Teaching Students, Not Just Standards, with Visual Literacy

Post submitted by ASCD author Lynell Burmark.

In this climate of standards and standardized testing, of politicians posturing and parading, the pressure is on to make square pegs fit into round holes. Even the Gates Foundation has joined the parade, announcing a $1 million grant to the National Parent Teacher Association last week so that the PTA can engage parents in the push to adopt national K–12 curriculum standards.

Standards and high-stakes tests focusing on language arts and math (to the exclusion of "electives" like art, music, and physical education) reduce the education experience for some students to words and numbers. Yet serious research, inspired publications, and classroom experience (including the irrefutable "teacher's gut") all reveal that these elective methodologies are frequently the best, if not the only way to reach students who are flailing, failing, and dropping out of our increasingly standardized education system.

ASCD's most beloved authors don't mince words on this topic. The queen of differentiated instruction, Carol Ann Tomlinson, advises us to "begin where the students are, not in front of the curriculum guide." Robert Marzano concedes that to cover all the standards, students would have to attend school K–22! And Thomas Armstrong, with his wonderfully accessible prose, applies Howard Gardner's 40 years of research documenting Multiple Intelligences, implicitly encouraging us to change our assessments from "How smart are you?" to "How are you smart?"

In my own experience as educator, researcher, author, and presenter, I have documented and demonstrated that to reach 21st century learners, we must begin our instruction with images. For an example of the connection between images and instruction, try to conjure up an image based on this series of descriptive cues: 

A woman, seated, in a low-cut velvet dress, with dark eyes, smiling, almost imperceptibly.

By the time I say "smiling," most people "see" the Mona Lisa in their mind's eye. How many words would it take to get you there if you had never seen the painting? No matter how many thousands of words, you could never see exactly that image. Words can only recall images we've already seen. What does this mean for how we teach our students? 

According to Multimedia Learning author Richard Mayer, students' retention (and regurgitation for tests) is boosted 42 percent when materials have appropriate illustrations, rather than text alone. And—what really touches the heart of an educator—transfer (being able to apply learning in new situations) improves 89 percent when instruction is anchored to compelling images!

In today's typical classrooms, we face a myriad of challenging students: from English-language learners to students with learning disabilities, diverse cultural backgrounds, vastly different reading abilities, and a wide range of learning styles. In this environment, we cannot presume they have all seen the Mona Lisa or any other person, place, or thing we might want to discuss. In this environment, starting with a shared image is one of the fastest, most effective ways of reaching every learner. The good news is technology provides the tools to create and display the images we need to help all our students access all the ideas and concepts we need to teach.

Let's make school a place to laugh and learn, a place where the best images and video clips are harnessed and incorporated (along with humor, music, and other ways of making education stick) into our curriculum and presentations. Let's make school a place where we meet students in their mind's eye, where we encourage the square pegs to stand atop the round holes, to build not a standardized future but a wildly innovative and creative future, beyond anything even the best drillers of round holes could have imagined.

Lynell Burmark, Ph.D., is author of the award-winning ASCD book Visual Literacy: Learn to See, See to Learn (browse free chapters). An expanded version of this post (with reviews of relevant publications and examples of classroom applications) is available on the author’s Web site under Free Articles & Free Handouts.