Every Student Has a Story to Tell
I’ve been writing plays for a long time. Yet the question I’m always asked, especially by people who know me primarily as an educator, is whether the two worlds connect.
Teaching and storytelling. Structure and imagination. A classroom and a stage.
For me, the answer is simple: completely. Inseparably.
What Storytelling Has Taught Me About Teaching
Whenever I sit down to write a play, the first question I ask isn’t what happens? Instead, I ask myself: what do I want to leave with the audience?
What feeling should remain? What truth might they recognise? More importantly, what part of my own experience, raw and honest and perhaps imperfect, can I offer that allows someone in the audience to see themselves?
That, to me, is what great storytelling does. It doesn’t lecture. Instead, it resonates. It says, I see you. I’ve felt that too.
Teaching, at its best, does exactly the same thing.
When a student comes to Young Scholarz, I don’t begin with a syllabus. I begin with them. First, I want to understand what they are trying to achieve and what their story looks like.
Every child arrives with a narrative already in motion. That narrative has been shaped by family, school and years of experiences: being praised or overlooked, understood or dismissed, encouraged or made to doubt themselves.
My job isn’t to overwrite that story. Rather, it is to help them tell it better.
Every Student Has a Story
In theatre, we talk about character objectives. What does this person want? What are they moving towards, even if they don’t fully understand it yet?
Students have objectives too. Sometimes they can articulate them clearly; at other times, anxiety, habit or expectations have buried those objectives beneath what they think they are supposed to want.
As a teacher, part of my role is to help them uncover what they actually want.
And here’s something I’ve learned from stories: the good ones rarely move in a straight line.
Characters evolve. Circumstances change. Directions shift. Consequently, a plot that seemed certain in Act One can look completely different by Act Three.
That isn’t failure. It is growth. In fact, it is the story becoming what it needed to become.
Students are much the same.
Over the years, I’ve watched children arrive convinced they are simply bad at something: maths, writing, critical thinking or expressing their ideas. Gradually, however, they discover that the problem was never them.
Often, it was the story they had been handed about themselves.
Once that story changes, everything else can begin to change too.
Why Education Cannot Be Copy and Paste
There is a dangerous tendency in education, just as there is in bad writing: the temptation to cut and paste.
A teacher who gives every student the same formula is doing something remarkably similar to a playwright who recycles someone else’s ideas and calls it an original story.
Neither is telling the truth. Neither is creating something that can genuinely last.
Of course, structure matters. Students need guidance, frameworks and clear expectations. However, those things should give a student the confidence to develop their own thinking, not force every student into exactly the same mould.
That distinction matters enormously to me.
Helping Students Find Their Own Voice
What I want for every student who walks through Young Scholarz is for them to understand that their story is worth telling.
It doesn’t have to look like the answer in the textbook. Nor does it need to resemble the student who sat in that chair before them. Above all, it shouldn’t be a copy of what someone else has done.
Instead, I want students to develop their own voice: their own way of seeing a problem, their own approach to constructing an argument and their own ability to make meaning from what they have learned.
Because education, really, isn’t about producing identical outcomes.
Ultimately, it is about giving each person the confidence, skills and understanding to discover the most powerful and authentic version of the story they came here to tell.