Students spent six weeks listening to, watching, developing, writing and eventually recording their own stories. The unit was a success; it sparked the young readers’ and writers’ storytelling abilities and offered lessons in empathy, courage and multi-modal literacy.
“We certainly practice [responding to prompts about short readings] in other ways, but I also wanted to just bring the joy of storytelling back to kids,” said Lifshitz.
In an age where writing in school is often focused on fulfilling standardized test requirements, personal narrative writing units can offer a more personalized approach to literacy.
Personal Narrative Unit
Lifshitz starts the unit by introducing her students to examples of personal narratives from The Moth’s archives. The fifth graders then sample more of the pre-approved stories on their own. As the students listened to the stories, watched the videos and read the transcripts, they worked on annotating the text and answered questions like: What is this story about? How can this story help others?
Then students brainstormed stories from their own lives and shared these stories with their peers. Lifshitz said the energy from her students during the brainstorming was palpable and resulted in stories with titles like, “When Petsitting Goes Wrong,” “The Hardest Math Problem” and “Grandpa and Grandma Day.”
Once each student landed on a story they wanted to develop further, they mapped them out using a graphic organizer and studied four storytelling strategies. “Snapshots” describe in detail things that could be seen; “Thought-shots” describe the thoughts and emotions that the writer was experiencing; “Exploding important moments” magnified significant parts of the story; And “Adding in reflection” encouraged students to share a lesson that their story could teach.
Additionally, Lifshitz reflected on her own journey using The Moth in our latest episode of the MindShift Podcast. She describes the community of teachers she developed as she started sharing her own teaching stories with the world, and the difference it made in reigniting her excitement with teaching.
“As my voice found an audience, as our stories formed the basis for a strong community, my teaching began to change and I began to grow, and writing was such a huge part of that for me,” Lifshitz said in the podcast. “Maybe that is why storytelling is so important to me, because it was this storytelling that allowed me to connect with audiences, to develop community, to be challenged, to be exposed to others in the world.”
The Moth Model
While Lifshitz developed her own unit, The Moth has a curriculum for K-12 teachers who are a part of their Teacher’s Lounge program. The Moth also hosts in-person afterschool and summer programs for teens, as well as virtual workshops.
It’s rare for teens to find a space where they are free to tell their own stories, uninterrupted, for five minutes “unless you’re talking to the internet in a void,” said Ana Stern, The Moth’s senior manager of education. At the end of the eight-week sessions, the teens share their stories for the whole group. The “slam,” as they call it, is also recorded. The recordings are given to each student and they get to decide what they want to do with them.
Some teens perform their story at the slam and never look at the recording again, said Stern, and that’s okay.
According to Stern, building a community comes first because storytelling can be a vulnerable experience. “We really spend a lot of time concentrating on building as brave and as safe a space as possible,” she said. And the program encourages students to lead with curiosity and withhold judgement when giving peer-to-peer feedback, she continued. Often, by the end of the eight-week program Stern hears feedback from students like, “I never thought my story would matter” and “I never thought I had anything to say.”
“Through the workshop, they’re realizing not only do they have something to say, but they have folks who want to hear them as well,” said Stern.
Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Ki Sung: Welcome to MindShift, the podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Ki Sung, and with me today is MindShift reporter Marlena Jackson-Retondo.
Marlena Jackson-Retondo: Hi, Ki.
Ki Sung: Hi, Marlena. So you have a story today that’s about writing, but it’s really about something else. Tell us more.
Marlena Jackson-Retondo: Yeah, I’m here to tell you about a teacher named Jessica Lifshitz. Jessica has been teaching for two decades, but over time, she began to notice a shift in the writing stamina of her fifth graders. They were petering out and not really interested in writing.
Ki Sung: Struggling with student engagement, that sounds like a really familiar problem teachers have, especially post pandemic.
Marlena Jackson-Retondo: Yeah, students weren’t connecting to traditional writing prompts for personal narratives in the way that they used to. Like how did the student spend their summer? What was their favorite memory? Something was missing, both from the text prompts and the student assignments, so she out an idea from the moth. In the moth, adults perform their stories in front of a live audience, usually about three stories per episode, and these stories are grouped by themes like timeless love, football, and grocery trips.
Jess’s students read their moth-style stories about fifth grade stuff, with titles like When Pet Sitting Goes Wrong.
Speaker: When I got into the backyard, I couldn’t find the pit bull. I was just like, oh my god, oh god, oh my God, oh God, Oh my God.
Marlena Jackson-Retondo: Grandpa and grandma day.
Speaker: Grandma always makes the best lunches. Cucumbers, mango, watermelon, tuna, croissants, grapes. I would put it all on my plate and start making food monsters.
Marlena Jackson-Retondo: And the hardest math problem.
Speaker: Once, when I was doing math, my teacher introduced me to an indescribably hard math problem. If my head had a fuse, like where a bomb would be, it would blow.
Marlena Jackson-Retondo: We’ll tell you why Jessica wanted to do this after the break.
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Marlena Jackson-Retondo: Teacher Jessica Lifshitz does something special in her classroom. Instead of having her students respond to boring writing prompts on paper, she has them tell stories about their lives to each other.
Ki Sung: Okay Marlena, that sounds great. So what’s the real reason Jess has her students do this?
Marlena Jackson-Retondo: Well, I thought we’d get a little meta, so I asked Jess Lifshitz to do something a little different for you, our listeners. I asked just to tell the story of why she came to teach her students about narrative storytelling all of the month. She performed her piece in front of a tiny audience live near Chicago. Please welcome Jess Lifshitz.
