Story Hui and The Spiral of Inquiry
Story Hui makes learning and achievement visible. It provides sound evidence of progress in student learning capabilities. Using a group storytelling process, it reveals clear evidence of change in learning, engagement and wellbeing – while re-energising the practice of teaching as inquiry.
Story Hui provides clarity around usually hard to access learning data. It can valuably inform standardised assessment data. The results can be easily interpreted in a simple three column table.
The ‘heart’ of achievement is revealed through a Story Hui in a way that formal testing is unable to do. Story speaks to us at a deeper level, valuing and respecting diverse ways of knowing, being and learning. Story puts a face to the numbers and helps to show what’s working, what’s not and why.
Liz Stevenson – New directions for evaluating and monitoring – 2015 www.storyhui.org
Liz Stevenson’s Story Hui process can be used to evaluate Spiral of Inquiry implementation with leaders and teachers in both secondary and primary contexts. Here is a brief summary of this amazing story-telling process which can also be used with learners of any age:
Choose a small group
Provide a focus for the stories being told that involves improvement or transformation for the Storyteller
Invite a Storyteller to tell their story while others listen, make notes map or draw the story
The group then asks facilitative questions to add more detail to the story, both written and in the map/drawing
In this post I share the results of a Story Hui process with secondary school teachers. The focus provided for the stories was the teachers’ improvements and transformations that they experienced through implementing the Spiral of Inquiry. Quotes are from their actual stories told during the Story Hui process.
Scanning
Scanning design and integrity is important so we can discover things we never knew before. Scanning is about listening to others. Teachers can experience some real a-ha moments from well-designed Scanning.
“I was shocked by what learner voice showed us in Scanning...shocked at what some students said. I thought I knew them and that they knew me.
"I was a little shocked with what learners said, it made me take a second take about how I am working with the students, presenting myself. It made me step back and check my assumptions.”
“The learners’ responses floored me. I was surprised at how they saw themselves and how they saw learning”
Building Collaboration and Trust
High performing teams are built from resilient, adaptable and inspired individuals. Building good relationships in teams supports successful collaborative inquiries. Trust is a key factor in this. At this secondary school, leadership made the genius move to provide time for teachers to come together from different faculties to engage in cross-faculty collaborative inquiries. Teachers shared their appreciation for this in their Story Hui process.
"I see it as true collaboration which is not what I have experienced in the past".
"Across-school team building and networking has been enabled. I wouldn’t have worked with some people if this wasn’t happening. It has been powerful to come at the same problem from different directions. This gives you a sense of different peoples realities in a school (we have different learning environments and different things to offer)".
Developing Hunches
It is super important when we engage in a Spiral of Inquiry that teams are building deliberate spaces to consider their teaching practice asking “what is leading to this situation?”. The Developing a Hunch phase is very powerful and is often where focused inquiries emerge.
Part of looking at our own practices requires that the process enables teachers to safely challenge their assumptions and confront themselves and each other about their beliefs and biases. This requires leaders to foster ongoing development of inquiry mindsets. The Five Whys process is included in this free Guide for Developing a Hunch. You can book a free discovery call with me to learn more about how to use this!
"Challenging the assumptions that I had was confronting but not scary, being in the little group helped to not make it scary - the fact that I wasn’t just one person doing it, there were people around me who were also delving deep. It was good to change the way I looked at what I was doing."
"The '5 whys' and the hunch phase was a real turning point for me."
Learning
Engaging with research and examples of practices to find out what we don’t know before deciding on what to do is key as we venture into the Learning phase. Teachers might start with scattered, unfocused learning, followed by in depth learning once we are more certain about the direction we are heading in.
It is hard to set goals for change in practice without first exploring the area in which we plan to change. Research and extensive reading is a key driver of change. This might include looking around at what other schools are doing.
Taking Action
While teachers are taking action all the time (even during earlier phases of the Spiral of Inquiry), Kaser and Halbert (2021) remind us that it is important to slow down this predisposition to rapid action so that we can take more informed action with a better chance for impact over time. So in order to take informed action, time must be given to teams to connect, to examine their beliefs, to build trust, setting the scene for debate, challenge and changing practice. Taking action is learning about new ways of doing things and then trying them out.
"A couple of students commented that they thought I didn’t care about them or listen to them - so I tried to make those things more explicit. The other thing that came out, that I was teaching my subject but not making links to the real world - when i asked them what links they saw, several of them said none. So for the rest of the year I tried to link things to how they connect to the real world."
“So, now I want to start next year on the ground running, the first 2-3 lessons we will look at growth mindset, getting the kids set up, getting to know the students better and setting goals. I want to inspire the students rather than making them think they have to do this. Getting growth mindset resources, and then work with the students for the first initial time, so it will be really interesting when I do my first lot of scanning to see what the difference is in their responses.”
"This process has given me confidence and choices about what to do for learners."
To access more free resources and epic stories from other schools, sign up for my awesome newsletter
Reference: Linda Kaser and Judy Halbert (2021) Leading Spirals of Inquiry: Module 7 - Taking Sustained Action