What does thinking look like? By taking the written word and drawing out the metaphors within it allows visual thinking to take place. Visual thinking allows pupils to develop the way in which they think and to help them understand. During today’s lecture, we were each given a page of an academic article and used pictures and colour to pull out metaphors within the paper. I felt this technique helped aid my own understanding of the paper more clearly than if I was just reading it.  See my example below.

Using this approach can help raise attainment levels with programmes, such as Making Thinking Visible being rolled out across Scotland. This programme is mainly aimed at the East Ayrshire sector, as despite money being poured into helping raise levels of literacy and numeracy, it still has the lowest levels of these subjects in the United Kingdom. MTV is focused on helping pupils develop their higher order thinking skills and unite these alongside the learning of each subject (Stewart, 2019).

During our workshops, the theme running through each of the parts was the question of what does thinking look like ? We were able to explore this concept in visual arts by making prints of parts of our hands, like our fingertips to create prints. We twisted and turned the pages to see what images we could see inside these prints and used a black biro pen to enhance them and bring the image to life.

Make a mark and see where it takes you (Reynolds, 2003). By using visual thinking, we were able to use our imaginations and draw what we saw rather than writing it.

Drama uses the concept of visual thinking through giving pupils a scenario and asking them to act out what they think would happen in the situation rather than writing it down. Our workshop today consisted of us using this idea, based around the painting ‘ Windows in the West’ by Avril Paton.

We had to visualise that we lived in this tenement building and had to perform different dramas each time using a different drama convention. This week we focused on still image, flash forward, flashback and thought tracking. Although we focused on mostly upbeat scenarios, we have to be careful as we cannot use drama as way to solve the worlds problems.

Reference List

Reynolds, P. H. (2003) The Dot. Candlewick Press

Stewart, R. (2019). Making Thinking Visible