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SPEAK: Scientific Storytelling and Podcasting

An Integrated, Multimodal

Approach to

Science Teaching

https://bit.ly/3KfHtKB

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Kristine Cooney

Curriculum Consultant

M.A. in Teaching and Curriculum

PBL facilitator, technology integration coach, curriculum designer, ELA and social studies educator

Dual certifications in English and Social Studies

National Geographic Certified Educator

Susan Sobehrad

Curriculum Consultant

M.A. in Science Education

PBL facilitator and trainer, instructional coach, curriculum designer, science educator

Dual certification in Integrated Science and Journalism

National Geographic Certified Educator

Contact:

Kristine Cooney

Susan Sobehrad

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Students have innate creative ability.

Storytelling and podcasting create a multimodal experience for students.

Spoken word activities promote literacy skills and deepen the comprehension of scientific concepts.

Big Ideas:

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“. . .cultural innovation increased the rate at which genes favoring intelligence and cooperativeness were spread more rapidly. . .and the resulting genetic change increased the likelihood of cultural innovation.”

(Wilson, 2017, p. 107)

Wilson, E. O. (2018). The Origins of Creativity. Liveright Publishing Corporation.

You are familiar with natural selection–certain adaptations make it more possible for organisms to survive in their environment. In his book, The Origins of Creativity, Edward Wilson shares a theory about the innateness of creativity. He explains that creativity made it possible for organisms to take advantage of their biological adaptations, and that organisms who were able to use those adaptations in innovative and creative ways were even more likely to survive. In other words, it wasn’t just the adaptation that helped organisms survive. It took creativity and innovation to use those adaptations to their best advantage. So Susan and I have thought a lot about how we can tap into our own students creativity .

We gave students a survey question, and asked them whether or not they felt like they were creative, less than 20 percent of them said yes! This is terrifying! Creativity has brought us from living in caves to the present. Are our students doomed to just copy and paste their way through life?!

Are we willing to allow 20% of the population to determine progress?! And we wondered, “What can we, as teachers, do to help foster creativity in our classrooms?”

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Part of our cultural evolution involved the development of language. “Without the invention of language we would have remained animals.”

(Wilson, 2071, p. 161)

Apart from other species, Early man had a larger brain than their ancestors, which in turn gave rise to our unprecedented creativity. And it was that creativity that made it possible for humans to tell and learn from stories.

We tell stories from a young age, we are natural storytellers. We were hoping to use stories in our courses to inspire not only creativity, meaning, and understanding.

While traditional storytelling mainly requires the usage of words and pictures, multimodal storytelling integrates lots of modes, such as gestures, audio, videos, images, labels, words, textures, and smells to create meaning.

Kristine leads ACTIVITY: INTRO TO STORYTELLING

Share stories.

Apart from other species, Early man had a larger brain than their ancestors, which made it possible for our unprecedented creativity to exist. And it was that creativity that made it possible for humans to not only tell, but LEARN from stories.

We are natural storytellers, we tell stories and hear stories from a young age. So Susan and I were hoping that through the use of stories in our courses, we would inspire creativity in our students, while also developing deeper meaning and understanding of the content.

While traditional storytelling mainly requires using words and pictures, multimodal storytelling integrates lots of modes, such as gestures, audio, videos, images, labels, words, textures, and smells to create meaning. And while podcasting is only audio, it takes imagining the story using a variety of multimodal lenses to create a podcast that actually has meaning.

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Storytelling Protocol

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. . .”

Dickens, Charles, and Harvey Dunn. A Tale of Two Cities . New York, Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, 1921.

Kristine and I were actually in an ideal place to begin to find ways to combine our love of story with blended activities in the classroom. Our story might have begun something like “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. . .” and. . .we were in the middle of a pandemic

Susan and I worked on a campus that valued digital literacy and encouraged collaboration between subject areas. In a lot of ways, for an education environment, It was the BEST!

Yet, the mindset was still hard science vs humanities, and Blending happened between science courses, and between humanities courses, but not between science and humanities. It was the WORST! To see the possibilities, yet not have a way to make them happen.

At a conference very much like this one and amidst the pandemic, we came to realize that we were of like mind. Through our discussions we discovered a connection between our content areas that there was great WISDOM in the idea that science and the humanities were truly better together. So we began thinking about projects that blended our content areas in ways that were relevant and meaningful for students.

Then, the creative juices began to flow, and the FOOLISHNESS began.

