Who can benefit from Visual Strategies?
Lots of people benefit from using visual strategies. Do you use a day planner or a calendar or write notes to yourself to help you remember? Then you use visual strategies. All students can benefit from having visual supports to help them remember and understand. But using visual supports can be particularly helpful for students with special learning difficulties.

 

Why use Visual Strategies?
Communication breakdowns can be a "root" cause of problems in social interaction, educational performance, and behavior.

It is critically important to understand the learning style of students so the most effective teaching can occur. Recognizing that students have different learning styles leads to the discovery that most students with autism spectrum disorders and many others with communication or behavior challenges are visual learners. That means they understand what they see better than what they hear. Yet we tend to communicate with them primarily with talking.

It is typical for teachers and parents to presume that students understand everything that is said to them. Frequently they do not. In fact, many of the behavior and social skill problems that these students demonstrate can be linked to a lack of understanding.

As we observe students, we discover that many of them demonstrate a strength in understanding visual information compared to their ability to respond to what they hear. Using visual strategies to support communication provides an effective way to improve both understanding and expressive communication.

For many students with communication challenges, the use of visually supported communication is more effective and efficient than just talking to them. Visual tools assist students in processing language, organizing their thinking, remembering information and many other skills necessary to participate effectively.

 

Can you explain this more?
Consider this example:
Auditory information is fleeting. It is there and then it is gone. It is transient. That means it comes and then it disappears.

Social interaction requires lots of shifting. . . back and forth. . .from person to person. Effective communication requires the ability to rapidly establish attention and shift attention. We take in information and process it. Then we formulate responses appropriate for the situation. These steps need to happen quickly because social life moves and changes continually.

Our targeted students may experience difficulty accomplishing these skills at the speed necessary to participate effectively in communication interactions. They can have difficulty rapidly establishing or shifting attention.

Auditory information may disappear before students have a chance to pay attention enough to take in what is being said. They may miss a lot of information. Students may be accurately interpreting only fragments of communication messages.

Using visual strategies helps. Visual information stays there long enough for the student to see it, take in the information and respond to it. It is non-transient. It doesn't fly away. Students can go back over and over if they need, to understand and remember. 

 

How to Use Visual Strategies. . .
There are lots of options. Schedules and calendars are the most common visual tools used to give students information. Step-by-step directions, choice boards, and classroom rules provide structure in classrooms. They help students by creating an environment that is more predictable and understandable.