Long ago, the public schools in the U.S. (and nearly everywhere else) made a decision that has affected the teaching of storytelling ever since:
Grades are to be objective!
That sounds harmless, doesn’t it? After all, we don’t want grades to be based on teacher bias or on random chance. But, in the case of storytelling, a focus on objective evaluation actually undermines key skills.
The Value of Grading
Grading can be very helpful: done appropriately, it can give students feedback on what they already know well, what they need to work on, and what progress they’ve made in the time since their previous grades.
A problem arises, though, when we try to grade things objectively that are NOT inherently objective!
Does Objective Grading Work with Storytelling?
The “problem” with grading storytelling is actually storytelling's greatest strength: storytelling is subjective. Like much of human cognition and communication, storytelling involves very complex processes that, in turn, have very complex results.
When people tell stories in friendly conversation, for example, they usually seek connection: the vivid sharing of experience that storytelling excels in. They also seek resonance between their experience and the experience of their friends, partly by trading stories back and forth.
As effective as such shared experience can be, though,…
