Images are powerful: they are shared and they are remembered. Katie O’Malley discusses the power of images in generating success criteria.
Instagram, Tumblr and Snapchat. Selfies, memes and emoji’s. An app, a trend, a new keyboard for messaging. Students are increasingly using images to communicate. It’s no longer an influx of text messages, with their abbreviations and lack of punctuation, which fills the inbox of every fourteen year old’s smartphone. Instead, it’s a litany of emoji’s. Or, a photo with a surreptitious caption that delivers a message only to disappear again in 10 seconds. This is unless it is screen-shot and sent to all 40 contacts in the WhatsApp group.
I confess, the notion of using images to convey difficult concepts is hardly original in teaching and learning. I attribute my own awareness of how pictures can be a powerful tool to a colleague from a couple of years ago. He used a series of images to represent the skills his class should use to “bling up” their writing.
Inspired by the success he had in those pre-emoji days, I generated my own selection of pictures. These pictures symbolise the skills needed to analyse. For example:
- a microscope appears for zooming in 🔬
- an iceberg for inferring
- a message in a bottle for the writer’s message
- a picture of sticky labels represents the requirement of terminology
- a YingYang symbol for alternative interpretations ☯️
- the image of a squeezed orange to show the need for juicy quotations.
And so the list continues! Now, my success criteria for analysing moves away from a list of bullet points covering each skill. Students can them become increasingly familiar with what the images represent. The hope is that, in the exam, the mental and visual checklist of images is far more memorable than the ‘fourth bullet point’.
My latest attempt is using images to help my students to develop original character interpretations in ‘An Inspector Calls’. For example, when examining Sheila and Inspector Goole, I projected a series of images. Each of these images could be used to represent symbols for each character. Students were then asked to compared to how each character is presented using the symbols. They then built their own simile and wrote this as the topic sentence for their analytical paragraph. The result was a clearer sense of an individual interpretation and following a line of argument.
Fingers crossed they remember their juicy oranges, microscopes and sticky labels when proving the Inspector is a crystal ball or a compass for ‘moral navigation’.