Educating Through The Power of Storytelling

This yearlong professional development program combines in-depth monthly seminars with personalized support from an experienced mentor teacher. Through this process, teachers will implement strategies that help young children extend their vocabularies, develop print awareness, cultivate oral expression, and develop an understanding of narrative form through dictation and dramatization of their own stories. It is designed for early childhood teachers whose goal is to create classrooms that inspire children to read and write through storytelling and other research based early literacy activities.

Monthly Seminars

Classroom Experiences

Mentorship

Sampling of Seminar Topics

The Rice Experience

Why should you choose Rice's Classroom Storytelling?

Plan of Study

SLC's Classroom Storytelling program is inspired by Vivian Paley’s storytelling and story acting work. The project combines early literacy research and classroom practice with mentoring and seminar discussions in a yearlong training program where:

• Teachers implement strategies that help young children extend their vocabularies, develop print awareness, cultivate oral expression and develop an understanding of narrative form through dictation and dramatization of their own stories.
• Teachers address the role of language acquisition and the cultural dynamics of teacher-student relationships as critical factors for children learning to read and write.
• Teachers create classrooms that inspire children to read and write through storytelling and other research-based early literacy activities.

Classroom Storytelling training includes in-depth monthly seminars and personalized support from an experienced mentor teacher. Mentors will visit teachers’ classrooms and share best practices for implementing new early literacy methods.

This program a pre-requisite to participating in the Early Literacy Leadership Academy.

Admissions

Application Deadlines

Application deadline: Sept. 10, 2024

Resuming an application: To resume an application, please log in to your student portal. You will find a saved instance of your application in the tab titled “My Applications”.

Should you have questions, please contact slc@rice.edu or Vanessa Vierra at vqvierra@rice.edu. 

Tuition & Scholarships

Tuition

$2500

Tuition is typically covered through campus-or district-based state or national funding, PTO support, participant payment, or individual donations. For more information, please contact slc@rice.edu.

Fellowships

Rice University believes in the importance of developing teacher leaders. Classroom Storytelling offers a limited number of merit based partial fellowships to highly qualified prospective students. Fellowship opportunities can be discussed once an applicant is accepted into the program.