How do we come out of this better?
That was the essential question that surfaced in my conversation with Marco Torres this week. Marco is a friend and former colleague who is a master at using story to provoke new ways of thinking.
In the times we’re in now with the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s especially important to be asking the right questions first instead of jumping directly to solutions. What is Marco’s tip for schools as we navigate the unknown together? Curate, cultivate and create.
Curate - Create a process and identify a central location to receive your community’s questions. Build a team to help categorize the questions and curate them based on categories or themes. Create a common language.
Cultivate - Identify any holes, asking “what do we know and what do we need to know?” Start to fill in these holes by cultivating information you already have.
Create - What do we need to create? Using the storytelling framework (below), start documenting and sharing your school’s best practices with the community.
The Power of Story
Everyone has a story of hope in these challenging times. Stories keep us going. They give us hope, make us believe, get us to empathize and realize we have questions we hadn’t thought of before.
How can we use stories to build learning communities? By capturing and sharing what learning looks like either as a need and concern, a lesson learned or a victory. Someone’s need and concern could be someone else’s lesson learned. To start this process, Marco suggests using his storytelling formula to organize your thoughts and reflections on what you’re learning in this new distance learning world.
What is the story you want to tell?
For example - include four examples that demonstrate what it is.
Why is it important? What are the benefits?
Marco Torres is a professional filmmaker and photographer who uses digital storytelling skills to transform learning. As the Senior Specialist/Learning Engineer at Apple, he was in charge of designing and implementing a professional learning plan for teachers, leaders and students of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Marco taught middle school and high school for ten years, was a media coach, an education technology director, and one of the professional learning leaders for one of the nation’s largest urban schools in Los Angeles. He has been recognized locally and internationally for his accomplishments in the classroom. Marco is also a keynote speaker focusing on the why, what and how of creativity. Follow the stories he’s capturing right now on silverliningchallenge.org.