Steve Bell, published and De Akelei, Assendelft, The Netherlands

ISBN 90-74043-29-1

Learning is a partnership that requires the active participation of both teacher and pupil. Skills are refined through practice but the repetition this involves can be dull and boring for both teacher and pupil if care is not taken to create an effective learning climate in the classroom. Ideally the opportunities for skill practice will still be present but will be organized in such a way that they seem imaginative and exciting for both learners and teachers.

On a recent visit to a small village school in the Highlands of Scotland I almost missed lunch because a five-year-old child wished to tell me all that he knew about dinosaurs. His head was full of information that was both detailed and accurate. I made the mistake of asking the names of dinosaurs that could fly. "Dinosaurs don't fly," I was corrected. 'Those are flying reptiles". As he pointed to a poster of silhouettes he named each one with great care. Who was I to argue with what he said? He could have gone on for hours but it was necessary for both of us to snatch a lunch. Here was a child who has knowledge that he cannot yet communicate through the written word. He uses other forms of communication - talking, drawing and miming. All he needed was an audience and a purpose. The main limitation was one of time.

When teachers are required to teach all the usual school subjects, as are teachers in primary schools, the only way open to them because of the severe limitation of time, is to use an integrated topic approach of some kind. In the case of the Scottish primary schools Language (mother-tongue),and Mathematics are defined as being basic skills which have to be time tabled at separate times in the school day. They are usually taught using structured programs of wide variety. These basic skills also become relevant in their use within the other three areas of the curriculum which are all of an integrated form - environmental studies, expressive arts and moral and religious education.

In order, therefore, to provide the necessary practice in the classroom it would seem sensible to bring examples of real life into the school. One way of doing this is through the use of a curriculum design structure known as Storyline.

Stories usually have three elements which are woven together - people(and/or animals), time (past, present or future) and place ( the environment or setting of the story). Traditionally, stories have been used to teach about the past in the form of sagas, myths and legends, to educate using parables and metaphors and to entertain. Children usually love stories. They will often happily listen to the same story told over and over again.

Teachers are required to teach about people in society, about families, about good and bad, about friends and enemies, about our environment and the threats to it, about lessons to be learned from the past and about what we can expect in the future, about communication in all its various forms, about values moral and religious.

Many problems are solved for the teacher when the story form is used as the basis of the curricular designing. First of all a story has sequence -a beginning, a development and an ending. Because of the context any related activity has an audience and a purpose. The previous one supports each episode. Only the teacher knows what the next new development will be and so every day can create surprises that in turn provide excitement.

In Storyline the story is developed as a shared experience because, although the teacher knows the sequence, it is the pupils who create the detail of the story. The teacher may know that the children will design families but it is the children who produce the visuals, who write biographies and physical descriptions, who make model homes for them, who discuss their interests and hobbies and their personality traits etc. So, it is not just the children who get surprises. Each day is new for the teacher, too.

Mutual respect is encouraged because there are so many opportunities for the teacher to demonstrate the value to the pupils of their work. This can be shown in the way that the teacher listens to the pupils' ideas and views, by the care with which the pupils' work is displayed and by encouraging the pupils to design their own criteria for a task and then evaluating the end-products themselves.

Storyline Design Format. Over the years different forms of topic outline have been produced. The most up-to-date and useful has six columns that provide a short but precise summary of the topic plan. Column 1: Storyline In this column are the chapter headings of the sequence to the story.

Column 2: Key Questions These are suggested key questions which raise problems to which answers must be found. Column 3: Activities These activities can take a wide variety of form and are designed to attempt to answer the stated key question.

Column 4: Organization This column contains information about the best grouping for the activity - class, pairs, groups of 3,4,or 5 or…

Column 5: Resources It is often necessary for the teacher to have a special resource ready for a particular activity e.g. a tape recorder, a map of Europe, scrap material etc..

Column 6: Outcomes. Each activity produces some kind of end-product. These outcomes are listed here and can be useful for evaluation and/or assessment purposes.

Steve Bell Educational Consultant University of Strathclyde e-mail stevebell@strath.ac.uk

 http://www.acskive.dk/storIntr.htm