(2002-02-14) i

Roger Schank on the Story Telling Curriculum. It seems to me this might even better be called Simulation based curriculum (see Michael Schrage Serious Play). A good education relies upon the creation of stories that a student can participate in and feel deeply about. This means those stories must take a significant amount of time, must have others playing roles the student will encounter in later life... Students would work in groups of three or four. They would be given detailed information about the company they were working for, along with detailed assignments. They would, with the help of an advisor, establish roles to play and timetables for the completion of the various assignments. Supporting materials would be made available and faculty and mentors would be able to answer questions and point students in the right direction... This is an Iterative process that is at the heart of real teaching utilizing one-on-one tutoring. There is no place for either classes or lectures in this curriculum. There are some courses that stand alone, however... The SCC can be presented entirely online, entirely in a traditional school setting or as a mixture of the two...

For these reasons and more, there is great opportunity in the field of building online master's degrees... Where else would the SCC work? One obvious answer is in High School... The SCC is about eliminating courses in favor of curricula that tell a meaningful story that the student is likely to encounter after graduation. Now, many high school students are simply preparing for college, and thus one could argue that they take trigonometry in order to take college math. The fact that this isn't really true may not matter in this case. What is important is that we identify some stories that the student might want to live in high school because they may come up again. Here are some examples (Stimulating Learning Projects): running a small business, working on a political campaign, building a house, designing a city, running an organization, being a parent, creating an invention, making a discovery, convincing an organization to do things differently... The advantage of the SCC is that it is considerably cheaper to build than a full-scale simulation. The disadvantage is that it requires mentors who are available to tutor students. This is not such a problem for schools, but it could be a problem for businesses...