Even though considered problematic, the growing need for remote and hybrid classrooms makes visual teaching necessary. The recent surge outdoor education has seen schools adapt versions of personal learning and digital and hybrid learning approaches that will supplement and enhance students’ learning.
Visual learning is critical in engaging and helping students retain information learned in particular lessons. Therefore, below are some essential visual teaching strategies that tutors and teachers can adopt to enhance learning.
Identify each student’s ability.
The best thing a teacher can do is to learn from the student before the student learns from the teacher. Thus, students have different abilities. Some will retain information much longer through auditory aids such as podcasts, lectures and music.
Similarly, others with a strong sense of balance will retain information by visualizing information. Therefore, there are many ways a teacher can quickly identify a student’s visual learning abilities.
For example, a teacher or tutor may use highlighters and coloured marker pens to mark different types of information while teaching. Or, at best, seek to develop youth programs to identify each student’s ability and enhance his learning.
Deliver complex concepts with the aid of digital media
Digital media, including videos and PowerPoint slides, are powerful tools to engage students in visual classrooms. The main aim is to ensure that you deliver complex concepts with engaging media that will speak to your students.
For example, a sixty-minute lesson will only be fair to some students if the tutor comes to lecture; however, it would be more effective to incorporate digital media, such as videos, to help explain concepts to students. Among other visual presentations you can include in your lessons are:
- Diagrams
- Graphs
- Concept maps
- Annotated visuals
Please encourage students to demonstrate what they have learned
Learning aims at equipping a student with knowledge and skills. Students who learn best through visual aids should best be trajected towards exploiting the knowledge they have gained physically.
Scholars agree that learning by teaching is a proven method of successful education. Therefore when students demonstrate what they have learned, they develop a more profound and long-lasting understanding of the lesson than students who do not demonstrate.
There are various ways in which students can demonstrate knowledge learned in class. It may include peer teaching, participating in youth programs, and undertaking evaluation tests.
Despite the excellence and preferability of this method of learning and teaching, tutors must seek to create a study routine, plan out each lesson in advance, and try teaching multiple skills at a time.
Conclusion
However expensive this teaching method may be, tutors must ensure that it is achievable by investing more time and personnel, seeking charity partnerships and encouraging students to demonstrate what they have learned visually.
Learning is complex and, many times, a burden to some students, improper methods of teaching many times, students plunge into distress and, finally, depression. Therefore as a tutor, ensure that your way of teaching aids achievable and gentle in equal measure.