As much as I love my assessment compadres, sometimes I worry that the language we use to describe the process of continual improvement sounds pretty stiff. “Closing the loop” sounds too much like teaching a 4 year-old to tie his shoe. Over the years I’ve learned enough about my own social science academic nerdiness to envy those who see the world through an entirely foreign lens. So when I stumbled upon a simple framework for telling a story called a “Story Spine,” it struck me that this framework might spell out the fundamental pieces of assessment in a way that just makes much more sense.

The Story Spine idea can be found in a lot of places on the internet (e.g., Pixar and storytelling), but I found out about it through the world of improv. At its core, the idea is to help improvisers go into a scene with a shared understanding of how a story works so that, no matter what sort of craziness they discover in the course of their improvising, they know that they are all playing out the same meta-narrative.

Simply put, the Story Spine divides a story into a series of sections that each start with the following phrases. As you can tell, almost every story you might think of would fit into this framework.

Once upon a time . . .

And every day . . .

Until one day . . .

Because of that . . .

Because of that . . .

Until finally . . .

And ever since then . . .

These section prompts can also fit into four parts of a cycle that represent the transition from an existing state of balance (“once upon a time” and “every day”), encountering a disruption of the existing balance (“until one day”), through a quest for resolution (“because of that,” “because of that,” and “until finally”), and into a new state of balance (“and ever since then”).

To me, this framework sounds a lot like the assessment loop that is so often trotted out to convey how an individual or an organization engages assessment practices to improve quality. In the assessment loop, we are directed to “ask questions,” “gather evidence,” “analyze evidence,” and “use results.” But to be honest, I like the Story Spine a lot better. Aside from being pretty geeky, the assessment loop starts with a vague implication that trouble exists below the surface and without our knowledge. This might be true, but it isn’t particularly comforting. Furthermore, the assessment loop doesn’t seem to leave enough room for all of the forces that can swoop in and affect our work despite our best intentions. There is a subtle implication that educating is like some sort of assembly line that should work with scientific precision. Finally, the assessment loop usually ends with “using the results” or, at its most complex, some version of “testing the impact of something we’ve added to the mix as a result of our analysis of the evidence.” But in the real world, we are often faced with finding a way to adjust to a new normal – another way of saying that entering a new state of balance is as much a function of our own adjustment as it is the impact of our interventions.

So if you’ve ever wondered if there was a better way to convey the way that we live an ideal of continual improvement, maybe the Story Spine works better. And maybe if we were to orient ourselves toward the future by thinking of the Story Spine as a map for what we will encounter and how we ought to be ready to respond, maybe – just maybe – we will be better able to manage our way through our own stories.

Make it a good day,

Mark