ideas for using visual thinking in the classroom from gradstep participants
by derek bruff, cft assistant director
at the end of my gradstep workshop saturday, “show and tell: using visual thinking in the classroom,” i asked participants to doodle their ideas for incorporating visual thinking tools in their teaching on large post-it notes. i then had a few helpers collect these post-its and place them on the board at the front of the room, with ideas that involved student-created visuals at one end and ideas for instructor-created visuals at the other end. i promised the participants that i would share their ideas here on the blog, so here we go…
above is the cluster of ideas for student-created visuals. click the picture to see a larger version. participants identified ways to have students create and use concept maps, word trees, flowcharts, timelines, and prezis. for instance, here’s a lesson plan built around a word tree, like this alice in wonderland word tree:
the phrase “adopted volcano” caught my attention in this participant’s idea about using coordinate axes:
and this participant was inspired by my post-it activity to try something similar on the topic of constitutional powers:
zooming back out, here are the participants’ ideas for instructor-created visuals, including timelines, concept maps, and better powerpoints:
i’ll admit that i don’t really understand what some of these post-it notes are meant to convey! for instance:
but other participants doodled fairly comprehensive approaches to using visuals. here’s one that rejects boring powerpoint slides for what looks to be prezi:
and here’s a plan for a lecture about psychopathy that features multiple visualization tools, including film clips, metaphorical images, and student-created prezis:
the post-its placed on the middle of the board were supposed to feature ideas somewhere between student-created and instructor-created.
as it turned out, there were mostly just cryptic, like this one that clearly represents something interesting:
other post-its in the middle of the board seemed to be meditations on the nature of visual thinking, like this lively one:
thanks to all the participants for attending the session and sharing their ideas!
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