Two (or five) heads are better than one...

Two (or five) heads are better than one…..
A picture paints a thousand words….

Both of these phrases support today’s post.

I’ve been blessed to work with some wonderful teachers at my school. My fellow World History teachers (Jamie Carlson, Deb Kenton, Tammy Morley, &  Matt Lewis) and I share lesson activities with each other as well as work together creating many of our assignments.
In my last post, I shared research supporting non-linguistic representations (pictures) in the high school classroom. In addition to formative assessment, pictures can be used to help students process new information.

In our World History World War I Unit, we modified the Etch-A-Sketch concept from Tools for Promoting Active In-Depth Learning to create a graphic organizer to accompany a PowerPoint we created. However, we went from pictures to words this time instead of taking written notes and then drawing pictures.

Our Lesson: Teacher presents their own material to cover the big ideas and details of how WWI was a “new kind” of war. Students will sketch as they view the material, and then will discuss the big ideas and details. Afterwards they will put the class interpretation into words and phrases.

Here’s the note organizer.

We got some great drawings of soldiers in the trenches with flamethrowers and of tanks and other new technology in the war.


Your turn:
How have you used pictures or visuals in your classroom?
Leave a comment to start our discussion.