The Narrative Change Equation: Audience Research + Community of Practice
The Challenge
How do you take messaging recommendations based on audience research and test them in a real-world context? How do you socialize those findings among advocates and practitioners? How can you build the capacities of advocates and practitioners to implement narrative strategies and embed them in their work? Those are the questions explored by the Math Narrative Project. The lessons from the Math Narrative Project provide a roadmap for how to develop and scale narrative strategies that will drive real-world impact.
Discovering How to to Shift Beliefs about Learning Math through Narrative Interventions
The Gates Foundation wanted to understand how students feel about learning math and how teachers and parents can help them persist when learning math feels hard. The foundation partnered with Wonder for Good, and our collaborators at Goodwin Simon Strategic Research, to launch the Math Narrative Project.
Our audience research showed that many students have negative emotions about learning math. The harmful narratives that adults, including teachers and parents, hold about math can make it harder for students to persist when math becomes more challenging.
The Math Narrative Project developed and pressure-tested narrative interventions that proved successful in shifting the beliefs of 6th to 10th grade students, their parents, and their teachers in a research environment using qualitative and quantitative methods like focus groups and online surveys. Audience research findings were translated into a messaging guide, with specific recommendations for students, teachers, and parents that can help to improve students’ experiences with math learning, so that more students persist when learning math gets hard.
Implementing, Validating, and Refining the Messaging Recommendations through a Community of Practice
To determine if the narrative interventions were successful in a real-world environment, we launched a community of practice, made up of 20 organizations with expertise in math learning and teaching to validate and refine the messaging recommendations at scale. With support from Wonder, organizations adapted the recommendations to their own context (for example, teacher professional learning), creating and testing messaging for students, parents, and teachers across four states, and measuring its impact on beliefs, emotions, and behaviors. Additionally, the project sought to build the capacity of community of practice members to engage with and utilize narratives to further their learning and teaching goals.
The community of practice worked across 17 different projects to put the learnings of the Math Narrative Project into practice across an array of activities reaching students, parents, and teachers. Participants ran field tests reaching approximately 400 students, 400 parents, and 1,000 math teachers in 6th through 10th grade.
The breadth of field tests the community of practice implemented included:
- Student video stories that resonated deeply for teachers in a professional development session and sparked teachers to reflect on their instructional practices;
- Teacher-to-teacher story sharing in the form of a podcast that turned professional development “reading” into something participants could take with them on a walk or commute;
- Text messaging from near-peer students and conversations at home with parents/caregivers that created a “surround sound” of positive math narrative messaging for students;
- An AI-enabled chatbot trained and prompt-engineered to deliver math narrative messaging about the value of struggle and making mistakes, which helped students work through math problems in class.
Field tests generated powerful findings about narrative strategies such as: the impact of credible messengers, the value of repeated messaging over time, and the critical role that reflection has in shifting people’s beliefs and behaviors when it comes to math teaching and learning.
Building the Narrative Capacities of Community of Practice Members
The community of practice was also a resounding success in growing the skills and confidence of participating groups in implementing their own messaging and narrative change efforts.
Analysis of pre and post-surveys with community of practice members showed big gains in narrative change and messaging confidence, including:
- A 48-point increase in confidence integrating narrative change into an organization’s existing work;
- A 19-point improvement in their self-assessed ability to create persuasive messaging content that moves audiences to think, feel, or act differently; and,
- A 17-point bump in comfort developing effective messaging to reach their target audiences.
Here’s what some community of practice members had to say about the skills they strengthened:
“Going deeper on the timing, duration, and dosage of messaging—given the different system levels in education I work with, I came away with understanding the importance of creating more nuanced conversations about beliefs and designing for a variety of contexts and audiences.”
“Having the background gained through discussion to understand the nuances in the messages so that when we use them we can clarify for different types of audiences.”
“We gained some valuable capabilities around incorporating authentic storytelling as a mechanism for shifting mindsets.”
No matter the issue you work on or the audiences you’re messaging to, Wonder can design a community of practice approach that brings messaging recommendations off the page and into the real world, strengthening the capacities of changemakers, and helping to hasten and catalyze lasting change. If you’d like to connect with the Wonder team about how a community of practice can help your cause or organization make change, reach out to us today at curiosity@wonderforgood.com.