Visualizing

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Visualizing

• A Motion Picture in the Mind

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What Is Visualizing?

• As you muse over a poem, read a novel, or pause
  over a newspaper story, a picture forms in your
  mind. Certain smells, tastes, sights, and
  feelings emerge, depending on what youre reading
  and what life experiences you bring to it.
  Information comes to you through your senses.
  This technique triggers a wide range of memories
  and feelings.
• 
  Susan Zimmermann

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What Happens When You Listen to the Radio?
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If you can create that motion picture while
listening to the radio, you can do it while
reading a book. Sensory images are the
cinema unfolding in your mind that makes reading
three-dimensional.
Susan Zimmermann
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Authors WordsYour SchemaMental Images That
Enhance Understanding of the Text and Bring Life
to Reading
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When readers create mental images, they
engage with text in ways that make it personal
and memorable to them alone. Anchored in prior
knowledge, images come from the emotions and all
five senses, enhancing understanding and
immersing the reader in rich detail.
Keene and Zimmermann
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Is Visualizing Really Important When Reading?

• Read Ballad of Birmingham to yourself.
• Reread the poem and track images that you have in
  the margins of the page.
• Turn to a friend and share your thoughts.
• Answer the following questions
• -How did visualizing help you to better
  
• understand the poem?
• -Did sharing your visualizations with
  others
• help you to better understand the
  poem?
• -Did you and the others you shared with
  
• have different visions of the same
  text?

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Visualizing

• Allows readers to create mental images from words
  in the text
• Heightens engagement with the text
• Links past experience to the words and ideas in
  the text
• Enhances meaning with mental imagery
• Stimulates imaginative thinking
• Enables readers to place themselves in the story
• 
  Stephanie Harvey

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More Benefits of Visualizing

• Improves literal comprehension of both narrative
  and expository text
• Increases the ability to elaborate on characters,
  scenes, actions, and ideas
• Heightens enjoyment of reading
• Helps in solving spatial and verbal problems
  e.g., story problems in math, process
  descriptions
• Improves test scores on various reading measures,
  including standardized tests
• Gambrell and Koskinen 2001 Wilhelm, 1995, 1997
  for research review

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Visualization has been successful in
improving comprehension monitoring, a skill
integral to expert reading, identifying main
ideas and justifying these with evidence from a
text, and seeing patterns of details across a
text or texts to discover complex relationships.
Recent NAEP studies show that fewer than six
percent of our high school seniors can
effectively use these skills.
Reading is Seeing, Jeffrey Wilhelm
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Even cursory use of instruction supporting
visualization improves scores on standardized
tests... I work in schools and know the political
realities of test scores. Some ingenious studies
(see especially Rose, et al, 2000, and the Arts
Education Partnerships Critical Links study,
2002, www.aep-arts.org) have shown that imagery
use has many benefits, including higher
standardized reading scores relative to control
groups. Reading Is
Seeing, Jeffrey Wilhelm
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There are many smart, competent people
who dont create sensory images when they read.
As a result, reading is often a chore to be
avoided. 7 Keys to Comprehension,
Zimmermann
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Can Students Be Taught to Visualize?

• The answer is YES!!!
• When you give students long blocks of time to
  use comprehension strategies as they practice
  reading, magic happens in the classroom.
  Students become more engaged. And with
  engagement comes deeper understanding.
  Susan Zimmermann

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Showing students the thinking side of reading
teaches comprehension. When you model how you
think as you read, students learn how to talk and
write about their thinking. When you give
students long blocks of time to use comprehension
strategies as they practice reading, magic
happens in the classroom. Students become more
engaged. And with engagement comes deeper
understanding. 7 Keys to
Comprehension, Susan Zimmermann
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What Is the Directors Role?
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The director models the use of visualizing to
better comprehend texts through thinking-aloud.
Stars on the rise are then given
opportunities to apply the same strategy in their
own reading, first with help from the director,
then the director gradually releases the
responsibility to the stars.
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We know that

• Better learning will not come from finding
  better ways for the teacher to instruct, but from
  giving the learner better opportunities to
  construct.
• Papert, 1990

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Tips for Directors

• Mental images are connected to your life
  experiences and memories.
• One image leads to another, helping you to
  develop a deeper appreciation of what you read.
• Mental images bring forth not only still
  snapshots of reading but smells, tastes,
  feelings, and chills and thrills as well.
• Reading becomes three-dimensional when you call
  on your sensory images.
• Sensory images help you remember what you read as
  you personalize characters, scenes, plot lines,
  social studies facts, and so on.

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More Tips for Directors

• When your reading camera shuts off, its a
  warning that there might be a breakdown in
  comprehension.
• Watching words unwind like a movie in your mind
  helps you stay with the book longer. You want to
  see the extended story or watch how science
  facts unfold.
• Using sensory images helps you move from a
  literal interpretation of the story to
  inferential thinking. Youll see the concrete
  representation in your minds eye, and then
  extend the image to new thinking.
• 7 Keys to Comprehension, Susan Zimmermann

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Directors Prompts

• What impressions of the people and settings are
  forming in your mind?
• Where did the story take place? What is it like
  there? What kinds of buildings, trees and so on,
  do you see?
• Does it matter where the story takes place?
  Could it have happened elsewhere or anywhere?
  Does it matter when the story happened?
• What do the characters look like? How are they
  dressed or groomed? How do they walk, stand,
  gesture, interact, or display emotions?
• What kind of details help you to envision the
  story? How are these connected to your life or
  reading experiences? Reading Is Seeing,
  p.65

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Scene 1, Take 25
How Do We Know If Our Stars Are Oscar Ready?
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If a student

• Begs to be read to and bugs you to keep reading
  once you start
• Talks about the book and gives you details when
  asked to tell about the story
• Laughs or cries at appropriate places
• Makes predictions about the story
• Reads aloud with expression
• Describes the characters to you
• Extends the story, going beyond what is on the
  page

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Then

• The student is more than likely creating sensory
  images and visualizing.