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Why humanities and hard science? “The sciences are the ‘how,’ and the humanities are the ‘why’ – why are we here, why do we believe in the things we believe in. I don’t think you can have the ‘how’ without the ‘why.’” –George Lucas

Kristine and I were sitting at dinner at a conference much like this one, and the conversation turned to–what else–our classrooms. We began talking about the potential of doing some cross curricular activities to foster storytelling in our classes, literature and biochemistry.

At the time I was planning for a unit to explore Romeo and Juliet with our freshman. Susan and I discussed the characteristics of the play, and the fact that it was relevant to freshmen because Romeo and Juliet were teenagers themselves. And we wondered how we could form connections between literature and biochemistry.

And suddenly, the FOOLISHNESS erupted. Teenagers? BioChem? There is such an obvious connection! HORMONES! And so the project, Raging Hormones, was born.

Students created a reality television show to share an emotional scene from the play, examine the emotions, the hormones, the biochemistry behind them, and how to identify and cope with teenage angst.

Kristine and I were sitting at dinner, and the conversation turned to–what else–our classrooms. We began talking about the potential of cross curricular activities to foster storytelling in our classes, literature and biochemistry.

At the time I was planning for a unit to explore Romeo and Juliet with our freshman. Susan and I discussed the characteristics of the play, and the fact that it was relevant to freshmen because Romeo and Juliet were teenagers themselves. And we wondered how we could form connections between literature and biochemistry.

And suddenly, the FOOLISHNESS erupted. Teenagers? BioChem? There is such an obvious connection! HORMONES! And so the project, Raging Hormones, was born.

Students created a reality television show to share an emotional scene from the play, examine the emotions, the hormones, the biochemistry behind them, and how to identify and cope with teenage angst.

This was multimodal storytelling at its best–students created a relevant interpretation of classic literature in a video that used images, gestures, audio, video, and models to share information about a scientific topic. But were these blended curriculum ideas academically sound? We wanted to know.

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Common Core ELA Standards

Research ● Problem Solve ● Investigate ● Synthesize ● Read ● Use Evidence Analyze ● Argue ● Inform ● Narrate Present ● Organize ● Explain ● Make Connections ● Revise ● Interpret

Read

NGSS Science Standards

Evidence ● Illustrate ● Construct ● Explain

Communicate ● Represent ● Predict ● Evaluate Explain ● Reason ● Construct ● Develop ● Analyze Claim ● Describe ● Investigate ● Ask ● Forecast

Revise ● Support ● Argue ● Create ● Clarify

Design ● Defend

There is, in fact, a symbiosis between science and ELA that can be leveraged through protocols

that incorporate a multimodal approach.

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WHY PODCASTING?
Live Presentation	Podcasting
Share a narrow scope of knowledge on a topic	Requires deeper understanding of topics to draw from during interviews and discussions
Rehearsed	Often unrehearsed and spontaneous
Focus on speaking	Focus on both speaking AND listening
Typically audience is seen	Typically audience is unseen
More formal	More conversational
Uses slides/visual	Requires ability to describe without visuals
Poise and physical presence	The voice has to engage

Scientific storytelling was at the forefront of our new curriculum. Science provides a purpose for writing and speaking while ELA provides the foundational skills needed to share ideas and findings in a thorough, logical manner. And one of our projects in this year-long curriculum was the creation of a podcast.

Our students had experience with presentations, so decided to compare podcasts and presentations. Even though podcasts are heard and not seen, they still require a multimodal mindset to create. Podcasters have to use their voice and word choice to engage the audience. So we thought podcasting could be a tool for sharing stories created by students.

Podcasts are also conversational, rather than lectures. The conversational nature of a podcast makes it approachable for students, and today’s on-demand technology makes it accessible for students in the classroom. You can get to podcasts with any of your digital devices.

These conversations require a deeper understanding of the materials that they’re talking about; students have to have information to draw from during interviews and discussions.

During a podcast, students have to listen rather than just recite. They have to tell a story with their words and voices to inspire their audience. And we wanted to figure out how to help our students do that.

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Tainted is a podcasting project in which students choose a topic related to human impact on the environment, and propose solutions for solving the problem. Podcasting allows students to use the language of science in real conversations that promote metacognition .

And so the podcasting project titled “Tainted” was born. We wanted students to produce podcasts with the goal of inspiring the audience to care about environmental topics related to water stewardship, and to allow students to use the language of science in real conversations.

