I recall asking students questions in readers' workshop or math concerning charts, but students could answer only closed questions such as, "how many more homeruns did Sammy Sosa hit than Babe Ruth?" If students were to respond to higher-level thinking questions according to Common Core standards, they need more exposure and opportunities to respond to open-ended questions using tables or charts. In order for students to truly give value to the images within a text, they must develop awareness of the images and how they support the print. O'Neil explains in her article "Reading Pictures" that students truly need explicit teaching on how to use images to help them read text. If students are exposed to explicit instruction about the use of visual images, they can learn how to depend not solely on the text for answers or information and think about the topic they're reading about: "Sometimes simply by adding description of characters and setting, and, at times, by challenging the veracity of the text with ironic or additional information, the illustrations in picture books provide essential clues for comprehension. For this reason, novice readers can benefit from explicit instruction in reading pictorial elements."
1
Students should be taught how to grapple with an image on their own to raise and answer questions by depending solely on the image itself. Students will then be able to draw clues from illustrations to increase their understanding of the text. With this in mind, we should scaffold our teaching styles and traditional strategies in order to help students become visual thinkers.
Students should be made aware and encouraged to use their natural abilities, such as sight, as they learn or enhance their skills to become good readers. The neuro-scientist Donald D. Hoffman states, "You are a creative genius. Your creative genius is so accomplished that appears, to you and others, as effortless."
2
Students must first come to the realization that they have a natural born talent, the gift of sight. It is Hoffman's goal to convince readers that the genius of vision is complex and that the human eye is amazing. Hoffman explains that, "what happens when you see isn't a mindless process of stimulus response, but a sophisticated process of construction."
3
Students need to realize that their ability to look at an image is just as important as reading the text and requires a certain amount of visual intelligence. In order for students to understand how to use images as an aid to reading, they first need to come to the realization that looking at images isn't as simple as one perceives. Looking at visuals is just as complex as reading and should be done to help students think about the image and text as a whole. Students need to realize that there's nothing wrong with reading picture books and that they should practice reading using their visual intelligence, their innate ability to see. As children learn to read with their sight, they should be taught to develop meaning from what they see. This will, in turn, help students to become visual thinkers, which is to process what you see. We often encourage students to use their critical thinking skills, while reading complex text, but students should become visual thinkers, who can process what they see. In this respect, students will begin to think critically as they draw meaning from visuals.