Visualizing A Motion Picture in the Mind. What Is Visualizing? “As you muse over a poem, read a novel, or pause over a newspaper story, a picture forms.

Visualizing

A Motion Picture in the Mind

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 you’re 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

What Happens When You Listen to the

Radio?

“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

Author’s Words

+Your Schema

=Mental Images That Enhance

Understanding of the Text and Bring Life to Reading

“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

Is Visualizing Really Important When Reading?

1. Read “Ballad of Birmingham” to yourself. 2. Reread the poem and track images that you have

in the margins of the page.3. Turn to a friend and share your thoughts.4. 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?

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

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 testsGambrell and Koskinen 2001; Wilhelm, 1995,

1997 for research review

“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

“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

“There are many smart, competent people who don’t create sensory images when they read. As a result, reading is often a chore to be avoided.”

7 Keys to Comprehension, Zimmermann

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

“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

What Is the Director’s Role?

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.

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

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.

More Tips for Directors• When your reading camera shuts off, it’s 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. You’ll see the concrete representation in your mind’s eye, and then extend the image to new thinking.

7 Keys to Comprehension, Susan Zimmermann

Director’s 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

Scene 1, Take 25

How Do We Know If Our Stars Are Oscar Ready?

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

Then…

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

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

Then…

The student might not be creating sensory

images.

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 doesn’t make sense. Visualizing is a strategy that enhances understanding, but if ill conceived, it can just as easily hinder understanding.

How Does the Director Help a Rising Star Who Has

Misconceptions Which Hinder Understanding?

Silent Night

Is it “round John…” or “round yon virgin?”

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! You’ve marked a spot where you were confused—where you couldn’t see what’s going on. Why do you think your “camera” shut off? What will you do to get back on track?

More Questions for Directors

• Have your sensory images changed as you read this story? What words added detail to your mind picture?

• You’re 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 you’ve 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

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.

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 writer’s 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

What Props Are Needed to Be Oscar Ready?

•Variety of print—picture books, poems, newspaper articles, textbooks

•Pictures and graphics, including magazines, journals, websites, multimedia texts, maps

VisualizingQuote from Text

What I Visualize

Quote from Text

What I Visualize

Strategies That Work, Stephanie Harvey

Adapting Mental Images During Reading

1) My image now… 2) and now…

3) and now… 4) and now.

Mental ImagesMy image My image after having a

conversation with _______

Reading with Meaning, Debbie Miller

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 isn’t right when that movie stops or gets fuzzy. She is aware that she isn’t 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

“It’s like you’re in the book, but you’re invisible and you’re watching everything but the characters don’t notice you. Sensory images are like a movie in your head, but if you’re just reading words, you won’t get a movie in your head, so you have to reread. Sensory images make reading a lot of fun. If you’re reading and then take your eye off the words, you will say, ‘What’s happening?’ And then if you reread, you will get your movie back, but if you keep reading, you won’t get your movie back.”

Grace, a second grader

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 Reader’s 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.