But we realized that students don’t know how to podcast, some students may have never listened to a podcast. To help them with this, we developed several activities to scaffold essential skills for podcasting. We are going to show you examples that you could use in your own classroom. These activities help students develop interest in topics through exploration. We helped them practice visualizing by considering the impacts of human activities. They wrote and performed poetry to engage their creativity and storytelling abilities, while also practicing microphone to build recording skills.

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A

B

C

After conducting labs and playing with animations, they now had new terminology and facts to use in creating their podcasts. But we had to remember that PODCASTING USES ONLY SPOKEN WORDS TO TELL A STORY. So, we pushed them to visualize and represent their understanding of water-related topics in different ways. These new understandings helped them envision problems and solutions. They needed to be able to make emotional connections with the content so that their passion for the subject would be reflected in their questions and their voices during their podcasts.

Students created these pictures in five minutes during an activity called “extraordinary pictures of ordinary things”. They used only the things at hand, from the classroom, their backpacks, or the lawn outside. This was a first step in visualizing the problems they were investigating.

Take a minute to turn to your shoulder partner and talk about what you think the students had in mind when they created the images. What science topic could these images represent? What story could they tell? How could you use this idea in your own classroom? You’ve got one minute. Go.

CHECK QUESTIONS.

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“Eliciting emotional arousal likely improves the odds that listeners will not only engage with the material, but also act on it.”

(Wilson, 2017, p. 69)

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Language is a system that uses limitless symbols to convey deep meaning. Creating a podcast to share difficult concepts and inspire audiences to action begins with visualization.

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Asking students to take photographs that symbolize their thinking engaged their creative mindsets and helped them begin to think in terms of story.

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PODCASTING PROJECT PATHWAY

(Transition) All of these preliminary activities, exploring topics, taking pictures, and creating poetry were focused on developing mindsets that values creativity and storytelling as a method to convey important messages to a nonscientific audience. Now that students had some knowledge of water conservation issues, we had to come up with a pathway for them to develop the expertise to become informed podcasters.

You can see the flow–choose a topic, conduct the research, formalize your argument, write your podcast notes, and record. We’re going to share with you examples and documents from each of these activities in the hope that you will be able to take these and use them in your own classrooms. As we work through these activities, keep in mind that each activity can be used as a stand-alone experience, either in preparation for podcasting or for other content areas.

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Podcast Research

Passion Pitch

Battle of the Experts Feedback

Mini-Debate Protocol

Podcast Script and Rubric

Podcasting Feedback Rubric

BUILDING KNOWLEDGE: What are the attributes of an engaging podcast? What ideas are most interesting? What are the human impacts? The solutions?

BACKGROUND ARTICLES

In the first step on the pathway, students needed to explore topics related to water conservation. We assigned them to groups, and began the research.

PULL UP DOCUMENT

Through these guided reading activities, students became familiar with a variety of water conservation topics, from plastic pollution and macroinvertebrates as indicators of water quality, to climate change and landfills. The folder contains some of the articles we used, with each article divided into sections for a close reading activity.

In addition to learning content, they listened to related podcasts not only to learn new content but also to determine the characteristics of a successful podcast. They thought about how engaging the podcasters were, how well they connected with the audience, and whether or not their message was heard. Completion of these activities, in conjunction with a rubric, were used as formative assessments.

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Podcast Research

Passion Pitch

Battle of the Experts Feedback

Mini-Debate Protocol

Podcast Script and Rubric

Podcasting Feedback Rubric

PASSION PITCH: How does this topic connect to real life? How do I tell a story to convince my classmates that this is a worthy cause?

RATING FORM

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Podcast Research

Passion Pitch

Battle of the Experts Feedback

Mini-Debate Protocol

Podcast Script and Rubric

Podcasting Feedback Rubric

BATTLE OF THE EXPERTS:

What is the evidence that this topic impacts the environment? How can I use knowledge from the experts to sway others to support this cause? How can I tell this story in spoken words?

Armed with their chosen topic and some basic knowledge, the groups broke their topic down into subcategories. Each member of the group had one day to research their category and create a 5 minute presentation to share what they had learned. This addresses a concern about group work, with group members riding coattails. To shorten the time required for presentations, groups were paired for presentations, and each person in one group presented to the other group, and vice versa.

As an example, the group whose passion pitch we just watched chose Algae Blooms as their topic. Their subtopics included red algae, blue-green algae, eutrophication, and effects of algae blooms on organisms and humans in the area. After each student presented, listeners evaluated their knowledge using this Google form.

