When I was in high school, I came home with a C- on my History midterm. My parents were shocked and, honestly, so was I. While not exactly a straight A student, I had never gone down to the Cs before. I couldn’t exactly articulate why history was so hard for me, other than saying I just couldn’t remember anything.
Luckily, at midterm I had to switch History classes due to a schedule change. My new History teacher was the same age and gender as my previous teacher. However, he used a method that saved my grade: visuals.
The story of Sacajawea was told with pictures. The lesson on the Battle of the Bulge was told with a stool. D-Day had movie clips. Vietnam had newspaper photos. As the images grew, my memory strengthened and my grade improved.
Because I am a visual learner, I retained almost nothing from my previous teacher’s all-audio lessons. By combining concepts with visuals, stories, and even movement, I retained so much more.
Now, I know that we all know these principles. Visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning styles are pretty much teaching methods class 101. However, I wanted to share how I blend images with concepts in ways you might not expect, deliberately working to link images with definitions.
Examples
AP English Literature Literary Terms
The main purpose of visual pairing is to solidify the concepts behind literary terms. In the new AP Lit CED, there are less than fifty literary terms identified among the AP Lit Essential Skills. However, that means that these terms are essential to know going into the exam. To help secure the terms into memory, I have paired each term with an image. I then post all of the images around my classroom, so students can work on retainment throughout the year. Here are a few of my favorites:
English 10/Honors English 10 Literary Terms
I’ve also used this idea of paired terms and images with my sophomores as they learn their literary term bellringers. Here are some of their paired concepts:
Journalism
In my Journalism class, I use visuals in a more obvious way, to illustrate what I’m talking about. When we discuss media bias, I use visuals from Allsides.com to show examples of different kinds of media bias. My test asks students to identify similar examples in real news pieces.
Why Visuals?
Obviously, we want to blend learning styles as much as possible. However, most students are visual learners. Furthermore, according to the Visual Teaching Alliance:
- The brain can see images that last for just 13 milliseconds.
- Our eyes can register 36,000 visual messages per hour.
- We can get the sense of a visual scene in less than 1/10 of a second.
- 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual.
- Visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text.
- 40 percent of nerve fibers are linked to the retina
Bottom line, if you want students to remember a definition, you better connect it to an image!
Suggested Resources
For those interested in using these resources, I am offering a FREE download of just the AP Lit Literary Term images below. To access the no-prep lessons, you can purchase the whole download here.
I am also offering a free week of ELA Bellringer lessons, which use visuals in teaching bellringers as well. See the opt-in at the top of the page to get your free lessons!