Remember when you were a kid and loved stories?  Like me, you might remember gathering around your 1^st grade teacher as she read a new chapter each day. I remember listening to Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle by Betty MacDonald who lived in an “upside-down” house and provided magical cures to children with bad habits. Great fun…and, as it turns out – great learning, too!

Whatever type of training you might design, develop or deliver, you probably face challenges keeping people engaged. Have you ever caught folks dreaming during class? Taking a mental nap while completing an e-learning module? Well…it turns out that one way to keep folks interested is through the age-old method of storytelling.

Storytelling can help learners place new skills into context and, perhaps most important…keeps them wanting more. They want to find out where the story line goes, what happens to the characters and how it all ends. How perfect!

In our work, we’ve had some great successes using storytelling for all sorts of learning – from classroom to e-learning and many types in between. For example, we recently developed some e-learning with a main character – our “hero” – whose story unfolded to reveal the correct skills to use (and not to use) in a customer service role. As the learners got to know our hero, and watched his story unfold, they not only learned the skills, but saw how using the skills worked to the benefit of our main character.

Have you used storytelling in your work? How did you do it? How was it received? Any advice for the rest of us? Let’s engage in some storytelling of our own…and see what we can learn!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 11:33 am and is filed under Leadership Development, Low-Cost Training Solutions, VILT, WBT, e-Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.