PULL UP GOOGLE FORM

In addition to ranking their impressions, listeners also asked questions–again, listening and asking questions are essential skills for podcasters. Then, responses–including all of the questions–were collected and emailed to students so they could be prepared to use those questions during their podcasts. Looking at these responses was a great way to give a formative assessment grade–it was easy to tell who had done their research, who knew what they were talking about and who didn’t.

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Podcast Research

Passion Pitch

Battle of the Experts Feedback

Mini-Debate Protocol

Podcast Script and Rubric

Podcasting Feedback Rubric

Who Cares Anyway? Who does this topic impact most? What perspectives/stories do different people have? What are potential solutions, and which are best supported by evidence? How can I make this story live?

Our last activity “Who Cares Anyway” helped students develop content knowledge and the ability to talk about it in a mini-debate format. Students were tasked with discovering who is impacted most by their topic and provide varying perspectives on their topic. In addition, students were empowered to consider solutions for the issues.

PULL UP DOCUMENT

In a podcasting conversation, you have to listen, and you have to evaluate your thinking on the spot. This protocol gave students practice in looking for the weaknesses in an argument, how to craft a response, as well as a way to practice finding the best ways to present evidence to convince an audience that their viewpoint is worth considering. Again this debate was easily used as a formative assessment opportunity using the associated rubric.

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Podcast Research

Passion Pitch

Battle of the Experts Feedback

Mini-Debate Protocol

Podcast Script and Rubric

Sample Feedback Rubric

WHAT TO SAY: What story(ies) will inspire audiences to take action to solve this problem and reduce human impact on the environment?

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Podcast Research

Passion Pitch

Battle of the Experts Feedback

Mini-Debate Protocol

Podcast Script and Rubric

Podcasting Feedback Rubric

FINE TUNING: Is my story complete? What gaps are there? What evidence is missing or unclear?

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Increasing motivation and engagement, building a sense of collaboration and community, and creating authentic learning moments are benefits reaped from creating podcasts.

Finally, they recorded their podcasts. Students were wary at first, but even our most challenging students, and students with the most stage fright, were able to settle in and record. We did give them a brief practice with the equipment before the final recordings were made to get them used to hearing themselves through the headphones.

And while a separate, sound-proofed room would be ideal, we actually recorded podcasts in the classroom. We set up a recording pod, and other students were required to work silently during the recording. And they were actually very respectful.

We received a grant to purchase an actual podcasting setup, with microphones, headphones, and a digital console. Students thought this was very cool. It made for a more authentic experience for them.

Or, there are microphones with background noise eliminators that you can use to record directly to the computer. But there are a number of free online applications you can use instead, if getting hold of a podcasting setup is not an option.

Due to the pandemic, we’ve even had students record their podcasts remotely using Google meet. It was a bit messy, and the sound quality isn’t terrific, the authentic conversations about content were there.

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THAT’S WHACK!

HUMANS ARE THE PROBLEM. . .

LIVE FROM THE WALGREEN’S PARKING LOT!

THE BLOOM DIVERSITY PODCAST

WATER MINDSET

STUDENTS OF ALL STUDIES

THE OOMY ZOOMY PODCAST!

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Podcasting encourages students to learn from one another and to articulate course content in their own words.

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By using the ancient and universal language of story combined with modern technology we can help students process information rather than simply receive it.

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Passionate, creative podcasting, in an environment that values a blended curriculum, helps students leverage what they know with what they feel.

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Free Podcasting Platforms

www.anchor.fm

(affiliated with Spotify, unlimited hosting and creation, collaboration, phone app)

www.podbean.com

(create, 5 hours total, 100 GB of bandwidth per month, phone app, personal podcast site, iTunes support)

www.buzzsprout.com

(create, 2 hours per month, hosted for 90 days)

www.spreaker.com

(create, affiliated with iHeartRadio, 10 episodes total to be hosted for six months)

www.podomatic.com

(create, 6 hours free up to 20 episodes, unlimited hosting, phone app)

www.soundcloud.com

(hosting only, 3 hours worth of uploads, phone app)

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Session Feedback

Give us some props on Twitter if you’d like–#IconicTeaching.

Speaker Contact Information:

kristine@teachingiconic.org

susan@teachingiconic.org

www.teachingiconic.org

ICONIC on TpT

For Podcasting Equipment:

Sweetwater Sound

drake_sobehrad@sweetwater.com

(800) 222-4700 ext 3271