Stories form the fabric of our lives (Doecke, 2015). As storytellers, we get to select and share the colourful threads that have meaning to us and weave these into a material that impacts another. It’s a beautiful exchange in which stories offer a common currency between teller and listener.
Before we start, how are you feeling about your story and its impact?
Use this code to log your response and see what others are feeling: 583-810-709
Why tell a story?
Storying impact has social, professional and personal benefit. To understand these benefits, we must first know what ‘impact’ is and why it’s important. Impact is a temporal narrative where a person makes connections between their actions and the actions of others over time, taking multiple and divergent routes, to highlight practices that have meaning and value in their specific contexts (Willis et al., 2021). Across many professions, demonstrating professional impact is required for career development, job progression, and professional evaluation. Registered teachers, for example, must provide their registering body a clear story of evidence and its alignment to the teaching standards from Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) so that they can progress to higher accredited positions. Therefore, the ability to tell a story of impact is not just a rhetorical skill but of economic benefit to professionals like teachers.
Leaders, assessors and employers can recognise a person’s impact by the growth and change it has personally, by how it affects others, their organisation, and on a wider professional scale. Lee (2008) explains that personal narratives provide a window to view impact and can identify potential leaders: “the construction and sharing of autobiographies may support insight into leadership styles and abilities, and could potentially be a first step to ‘the ongoing self-enquiry and reflection inherent in leadership’ (p.97). Amott (2018) agrees that one of the most effective ways to construct and communicate impact is through story. In a study on teachers becoming teacher-educators, Amott (2018) found that “…by reflecting on their stories and meaningful experiences, professionals can construct and reconstruct their professional identity’ (p. 477).” Storying impact, then, is not just for professional gain but is, in essence, identity work.
To demonstrate authentic impact in a profession, it’s essential to collect and communicate evidence in a coherent and credible story of impact over time. These narratives must make the temporal connections between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ clear to the reader. The evidence included in the story should have a clear meaning and this needs to be unpacked to show why it is impactful within the unique context in which they work. Stories lend themselves to communicating this unique context as they are naturally socially situated (Slakmon, 2022), offering insight into particularities that are important to that context and with those people. They are, if you like, a common currency than enables meaning to be easily exchanged from teller to listener (Parr, et al., 2015).
A Case Study – Highly Accomplished and Lead Teachers
To help us learn how to construct our own impact story, we are using a case study of a registered teacher who is undertaking the process of becoming a Highly Accomplished and Lead Teacher (HALT). For teachers to gain HALT status, they are invited to construct a professional portfolio that demonstrates their impact. In other words, they’re invited to tell their impact story. Watch our teacher, Kami, as she shares her experience of becoming a professional storyteller: