It’s widely understood that visual learning can improve students’ comprehension, retention and critical thinking in the classroom. Yet, you can’t just throw any visual learning activity into an assignment and expect enormous results from your students. These visual learning tools, be it graphic organizers, compare and contrast diagrams, plot summaries or character analysis webs, must serve a purpose in each and every lesson. Visual learning for the sake of visual learning won’t get you or your students anywhere. Instead, begin with the end in mind and introduce visual learning tools with an added value and purpose for the learning exercise.
Match the right technique for the right lesson.
Each visual learning tool will introduce a different method of thinking and end result for your students. The first step is to match the right visual learning technique to the right lesson or assignment. To get started, ask yourself the following questions while planning your next assignment:
- What’s the assignment?
- What goal are you trying to accomplish?
- What skill do you want your students to master?
- What’s the appropriate visual learning tool to meet these needs?
By answering these questions, you can begin to narrow down which graphic organizer or visual learning technique is best for the assignment and will help your students think critically, be more creative, study more effectively, and better understand complex concepts and materials.
Visual learning introduces a model of thinking.
Each visual learning tool can introduce a new model or way of thinking. In a past post titled, “Jumpstart Structured Thinking With Templates,” I talked about how templates can help introduce new ways of thinking to teach specific thinking and analysis tools.
For example, if you supply students at the beginning of a reading assignment with a worksheet on Freytag’s Triangle, a triangle used to represent plot elements, they’ll consciously begin looking for the elements in the novel that fit each section of the dramatic elements. This type of fill-in-the-blank exercise with Freytag’s Triangle gets students thinking about the events of the novel and how they relate to the entire story and its literary elements. It provides a structure to help your students think and process information.1
In this case:
- The assignment may be to read and understand a novel.
- The goal is to understand the plot elements and how they relate to the entire story.
- The takeaway skill is understanding the plot and literary elements of a novel.
- The appropriate visual learning tool is a Freytag Triangle.
On the other hand, let’s suppose you wanted students to understand the common themes between two novels the class read over the course of the unit. You could ask students to complete the Inspiration® 9 template titled, “Compare and Contrast” in the Language Arts folder. When the students begin to look at the sections of the graphic organizer that they need to fill out, they’ll begin to think about common themes and differences between the two novels.
In this case:
- The assignment may be to write an essay comparing two novels.
- The goal is to understand the similarities and differences between two novels.
- The takeaway skill is the ability to compare and contrast two ideas.
- The appropriate visual learning tool is a compare and contrast graphic organizer.
The take away is this: Visual learning is the vessel or mode of introducing these ways of thinking to students. In the future they will understand what it means to evaluate the dramatic elements of a novel or compare the similarities and differences between two concepts. Yet, the appropriate visual learning tool has to be matched with the right assignment in order to achieve the goal and skills for the assignment. If your goal is to understand plot elements, a compare and contrast graphic organizer won’t necessarily achieve your goals. So, visual learning can improve your students’ comprehension and retention of knowledge in the classroom so long as you purposefully match the correct technique for the desired learning skill.
Thanks for stopping by and I look forward to seeing you next week!
Mona Westhaver
President and Co-founder, Inspiration Software
- “Freytag’s Pyramid.” The OAK Web Server Will Soon Be Permanently Retired and Decommissioned. Web. 12 Apr. 2011. <http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~hartleyg/250/freytag.html>. [↩]
