Acting Head of Learning at The Story Museum in Oxford, Lucy Webber, shares their Teacher Development Fund approach through the learning journey of one of their core teachers, Jade Matthews from St Christopher’s C of E school in Oxford.
The Story Museum works with schools to harness the power of stories to support children’s learning, well-being and socio-emotional literacy. Through the Story Exchange, storytellers and teachers have become co-learners, with teachers developing skills in oral storytelling and exploring their potential to develop children’s emotional literacy.
Here we share the transformative experience of the programme via the learning journey of one of our teachers, Jade Matthews, a Year 2 class teacher, head of Key Stage 1 and reading lead teacher at St Christopher’s C of E school in Oxford.
The teachers initially attended storytelling training in the wonderfully immersive museum, learning how to tell a story using a structure rather than a script.
“I was excited but nervous in the beginning, and I didn’t fully appreciate the power of stories. I didn’t feel like a storyteller.”
In turn, storytellers learned from the teachers with a particular focus on PSHE and supporting students to understand and manage their emotions. The teachers were paired with a single storyteller for 12 in-school sessions over the two years. In the early days of the project, Jade observed the storyteller and their students’ responses.
“My class was quiet, they found it tricky to talk about their emotions… if they were upset with something, they would show it rather than talk about it …”
As the project progressed, Jade worked with her storyteller to co-plan sessions. She began to tell the stories herself and to plan activities to support her class’s development of an emotional vocabulary. Discussing emotions within the context of a story released the children from their self-consciousness and she observed them beginning to express their emotions more openly.
Jade was a member of the Teacher Development Fund core-cohort, which provided opportunities for her to connect with organisations nationwide. A middle leader at school, she described how the project enabled her to develop storytelling into her area of expertise, confidently leading her colleagues.
“Without the project, I don’t think I would have had the confidence to cascade to my colleagues and try new things for both PSHE and oracy.”
Responding to a challenge to share the project with colleagues, Jade’s first idea was to offer an open-door week of storytelling activities which colleagues could observe in her class and then try out in their own. Undaunted by the in-school difficulties in releasing colleagues for this, she tried a new approach: creating story-bag resources for every year group for each of their PSHE themes. These will be available for colleagues to use throughout the school.
“Now I’m very keen to share how to storytell with others. I love stories, I always use them, and I feel a lot more confident.”
Our plans for a Symposium in July include teachers and storytellers co-leading workshops, sharing our learnings with the wider educational network in Oxfordshire. At our final in-museum training, the teachers and the storytellers created visual evaluations of the project.
All of us incorporated themes of growth; an unfurling of skills and confidence as the project progressed.
“It’s sort of a journey—from where I started, where I feel I am now, where I want to be—I feel immense pride. In the middle is the core of storytelling.”
The Story Museum’s new 1001 digital stories website will provide teachers with a powerful search engine to find stories to match themes of emotional literacy and classroom resources which have been developed through the 120+ co-taught in-school sessions throughout the pattern.
It has been a privilege to support this dedicated group of teachers on their journeys through the project.
Pat Cochrane and Vicky Storey, evaluation support consultants for rounds 3–8 of the Teacher Development Fund, reflect on the differing approaches to evaluation across TDF projects and share some of the ways that colleagues have enabled genuine exploration and learning as an integral part of the process.
TDF evaluation consultants, Pat Cochrane and Vicky Storey, speak with three senior leaders from recent Teacher Development Fund programmes to explore their role within the evaluation of their projects. Together, they discuss how senior leaders can lead and sustain evaluation processes to shape programme development and enhance professional learning outcomes.
