Sketches Help Organize Thoughts

By Doug Buehl,
Madison East High School teacher
Member, Wisconsin State Reading Association

November 2003

Let your mind wander, for a few vivid moments, around the neighborhood of your childhood. Recreate, in your imagination, the house you grew up in. Fold in streets or roads, adjoining buildings, significant landforms, people in the houses nearby. Hear the buzz of daily life, the familiar voices. Recall the half-forgotten scripts of drama and discovery, delight and disappointment. Notice those special places: where you played and dreamed, where you went to escape or to be alone, where you frequented on the sly, knowing full-well you were intruding into forbidden territory.

Glance about your map and reminisce. What stories can you tell? About the railroad trestle slung high over the sluggish, mud-colored river? About the bluffs, pocked with tiny caves, where the first splash of Dutchman’s Britches appear each spring? About the rubble of crumbling stones marking the ruins of the old mill? About the pitch-dark hay mow, frosted in January, deathly silent, illuminated by a single weak bulb, shadows harboring sinister forms?

Our memories, of course, are highly visual, and sometimes our “knowledge” may be more readily accessed first as images rather than as language. Suppose you were asked to represent these images in some sort of pictorial way before you attempted to express them in words. Could your mental images stimulate your thinking?

Strategies that prompt students to draw upon their powers of visual imagery are critical to deepening comprehension. This column has previously featured a number of ideas that encourage students to create mental images as they think about their learning. Talking Drawings (McConnell, 1992-93) is a strategy that engages students in “quick-sketch” renderings of some aspect of their knowledge or memory.

The strategy
Talking Drawings can be used in a number of contexts to elicit what students know and remember. Emphasize when introducing this strategy that a drawing is a rapid and informal depiction of something an individual knows, and is not intended to be a “work of art.”

Step 1: Model a quick-sketch for your students on the board or overhead projector. For example, to prepare students for exploring the literary genre of autobiography in an English or language arts class, you might ask students to very rapidly sketch the community where they first lived. To demonstrate, draw a “map” of your childhood neighborhood, commenting as you sketch in details so that students can tune in to your thinking as you revisit this part of your life:

“My best friend when I was little lived here, three houses down the street. Here is the community park where I once fell from the slide and cut my head. Everybody thought this house on the corner was pretty creepy, and we always ran by it as fast as we could. My brother and I had a secret hiding place in this backyard grove of trees.” And so on.

Students will perceive that you are not engineering a carefully constructed and precise illustration. Instead, emphasize that you are very quickly trying to “capture” a sense of what you are seeing in your mind’s eye, in order to further examine this image. There-fore, as you talk about your map, highlight spots overlooked at first that can be elaborated upon in your drawing.

Once we have a visual rendition in front of us, it is often easier to expand upon what we remember.

Step 2: After your demonstration, ask students to create their own drawings. Provide them with a prompt that might suggest elements to include as they sketch their images.

In our memoir example, students quick-sketch the layout of their earliest neighborhood, with salient details. It is often helpful to place a time limit on this activity, perhaps five minutes or so, to ensure that students do not belabor their drawing but very rapidly flesh out their images on paper. In addition, advise them to label aspects of their drawing.

Step 3: Next, have students share their drawings with a partner, to talk about what they remember. As they explain their drawings, additional details are likely to occur to them, as they continue to explore their memories and understandings. At this stage, students verbalize their understandings and memories, thus translating their visual images into language.

Step 4: Talking Drawings can also transition into written responses. After discussing their drawings and interpreting what they know and remember, students can be asked to summarize their thinking in a quick-write. Again, like a quick-sketch, this activity emphasizes informal writing, as students pay little attention to form and conventions as they rapidly jot down their thinking about the topic. To underscore that this is intended to be a “hurried” learning log or journal entry, provide time parameters, such as a seven-minute write.

These quick-writes can be revisited later in the unit, after further learning, and students can compare their previous understandings to newly gained insights.
Students working in an autobiography unit can also use the quick-write to jump-start a personal exploration of a memoir. For example, students might select one aspect of their quick-write for further elaboration, to be expanded into an autobiographical episode of their life.

Step 5: Talking Drawings can be employed as a strategy across the curriculum to activate background knowledge. For example, students can be asked to draw:

• What they think it would have been like to be a worker in a “sweat-shop” factory in the late 19th century.
  
• What images come to mind when they listen to this recording of the “Mars” movement from “The Planets” by Gustav Holst.
  
• What exactly happens to a morsel of food as it travels through their digestive systems.
  
• What impact global warming is having on polar ice shelves.
  
• What steps they should take to conduct this science experiment.
  
• How they would represent this character (or incident) from a chapter they read.

Posted November 10, 2003