When students organize their research for an audience, the act of shaping meaning for another person deepens their understanding of the research itself, surfacing questions that written analysis may not have reached.
In Story mode, arrangement is a form of inquiry. As students make decisions about sequence, emphasis, and structure, they encounter their research differently, discovering what their evidence can do in a new form, and what it still needs. The story doesn't package the research. It continues it. Ideas that held up on paper meet the demands of a listener's attention, and those demands generate new thinking about what matters, what's missing, and what the project is really about.
Returning to sources at this stage is a sign that the inquiry is working. Making meaning for an audience is itself a research act.
Habits of Thinking
What cognitive or scholarly practices students are developing.
- ArrangeHow does the sequence of ideas shape what they mean?
- ImagineWhat does the listener experience at each moment, and why does it matter?
- DiscoverWhat does organizing for an audience reveal about the research that working alone did not?
Strategies for Supporting Story Development
The following approaches help students translate their research into narrative shapes that clarify meaning, attend to audience, and prepare for production work. Each strategy supports the recursive relationship between inquiry and expression.
Guiding Questions
These prompts help students explore how narrative form supports inquiry and how research continues to evolve as ideas take shape.
Arrange
- What sequence of ideas feels most true to what the research revealed?
- What happens to the meaning of a claim when something different comes before or after it?
Imagine
- What does a listener need to know at each moment to stay with the piece?
- Where might attention shift, and what could hold it?
Discover
- What does the research look like from the perspective of an audience encountering it for the first time?
- What new questions surface when ideas are organized for communication rather than analysis?
Workshop Examples
Workshops in this phase create shared spaces for exploration, listening, drafting, and experimentation. They help students articulate ideas, test structures, and explore how narrative shapes thought.
Story Moves as Inquiry
Students map their research as discrete compositional units, each with a narrative purpose, an evidence plan, and a sense of what the listener hears. Arranging and rearranging these moves surfaces gaps, generates new questions, and often sends students back to their sources with sharper focus.