If one of your goals is for your educators and centre is to deliver high-quality documentation consistently, then story types are a key tool to support your achieving this.
Story types are customisable prompts – or scaffolds – that help guide and inspire educators to create meaningful, quality stories. Story types are especially useful to guide and help educators gain confidence, as well as indicating the types of documentation educators at your centre should create.
If your centre is about to start using story types, here are some quality practice tips from our product learning and development team.
Implementation tips
- Tell your team that you plan to start using story types – so they know what to expect. When starting a new story they’ll see a list of story types to select from instead of a blank story editor.
- Check out the Story type library, where we provide you with some exemplar story types to get started. You can copy any of these across to your service to use as is or tweak to suit your needs.
- Start with just a couple of story types and build that out based on your service’s specific needs – this helps educators be aware of the intent of each one and when to use them without feeling overwhelmed.
Creating new story types
- Get your whole team involved in creating new story types, it’s a great way to ensure that everyone feels involved and has ownership over their documentation.
- Think about the kinds of documentation you are currently doing and how story types could fill any gaps you have. For example, you might create a story type for a child’s first day story or a child celebration – this could save everyone time by having a framework to get started from.
- Take a look at your current stories; what is missing? Do your stories align with your philosophy and curriculum, and what prompts would support your team in creating rich stories of learning or deep reflection.
- Give a clear, identifiable name to each story type, and within the framework of each story type, use language your team is familiar with.
- Make sure the instructions within the story type are clear – what to delete, what learning tags to add and how many. You could use bold and or coloured text to highlight important words or instructions.
Take a tour of story types
Want to learn more about using and creating story types?
Check out the Storypark help centre:
- Adding story types to your subscription in Australia or New Zealand
- Setting up and using story types
If your service would like additional support and training to understand, create and implement story types, our Professional Learning and Development team also offer:
- Support to create your own bespoke story types
- A online training session to implement your story types across your service
If you are interested in know more please contact pld@storypark.com for options and costing.
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