How important is storytelling in giving tasks and instructions verbally? In every case in which we were able to create a story, students’ uptake of the task was better—they had fewer questions, they were able to more quickly begin the task, and they were less likely to misunderstand what they were meant to do. There are loads of research that support these observations (Egan, 1988) as well as research on how to teach mathematics through storytelling (Zazkis & Liljedahl, 2008), but not all tasks lend themselves to being posed as a story, and not all teachers want to be storytellers.