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If the student

• Shows a lack of interest in reading or being read
  to
• Is unable to put into words a description of what
  has been read
• Lacks interest in whether the story is finished
  or not
• Cannot describe the characters, setting, or what
  is happening in the story

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Then

• The student might not be creating sensory images.

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Encourage students to go back through the
text to check their mind pictures, and remind
them to check their thinking with someone else if
it doesnt make sense. Visualizing is a
strategy that enhances understanding, but if ill
conceived, it can just as easily hinder
understanding.
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How Does the Director Help a Rising Star Who Has
Misconceptions Which Hinder Understanding?

• Silent Night
• Is it round John or round yon virgin?

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Questions Directors May Use to Help Rising Stars
Reveal Their Thinking

• What did you see when you read those words? Does
  having this picture in your head make reading
  more fun? How?
• Where is that picture in your head coming from?
  What words in the text helped you make that
  picture? How did your background knowledge add
  to the details of this mental image?
• Great! Youve marked a spot where you were
  confusedwhere you couldnt see whats going on.
  Why do you think your camera shut off? What
  will you do to get back on track?

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More Questions for Directors

• Have your sensory images changed as you read this
  story? What words added detail to your mind
  picture?
• Youre reading a nonfiction book today. What did
  the author do to help you grasp the facts? What
  does it look like in your mind? Oh, you see a
  comparison of the size of these two plants?
  Please share with the class how even charts can
  paint pictures in our mind.
• I noticed youve highlighted this poem where the
  author used powerful nouns and active verbs. Did
  these words help the poem come to life in your
  mind?
• 7 Keys to Comprehension, Susan Zimmermann

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How Do I Know When I Have Reached Stardom?

• I create pictures or films in my imagination as I
  read, noticing what characters look like, where
  the action is taking place, etc.
• I visualize scenes or details not described,
  picturing what had happened to the characters
  before the story began.
• I picture myself in the book, meeting the
  characters and being part of the scene.
• I often draw as I read, depicting visual images
  of what I see in my mind.
• I comment on the way the writer presents or
  withholds information.
• I notice how the text is organized.

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• I role-play and enact scenes of the story as if I
  were in it.
• I combine and connect ideas, and I am able to
  formulate my own thinking.
• I notice the vocabulary, the style, the
  wholeness of the selection.
• I negotiate, agree with, or argue with the
  writers ideas and opinions.
• I use images from my own experiences to help me
  create a picture of the text.
• I connect to the emotions and the senses
  described in the text.
• I identify words and phrases in the text that
  help me see in my mind the characters, places,
  and events.
• 
  Literacy Techniques, David Booth

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What Props Are Needed to Be Oscar Ready?

• Variety of printpicture books, poems, newspaper
  articles, textbooks
• Pictures and graphics, including magazines,
  journals, websites, multimedia texts, maps

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Visualizing
Strategies That Work, Stephanie Harvey
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Adapting Mental Images During Reading
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Mental Images
Reading with Meaning, Debbie Miller
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When Will the Stars Be Ready for the Oscars?

• Sensory images play a valuable
  monitoring role. Once a child understands that
  there should be a movie running in her mind, she
  realizes that something isnt right when that
  movie stops or gets fuzzy. She is aware that she
  isnt understanding and can stop, reread, look up
  certain words, or ask for help to get back on the
  comprehension track. Then the movie can start
  rolling again.
• 7 Keys to
  Comprehension, Zimmermann

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• Its like youre in the book, but youre
  invisible and youre watching everything but the
  characters dont notice you. Sensory images are
  like a movie in your head, but if youre just
  reading words, you wont get a movie in your
  head, so you have to reread. Sensory images make
  reading a lot of fun. If youre reading and then
  take your eye off the words, you will say,
  Whats happening? And then if you reread, you
  will get your movie back, but if you keep
  reading, you wont get your movie back.
• Grace, a second grader

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Credits
  Booth, David and Larry Swartz. Literacy
Techniques for Building Successful Readers and
Writers. Portland, ME Stenhouse Publishers,
2004.   Boyles, Nancy N. Constructing Meaning
Through Kid-Friendly Comprehension Strategy
Instruction. Gainesville, FL Maupin House,
2004.   Gallagher, Kelly. Deeper Reading
Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12. Portland,
ME Stenhouse Publishers, 2004.   Harvey,
Stephanie and Anne Goudvis. Strategies That Work
Teaching Comprehension to Enhance Understanding.
York, ME Stenhouse Publishers, 2000.   Keene,
Ellin and Susan Zimmerman. Mosaic of Thought
Teaching Comprehension in a Readers Workshop.
Portsmouth, NH Heinemann, 1997.   Miller,
Debbie. Reading with Meaning Teaching
Comprehension in the Primary Grades. Portland,
ME Stenhouse Publishers, 2002.   Wilhelm,
Jeffrey D. Reading is Seeing Learning to
Visualize Scenes, Characters, Ideas, and Text
Worlds to Improve Comprehension and Reflective
Reading. New York, NY Scholastic,
2004.   Zimmerman, Susan and Chryse Hutchins. 7
Keys to Comprehension How to Help Your Kids
Read It and Get It! New York, NY Three Rivers
Press, 2003.