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| Teaching Students, Not Just Standards, with Visual Literacy by Lynell Burmark |
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An abbreviated version of this article appeared as a post on the ASCD blog,
the week of December 15, 2009. Of course, with standards and high stakes tests focusing on language arts and math, education risks being reduced to words and numbers, with no time left for "electives" like art, music, and physical education. Yet serious research, inspired publications, and classroom experience (including the irrefutable "teacher's gut") all reveal that these elective methodologies are frequently the best, if not the only way to reach students who are flailing, failing, and dropping out of our increasingly standardized educational system. |
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ASCD's most beloved authors don’t mince words on this topic. Queen of differentiated instruction, Carol Ann Tomlinson, advises us to "begin where the students are, not in front of the curriculum guide." Robert Marzano concedes that to cover all the standards, students would have to attend school K-22! And Thomas Armstrong, with his wonderfully accessible prose, applies Howard Gardner's 40 years of research documenting Multiple Intelligences, implicitly encouraging us to change our assessments from "How smart are you?" to "How are you smart?" |
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In my own experience as educator/ researcher/ author/ presenter, I have documented and demonstrated that, in order to reach 21st century learners, we must begin our instruction with images. For an example of the foundational role of visuals in instruction, try to conjure up an image based on the following series of increasingly definitive, descriptive clues:
By the time you read "smiling," if you are like most adults who took Art History in college, you were able to "see" the Mona Lisa in your mind's eye. But how many words would it take to get you there if you had never seen the painting? No matter how many thousands of words, you could never see exactly that image because, think about this: |
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| “Words can only recall images we've already seen.” What does this mean for how we teach our students? How effective is it to talk, talk, talk, talk, talk about things for which our students have no experiential or visual reference? What is the alternative? Last week, I had the privilege of visiting at Grimmer Elementary School in the Fremont Unified School District (Fremont, California). Every classroom was rich with visual displays. As Principal Donna Tonry confirmed, “We understand the need to give the students multiple reference points.” I was pleased to see a poster of the Mona Lisa in Maida Cardenas’s first grade English-Spanish dual immersion classroom. | ||
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| I had to chuckle when Maida told me her students thought it was Frida Khalo. The Maestra has made a point of sharing her passion for Khalo’s art with her students. | ||
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She even wears Frida socks! |
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| But do all these amusing visuals impact test scores? Actually, yes, when they are connected to the content to be retained.
According to Multimedia Learning author Richard Mayer, students' retention (and regurgitation for tests) is boosted 42% when materials have appropriate illustrations, rather than text alone. And – what really touches the heart of an educator – transfer (being able to apply learning in new situations) improves 89% when instruction is anchored to compelling images! |
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| In today's typical classrooms, we face a myriad of challenging students: from English-language learners, to students with learning disabilities, diverse cultural backgrounds, vastly different reading abilities, and a wide range of learning styles. Unless they are fortunate enough to attend an exemplary school like Grimmer Elementary, we cannot presume they have all seen the Mona Lisa (or any other person, place or thing we might want to discuss). In this environment, starting with a shared image is one of the fastest, most effective ways of reaching every learner. The good news is that we have the tools – the computers, interactive whiteboards, document cameras and LCD projectors, the large format printers like the PosterMaker™ for charts and the electronic dye-cut machines like the CutoutMaker™ for bulletin boards and manipulatives – to create and display the images we need to help all our students access all the ideas and concepts we need to teach. | ||
| Whoever said learning was painful should consider the joys of visually enhanced, technology-enabled instruction! Let’s make all our schools like Grimmer Elementary where children come to laugh and learn. Let’s make all our schools image-rich places full of visual reference points that students can etch indelibly upon their mind’s eye. And through it all, above it all, let’s remember to encourage the square pegs to stand atop the round holes, to build not a standardized existence, but a wildly innovative and creative life, beyond anything even the best drillers of round holes could have imagined. | ||
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