Story Practices Curriculum Development Interactive Questionaire

A companion for shaping your story-work curriculum proposal

This tool is a guided conversation, not a form. It walks you through the questions that actually shape a strong story-work unit — whatever setting you're designing for, from a K-5 classroom to a lifelong learning program.

It starts with the basics — a working title, who's building this, and a contact — then one honest question: what setting is this for? K-5 through graduate courses, after-school programs, adult school, lifelong learning, general community, or something else entirely. Everything that follows is shaped by that answer, because a unit built for a captive classroom asks different questions than one built for a program that has to recruit its own participants.

From there, it asks which form of story work this actually involves — story circles, interview-based work, writing process, photo-based work, visual arts, short documentary, full digital storytelling, or some combination — and gives you the practical, not persuasive, version of what each one requires: equipment, time, consent considerations, the things that actually determine whether this fits in the time you have.

Then it walks through the same territory every strong unit has to cover, in plain language: What's the learning objective here? Who's directly engaged, and who else does this reach — families, the wider school, a broader audience? What access needs — language, disability, or otherwise — shape who can take part? And a question worth sitting with regardless of experience level: is this extending something you've already run, or is there real invention in it?

It asks the practical shape too — who leads this, what the timeline actually looks like across planning, recruitment (when that's relevant), implementation, and follow-up, whether there's a shareable product at all, where it might go if there is one, and what consent or permission process it needs, since this work often involves minors.

Nothing it produces is meant to be final. It's a thinking partner for the hardest part of designing a unit — getting clear on what students will actually do, and why — so that whatever you write next, for your own classroom or for a curriculum committee, starts from solid ground.