The StoryCorpsU College Readiness Curriculum is a yearlong, standards based college readiness program designed for students in grades 9 – 12. The goals of the Curriculum are to increase students’ skills in the areas of speaking and listening, while also fostering students’ capacities in the areas of critical thinking, self-awareness, social-awareness and connectedness to school. Each StoryCorpsU teacher participates in a two-day training. You can download a detailed program description here.

The program is funded by a grant from The Corporation for Public Broadcasting as part of American Graduate: Let’s Make it Happen, an initiative to combat the dropout crisis through work with media stations.
You can find a full list of our partner schools on the Partner page.

Currently we cannot offer the full Curriculum and two-day teacher training to schools other than our current partners, though we do offer stand-alone lesson plans for grades 8 – 12 that you can use in your classroom:

• Introduction to StoryCorps is customizable lesson plan designed to teach basic interviewing and storytelling skills using StoryCorps content.
• Unheard Voices: Stories of LGBT History is a curriculum developed through a partnership of the Anti-Defamation League, The Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network and StoryCorps that is designed to help educators integrate lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history and issues into their instructional programs.
• Ted-Ed: Eyes on the Stars features the StoryCorps’ animation and includes multiple choice and open answer questions based on the animation. The lesson plan also provides resources for digging deeper into the topic of taking a stand against discrimination as well as links to other related StoryCorps audio clips.

You may choose to use these lessons intact or as models to create your own lessons around StoryCorps content and process.

The StoryCorpsU College Readiness Curriculum is designed for high school students; however, we have developed online resources for the wider educational community, which are adaptable to all education levels. Many college educators have also found our Do-It-Yourself Guide helpful.

In addition to the College Readiness Curriculum, our current resources include:

• Introduction to StoryCorps, a customizable lesson plan
  for students in grades 8-12 that is designed to interviewing and storytelling skills using StoryCorps Content;
• Unheard Voices, a curriculum developed through a partnership of the Anti-Defamation League, the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network and StoryCorps that is designed to help educators integrate lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) history and issues into their instructional programs;
• Lists of recommended listening clips organized by heritage month and by subject area;
• Ten Ways to Bring StoryCorps to Your Classroom Links to the Great Questions lists to help support StoryCorps style interviews;
• An annotated bibliography outlining the research that supports the work of StoryCorpsU.

Yes, we have several resources that may help: our Do-It-Yourself Guide provides detailed and easy to follow directions for using StoryCorps techniques to conduct your interviews and create oral history projects, the Great Questions list can help your students develop in-depth interview questions, and Introduction to StoryCorps, a customizable lesson plan that teaches basic interviewing and storytelling techniques.

On our resources page, we have organized suggested clips by heritage month and by themes of relevance to various subject areas. For example, for November’s Native American Heritage Month, we have suggested stories by and about Native Americans. We have also organized suggested clips by themes such as Growing up, Overcoming Obstacles, Friendship, Civil Rights, and Immigration.

StoryCorps can be a great tool for educators teaching English language learners. Our stories are told with varying formal and colloquial vocabularies, cover a range of topics and the clips are all under 3 minutes, an ideal length for either in-class or at-home work. You might consider using StoryCorps for dictation and transcribing exercises, vocabulary lists, or discussion. You can stream stories from our listening page.