Jess Lifshitz: My students are storytellers.
Their stories fill the spaces in which we learn. And when I think of my storytellers, I think of one student in particular. She is a master storyteller and her name is Lucy. Every morning we begin our days with a check-in question, a quick way to ease into our morning, a way for everyone to have their voice heard before we dig into the harder work of the day.
The questions are simple. What is the thing you are most proud of or what is your biggest fear?
And Lucy, she turns every answer into an adventure. Like the time when the question asked about your scariest moment. And Lucy launched into the ordeal that ensued when her dog ran away and she searched her entire neighborhood to find her only to return home and find her dog waiting for her in the backyard. Or the time she was answering a question about the worst injury you’ve ever had and it turned into a five minute retelling. Or the time she was wrapped in a mermaid blanket and turned over in her bed and fell directly onto her humidifier, smacking her face and leaving her with a permanent scar on her cheek.
There is rarely a day that goes by where she doesn’t give us all a good story.
Now I’ve been a teacher for more than 20 years. In those 20 years, I have heard my share of childhood adventures told through the dramatic voices of my students. But in those 20 years, I have also had to read the often dry words of those same students as they write in response to the boring prompts that we are required to assign from time to time. You know the kind. Prompts like, ‘What is something you did this summer?’ Or ‘What is an important moment you spent with someone you love?’
I don’t know what it is, but something about those prompts just sucks the soul out of a story. All that heart, all that voice that students like Lucy naturally pour into their stories seems to disappear when they are asked to write those same stories out for an assignment.
And after 20 years of watching the joy slip out of a story, I decided that I needed to do something to try to recapture the energy that filled my students’ stories when they were not writing for an an assignment, I wanted their classroom writing to be filled with the same kind of energy that filled every one of Lucy’s stories.
As I began to wrestle with how to bring this joy back to my students and to their stories, I started to think about my own history with writing. When I was a kid, I never saw myself as a writer. I saw writing as something I had to do, a task that I had complete. But at a certain point in my life, that changed. At some point, writing became a way for me to process the world.
Writing brought me peace. Writing became so much more than a task. It became a way to connect with myself and with others. Writing become a way for me to form community.
So when did that happen? For me, that transformation occurred when I started to write about my life as a fifth grade literacy teacher. This was in the days when the internet was a kinder place, when blogging wasn’t a career, when we weren’t worried about being influencers.
And this amazing thing happened through my writing. In a time when I felt isolated as a teacher, stagnant and bored with the teaching I was doing, I found others who opened up a whole new world for me through the sharing of their stories. I read the stories of others and they inspired me to think about teaching in a whole way.
As my voice found an audience, as our stories formed the basis for a strong community, my teaching began to change and I began to grow. And writing was such a huge part of that for me. Maybe that is why storytelling is so important to me, because it was this storytelling that allowed me to connect with audiences, to develop community, to be challenged, to be exposed to others in the world.
I was fine until I learned what else was out there. And then I became better because of it.
That is what I wanted for my students. I wanted my students to see storytelling as a way to connect with others. As a way to feel less alone in this world.
So I started to think about how to cultivate the same kind of experience for my students. And I kept thinking about the role that an audience plays in our storytelling. When our stories have a place to land, a place where they matter and can cause others to see the world in a new or different way, that is when our stories feel the most worthwhile.
And in all those boring writing prompts, the only audience my students saw for their stories was me, their teacher.
I needed to find a way to give them an audience beyond just me and to make their stories matter. And as I started to think about telling stories for an audience, my mind began to wander to one of my favorite public radio podcasts, the Moth Radio Hour.
How many times did I sat in my car at the end of a long day needing to hear the end of a Moth radio hour story? Sometimes those driveway moments were filled with laughter and sometimes with tears, but every one of those moments had one thing in common, a compelling story told in front of an audience that caused me to feel something in connection with the person telling the story.
It was those thoughts of the purpose of storytelling and of the Moth radio hour that led me to the realization that this year, my fifth graders and I would start our writing year with our very own Moth story hour. We would find a way to tell our stories, to use our stories to connect us, to learn from one another’s stories and to build our classroom community on the foundation of the stories that we would share.
I have a lot of hopes for my students and I had a lot hopes of what a Moth Story Hour might be able to do for my student and for me.
Let me share a few of those hopes with you.
Hope number one. In a world where far too much of the writing we ask our students to do in school is connected to the tests that they will take, it is my hope that my students can find a way to use writing to connect us to each other instead.
Hope number two, it is hope that if my students are able to feel the ways in which writing can serve a genuine purpose, that it can make them better, they will see the other benefits of writing on their own.
And finally, hope number three is really a hope for myself and my fellow educators. In order for our students to be able to feel the ways in which writing can serve these genuine purposes, we as educators must have the freedom to craft for our student the kinds of writing experiences that cultivate those possibilities.
And for me and for my fifth grade students, the Moth story hour was just that kind of experience.
Marlena Jackson-Retondo: That was Jess Lifshitz, a fifth grade teacher near Chicago. When I talked with her earlier this year, she said that this revamped writing unit not only allowed her students to connect with their own stories, but also help them develop empathy for one another. And who doesn’t love that?
Ki Sung: Sounds like a happy ending. Thanks Marlena for sharing that story with us.
Marlena Jackson-Retondo: You’re welcome.
