Telling Your Story

The Learning Opportunities you pursue during your Learning Journey not only work to help you develop autonomy, competence, confidence, and connection, they also work towards giving you insight about the journey itself. Each individual Learning Opportunity can help guide the next Learning Opportunity. Reflecting is a process of evaluating your journey and making future decisions but it is also a way of leaving a trail of where you have been so that at any point in your Learning Journey you can look back and see how far you have traveled and tell a story about what has gotten you to this point in your journey.

Obviously, when it comes time to tell your story, you will be glad that you have a record of not only what you have accomplished but why you made the decisions you made and what the experiences meant to you.

Traditional schools also tell a story about you but they make an attempt to standardize it. They use the language of grades and credits and requirements and test scores so that your experience can be simplified, measured, categorized, sorted, and compared to others.

A story about your Learning Journey does something very different. Perhaps even something radical. A Learning Journey treats you like a unique individual. It starts with the belief that everyone has a compelling and completely unique story to tell about their life. The story about your Learning Journey doesn’t need to be measured, categorized, or sorted. It’s a story. It should narrate the story of your journey with all of its choices, wrong turns, surprises, and revelations.

Let’s start with the first rule, you are the first and most important audience for your story.

It all starts with the process of reflecting. It doesn’t matter what manner or method you chose to use when reflecting, a reflection is you in the process of writing your own story.

By taking the time to reflect on your Learning Journey you are already starting to craft a narrative and make meaning out of your experiences. This process of thinking and pondering and evaluating and putting your experiences into context is fundamental to a Learning Journey. It is the first draft of your story.

Once again, it is the process that is most important.

You should be able to look back and see the journey you are on. You should be able to trace the progress you have made and understand the choices that have gotten you here.

You should also be able to look forward and see the possibilities in front of you and understand how to use the skills, knowledge, and habits you have acquired to continue reaching for your goals.

The ability to understand your personal Learning Journey as “your story” will help you continue to grow towards autonomy, competence, confidence, and connection. Instead of being a passive student following a fixed path to graduation, you are the hero of your own adventure story.

Hopefully, by this point you are beginning to see ways that you can connect to the communities you belong to, opportunities to offer your strengths to the world around you, and places where you feel that you belong.

In that way, you are the most important audience for your story. It helps frame your learning as a journey. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other people who want to understand your story, too. Friends and family might be invested in your success and want to know what is happening in your life. Being able to explain your decisions, describe your experiences, and explain what is next for you can help bring them into your Learning Journey as a support system.

You are the most important audience but you aren't the only one. Classmates, partners, co-workers, and supervisors might want to understand where you are on your journey as a way of connecting with you or tapping into your strengths and skills.

Pursuing a valuable internship, interview, apprenticeship, job, or opportunity might require you to explain a little bit about yourself and your journey. Your ability to tell your story and explain your strengths and plans for the future could be a key to opening doors.

Near the end of this Learning Journey you might decide to apply to college, learn a trade, get a job, start an apprenticeship, or create a business. Colleges and jobs typically have formal processes for applying. If you have been reflecting and capturing evidence of learning along the way, it shouldn’t be hard to translate your story into a college application or a resume. An application and a resume are nothing more than a type of storytelling. They just have a specific format to keep in mind.

If you need one, you can also create a type of transcript that tells your story. There is no reason it needs to be a narrow and limited story. You aren’t limited to talking about credits and grades; you have the freedom to talk about the choices you made on your Learning Journey and what your experiences meant to you. You can relate your choices to your goals and your strengths. You can highlight your Signature Learning Opportunities. You can discuss your path to autonomy, competence, confidence, and connection.

A college admissions officer, hiring manager, potential mentor, or even investor can come to understand you as a well-rounded individual who took control of their education and turned it into a Learning Journey

Section 4 includes templates and examples that you can use to create a transcript that summarizes your Learning Journey into a story about you.