Sunni Brown talks about doodle
as a thinking tool.
This thinking tool promotes visual literacy by expressing internal (mental) representations. This tool helps to process information and knowledge.
The benefit of the tool is by externalizing thinking. Externalizing makes processing information and solving problems more manageable and allows to share ideas.
If your students work in pairs or groups anyway, you can try the following exercise in any lesson, in any content.
Choose one concept or problem.
Represent your thoughts by drawing and illustrating shapes/lines/arrows to express them with images instead of words. Doodling will allow promoting thinking towards a solution.
Try it for yourself first.
The more you can visually express a concept or problem in various ways; you become visually literate.
That is - write in the visual language, a language of lines, shapes, pictures.
If you share the representations you have created with others, you will have a meaningful and profound dialogue, inspiring others and getting more ideas for your solutions.
For you, teachers - Doodling in the classroom can expand your knowledge of what the students understood.
A teacher who tried doodling in the classroom by visualizing a subject discovered that the students better processed the information. Furthermore, she had some additional unexpected gain: A student who had never participated express his views. As a result, his colleagues heard his voice for the first time.
It is a formative experience for every educator, and according to that teacher, doodling was a profound visual learning tool for her class.
So teachers asked me after the lecture (where I presented this video) - Should students be allowed to doodle on a topic unrelated to the lesson?
The answer - yes. If doodling helps the students to be more focused- please do.
Doodling activates the motoric system, promoting students' concentration ability: some wright, and some doodle.
I urge you- Turn doodling into a pedagogical tool !!
Using doodling will also gain the students' cooperation, active listening, a powerful tool for processing information, and an important tool to see what they are processing.
It's like an "X-ray of thought" for learners.
If it's hard for you to think about it in an entire class, try individual instruction, and keep track of what it does to your teaching.
If students do not want to scribble because they are ashamed, teach them to use cards with pictures that you will collect from the internet or bring as postcards or schematically draw shapes like squares, circles, and lines.
Another way - using the computer -
In the PowerPoint, use the "add" brilliant template
And you will discover a whole world of visual schemas.
Please note - choosing a scheme or drawing one yourself requires an explanation - why did I choose this?
The explanation is our most important thing as teachers - it enables us to understand the learner's thinking.
In my opinion, this is an excellent pedagogical tool for implementing classroom teaching instruction.
Good luck, 21st-century teachers.