Visualiser

Whether you agree with different learning styles or not, it’s largely common knowledge that a lot of people remember better when an image is attached to the memory – sometimes to create a story. Derren Brown advocates this technique in his Tricks of the Mind book.  Sometimes something is just better cemented because an image was matched with it.

Tracing

When starting to teach the Romans I had students trace and colour the stages of the Roman empire. This brought home that this was a large area to govern – over different continents as students had to account for the African colonies - and also the waves of conquest over many hundreds of years. Lots of students would have noticed these things by just looking at the book, but it seemed more got it by tracing – the act of following all that coastline and colouring in England in the final stages of the empire communicated the magnitude of the operation more effectively.

Picture to text

Sometimes there’ll be tougher or unfamiliar terminology in a text. Copy the material but also copy images depicting the tougher words. Students need to match the image to the right word based on collaboration or research, and then stick it down as appropriate. I used this when teaching English to support understanding of a poem, but it also worked in History for some of the terms in the Doomsday book.

Structured notes