Show and Tell: Using Visual Thinking in the Classroom

Our brains are wired to rapidly make sense of and remember visual input.  How might we tap into our students’ ability to think visually when teaching?  What roles can photographs, concept maps, flow charts, and infographics play in learning? These are some of the questions we explored at my workshop on the use of visual thinking in teaching Saturday afternoon at the Center for Teaching’s annual GradSTEP event for graduate students and post-docs.

This was more or less the third version of this visual thinking workshop for me, and I think it was my best yet. The examples of visual tools now have more relevance to college teaching, I think, and I added in a conceptual / theoretical layer this time around that pulled the session together well. Below you’ll find my Prezi from the session, and over on the CFT blog you’ll find a collection of ideas for using visual tools suggested by workshop participants. See also the teaching guide on visual thinking I helped write in 2010. I’ll need to update that guide with some of the ideas from this most recent workshop…

Image: “Eye,” Michele Catania, Flickr (CC)