Make Learning Stick with Storytelling

Long before textbooks, humans gathered around fires to pass down knowledge. Elders didn’t create PowerPoints or lecture about which berries were poisonous—they told stories about the hunter who ate the red ones and never came home. Today, we have smartboards and learning management systems, but our brains are still wired for campfire stories. Stories remain one of our most powerful teaching strategies.

Studies confirm what our ancestors knew instinctively: stories don’t just make learning more engaging; they make it more effective. When we hear a story, our brains begin to sync with the storyteller in a process researchers call neural coupling and it lights up more areas of the brain than non-fiction. And there is still more evidence that a well-told story improves memory and recall than learning from facts and figures alone. As a pedagogical approach, storytelling has the potential to meaningfully enhance student learning experiences and outcomes. In higher education, storytelling can achieve the following:

• Enhance cognitive engagement by making abstract concepts relatable.
• Boost retention and comprehension, especially in STEM and language fields.
• Build emotional and social connections, promoting a sense of belonging.
• Improve motivation and contribute to inclusive classrooms through cultural affirmation.
• Support identity formation, especially among underrepresented groups.
• Foster engagement and well-being (visual narratives).

In OPLR’s faculty symposium last fall, we explored how to bring this timeless teaching method into today’s higher education online classrooms. Whether on a micro scale in a lecture example or at the course level in an ongoing scenario, stories can be used in various course contexts:

• Module introductions to establish relevance and context
• Mini lectures using personal anecdotes to illustrate concepts
• Scenarios and case studies for practice and application
• Discussion prompts that invite student storytelling or role playing
• Assessments that ask students to demonstrate learning through narrative

Ready to get started? Visit Story-Based Learning in OPLR’s Instructional Design Showcase to see examples from other instructors and inspire storytelling applications in your own courses.

The good news: You don’t need to convince students to value stories—they already do. Rather than replacing traditional resources, storytelling offers a powerful way to convey the same factual content in a form that is engaging, memorable, and meaningful. The modern classroom may have replaced the ancient campfire, but storytelling adapts to settings—as powerful today in online modules as it has been throughout human history.