. How do we get them to write those stories? I’m going to share the process I used for teaching narrative writing. If we can pass that on to our students, then we will be going beyond a school assignment we will be doing something transcendent. If we’re going to talk about how to teach students to write stories, we should start by thinking about why we tell stories at all. It’s something to celebrate, to study, to perfect. I didn’t bother to tell them that the ability to tell a captivating story is one of the things that makes human beings extraordinary. I forgot to talk about the power of story. When my students asked why we read novels and stories, and why we wrote personal narratives and fiction, my defense was pretty lame: I probably said something about the importance of having a shared body of knowledge, or about the enjoyment of losing yourself in a book, or about the benefits of having writing skills in general. We can change a law, inspire a movement, make people care fiercely about things they’d never given a passing thought.īut when we study storytelling with our students, we forget all that. We can forge new relationships and strengthen the ones we already have. With a well-told story we can help a person see things in an entirely new way.

“Those who tell the stories rule the world.” This proverb, attributed to the Hopi Indians, is one I wish I’d known a long time ago, because I would have used it when teaching my students the craft of storytelling. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. Sponsored by Peergrade and Microsoft Class Notebook

Short stories to write for class