Curriculum Conversations: A Visual Approach

Thoroughly grateful, as ever, to had have the opportunity to share some of my reading, my thinking and my work at the researchEd National Conference in London earlier this month!

Thanks so much if you came along!

I have been interested in visual (and other) approaches to solving problems since studying a module on group decision making in my degree, back in the early 2000’s! The knowledge and skills I developed at that time had laid somewhat dormant over the years that followed, but since I have more recently encountered further ideas and writing on dual coding, visual techniques and graphic organisation, I have begun to fuse together my interest and experience from the field of management with my improved understanding of the importance of visuals in communication and processing.

Discovery of this very recent article from Csaszar, Hinrichs and Heshmati (2024) was very pleasing to me. They draw together findings from practitioners in the field of strategy, but with discussion of the reasons behind these being very familiar to any educator who is aware of the rationale for the use of visuals in learning according to research and thinking from cognitive science.

This presentation presented key points from this article, with applied examples of the use of a visual in various aspects of curriculum leadership, at senior and middle leader levels.

Slides from the presentation can be found here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e4FEEPcxKPxevbtxF3WBibZGfWoNxKGs/view?usp=drivesdk

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