Sharing beautiful pictures of nature with your students is key to helping students understand the aesthetic wonder of science, but just how does one make the best use of these gripping visual resources as possible?
As a first step toward using images most effectively in your teaching, you will be rewarded handsomely if you nurture within yourself a habit of always talking about each projected image three times. Really, three times. I mean it.
“Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then, lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.” Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Before you balk at this, take a moment and imagine an expert weather newscast for a city you probably don’t live in. The best journalists are trained to say, “Let’s take a look at the weather out in the Rockies. The chilly, north winds are picking up the southeastern corner of Wyoming. The city of Laramie is expecting another two feet of snow.” Notice how they’ve oriented the audience three distinct times, each one with more specificity than the last: (i) Rocky Mountain region, (ii) state of Wyoming, and (iii) Laramie. Because it takes an un-oriented viewer a few seconds to digest an unfamiliar image, the strategy of “say it three ways” when talking about an image slowly gives the audience time to catch up with you.
Now, imagine how you might talk about the image of a comet nucleus three times. Perhaps you could say, “Here we have a city-sized comet. The 6-mile wide comet is mostly made of ice which begins to melt when it is close to the Sun. You can’t see this view from Earth because the comet is so tiny; this close up picture was taken by a spacecraft visiting the comet.” Notice these three sentences aren’t three separate things you want students to memorize. Rather, these are three things that give students things to notice while their brains are trying to figure out what the picture is.
In addition to habitually orienting your listeners to the image by dragging your feet about getting to the good stuff, expert presenters also explicitly point out what viewers should notice. Whereas inexperienced presenters use a laser pointer and rapidly circle things on the screen like they are using a burning Fourth of July sparkler to write their name in the air, the best presenters do something much better.
A picture really is worth a thousand words, and students can be quickly overwhelmed by the information contained within a single picture. One strategy is to insert an oval shape over an image to direct students’ attention to what’s most important. Even better, many PPT-style programs will allow you to draw on an image while you talk about it. Television sports commentators do something similar when drawing on an image to highlight player positions or holes in the defense when explaining a particular aspect of a game. The most common way is to draw on your PPT is to call up a drawing tool by doing the equivalent of a right-click on your PPT when in play/presentation mode and select pointer. If students have a copy of your PPT, they can also draw on their copies, further engaging them actively in your presentation. Drawing on your PPT further slows down your presentation, giving students a much needed chance to catch up with you and better follow along with your presentation.
But, if you REALLY want to engage your students intellectually, giving them boring figure caption style descriptions is not the way to go. Instead, we recommend that you pose questions about the pictures you are showing. Posing questions requires students to engage in the picture and make inferences, whereas clearly stating facts requires nothing on the part of students other than to write it down.
Imagine for a moment a series of powerful images you will probably show your students. It’s only natural to want to tell students about the images, but facts won’t make students love science. What could happen in the classroom if, on the other hand, the images were used in conjunction with questions, rather than the facts? In the spirit of being provocative, consider alternative figure captions from the domain of astronomy:
This picture shows more than 10,000 galaxies in a tiny region of space. Do astronomers compete against one another for highly limited telescope time?
Water-ice is observed on Mars. How could a Faster-Better-Cheaper Mars Phoenix Lander be created from spare parts and find water when other more expensive missions haven’t?
Telescopes atop sacred Maunakea, where Hawaiian’s ancestors are memorialized. Where should the next great new telescope be built?
Our thinking here could naturally be misinterpreted as suggesting that facts are unimportant or that students don’t really care about hearing cool facts. In stark contrast, we are convinced that students really do want to hear about what’s it called, how big is it, how far away, and how did it get that way? What we are advocating here is that although precisely articulated and cleverly articulated facts are definitely cool, they are insufficient on their own to deeply engage the audience in a memorable experience.
Given that memories are the residue of thinking, it behooves the compassionate professor to be sure that the students have the opportunity to ponder questions, make inferences, and be positioned to welcome the facts and figures available to them when they’re primed and ready.
Tim Slater, University of Wyoming, Tim@CAPERteam.com
Suggested citation: Slater, T. F. (2018, November). Best practices for teaching with images in class. Society of College Science Teachers Blog, 4(5), https://www.scst.org/blog
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