Storytelling: A Powerful Tool for School Leaders

Storytelling—one of humanity's oldest forms of engagement—remains vastly underutilized as a community engagement strategy for school districts.  As educational leaders, you can utilize two distinct storytelling strategies to take community engagement to another level.  The strategies can be used independently or together.

1. Storytelling for Sense-Making

This approach serves as a systematic methodology for gathering and analyzing your community's lived experiences. By implementing structured storytelling sessions, you can:

• Collect authentic narratives from diverse stakeholders (district leaders, teachers, parents, students, and community partners)

• Generate meaningful data points that traditional surveys often miss

• Uncover hidden community sentiments, aspirations, concerns, and challenges

• Leverage AI technology to identify patterns and commonly held beliefs across collected stories

• Build trust through the act of listening before attempting to persuade

Implementation Tip: Train a cross-functional team to conduct these sessions regularly throughout the school year, ensuring continuous feedback and evolving insights.

2. Storytelling for Influence

This strategy can be used on its own or with your previous efforts to gather community insights through sense-making stories and other community feedback tactics. This approach helps you:

• Craft narratives that resonate deeply because they incorporate authentic community perspectives

• Transform complex data and challenges into compelling stories that motivate stakeholders

• Develop targeted communication that addresses specific community concerns

• Build greater buy-in for important initiatives by connecting them to shared values

• Facilitate productive discussions that lead to meaningful change

Implementation Tip: Develop a storytelling framework that consistently incorporates community feedback and stories while focusing on clear calls to action relevant to your strategic goals.

By mastering both approaches, school leaders can create a continuous feedback loop: gathering community insights, developing resonant narratives, inspiring action, and then listening again to measure impact.

The Grandview Group is pleased to welcome David Hutchens to our K12 Storytelling team. David is a nationally recognized author who has published several books on Storytelling. He has worked with numerous Fortune 1000 companies, teaching their internal teams how to create stories that influence people to take action. David and Grandview have developed a special program for K12 leaders who want to develop the skills and capacity to make storytelling for sense-making and influence part of their tactical toolbox for community engagement.

To learn more about the K12 Storytelling program for school leaders, feel free to contact us. We’ll be happy to tell you the whole story.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Brake is the founder and CEO of The Grandview Group, a consulting firm that helps organizations engage their stakeholders and elevate impact. We would love to talk with you about how your organization is engaging stakeholders and elevating impact.

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