Visual Thinking Strategies

I have been using Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) in my classroom since 2005. An arts and art management teacher introduced me to it, and it seemed to be a perfect fit for language learning. In the "pure" version of VTS students look for about a minute at an image that a teacher has selected and think about the answers to three carefully worded questions: 1) What's going on in this picture?, 2) What do you see that makes you say that?, and 3) What more can we find? Students then volunteer their answers and the teacher acts as a facilitator finding connections and threads through the students' answers, slowing building a fuller understanding of the class's ideas regarding the artwork. The teacher may ask for more detail in support of the students' answers to question 1, such as asking where in the image the student is looking in making their observation and perhaps asking for more support for question 2. 

The wonderful thing about VTS is that there are no wrong answers as long as the ideas are based on and supported by the image. Also, as the interaction progresses, students are free to respond to previous ideas and even offer different perspectives, also supported by their own ideas.

Among the reasons VTS seems such a good fit for language learning is it gibes with the approach for language learning proposed by Paul Nation, that "activities in a language course can be classified into the four strands of meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning and fluency development" (Nation, 2008, https://doi.org/10.2167/illt039.0). In VTS students share communicate their own ideas with their own language, interact with the ideas of others, get feedback on the quality of their utterances, and get practice using language for fluency. There is also a wonderful connection between images and vocabulary that helps improve comprehension (I guess the thing next to the bed must be that bedside table) but it also improves critical thinking in that it requires them to provide support for their ideas.

I have adapted VTS for language teaching by incorporating cooperative learning structures. Because students are shy about sharing their ideas "cold turkey," I have them first think about their own answers and write them down into a Google Form. Then I have them share with a partner in groups of four and ask them to write down keywords for the ideas that they hear. They then tell the other two students in the group what they heard from their partners. In whole-class situations and when time allows, I then have each member of the group go meet with matching partners in other groups (I have them divided by hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades and have them meet with matching suits from other groups--this can be two sets of hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades in larger classes). Then they return to their own groups and review what they heard.

Students love the idea of having someone else attend carefully to their ideas and to hear them be shared with other students. Knowing there is an audience for their ideas is a good incentive to participate and to make a little effort in their output. It is also fun for the teacher, since in my 20 or so years of using the same VTS images with a variety of groups of all levels, I almost always hear at least one new idea. My engineering students critiqued the house of cards that children in an image were building, and my art students once compared the color of a river in an artwork to the color of an old coke bottle. The painting came before the bottle, but it was still a great observation that led to further thinking about the colors used in the artwork.

VTS can be and has been used in a number of subjects. It can be a warmup for a discussion about social issues, it can be used to discuss the content of a book, movie, magazine, or documentary, and it is a great way to enable and encourage communication and learning of ideas.