A quick drawing, often spontaneously produced.
Learning to think. Learning to learn. These are the essential skills for student success. Research in both educational theory and cognitive psychology tells us that visual learning is among the very best methods for teaching students of all ages how to think and how to learn.
What is visual learning?
Visual learning techniques—graphical ways of working with ideas and presenting information—teach students to clarify their thinking, and to process, organise and prioritise new information. Visual diagrams reveal patterns, interrelationships and interdependencies. They also stimulate creative thinking.
With the language barriers in the classroom, us teachers end up having to find other means of communicating ideas -- I'll use the science unit on heredity for example -- to students, whom many don't even know how to spell the word "the".
For me, apart from being more animated, I use my students as examples and create stories. Which means, more often that not, I end up drawing them on the board. With the risk of sounding vain notwithstanding, I like to draw, and I think I've mastered the fine art of quick whiteboard sketching -- and I wouldn't give up that talent for the world.
My kids are a great audience, and when it's time for me to explain something to them, I whip out my red, black, blue, and green markers and go at it. The result: I have their attention, they're laughing and having a great time, I get my ideas across, and I've made my lesson memorable.
So, back to my science unit on heredity. How does one explain the concept of traits, inheritance, recessive genes, or dominant genes to 7-year-old EAL students?
Try what I did -- draw what the offspring would be like if one of your students had a kid with, say, an alien with four arms, green skin, three eyes, and tentacles for feet. Then you explain why the child looks that way: the child has inherited certain physical characteristics known as traits from its mother and father. These characteristics either show up as one or the other, or together combined because of the genes your body is made of. Explain and draw what another child might look like with the same parents -- thus clarifying why siblings look different and twins the same -- and throw in a couple of classroom references of kids and their siblings, too. Draw a couple of arrows pointing to the traits, highlight and circle some words, and voila!
That is your lesson on heredity, using visual diagrams and visual cues to get the messages across. This in itself is an art.
"Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition."
- Author unknown
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