I have believed for some time that good educational practice is intimately related to the notion of good storytelling. As I was reading today about this massive investment that Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and other tech leaders are making in education through “Altschool,” I was surprised by the connection that I quickly made between that investment in those schools and storytelling. The connection came from a passage in that piece that described the schools as implementing individualized learning, a “Reggio Emilia-Approach Intertwined With Technology.” Knowing nothing about Reggio Emilia caused me to jump to this Wikipedia article on the schools in Reggia Emilia, Italy. Here is the quote from that piece that caught my attention:
For example, teachers in Reggio Emilia assert the importance of being confused as a contributor to learning; thus a major teaching strategy is purposely to allow mistakes to happen, or to begin a project with no clear sense of where it might end.
It seems that the idea of being confused, allowing mistakes to happen, or having no clear sense of how a project is to end is tantamount to the essence of good story telling, no?