Teaching Visual Thinking (45 Strategies to Help Students Sketch, Shape, and Share Their Learning)

Help K–12 students move from mental chaos to confident clarity.

Students gather knowledge, skills, and experiences over time, storing them wherever there's room. Disconnected ideas, partial understandings, and fleeting observations can accumulate in a disorganized jumble, leaving students mentally jammed. Confidence crumbles, and motivation tanks.

Authors Connie Hamilton and Julie Stern have devised a three-step visual thinking process—Sketch-Shape-Share—that K–12 teachers and coaches can use to help students tackle the disorder, organize their thinking, and share their insights. Building on research-based foundations, including theories of visual processing, working memory, and metacognition, the authors show how to separate thinking into clear, manageable phases so that students can focus, remember, and make sense of what they’re learning.

This book features

• 45 classroom-ready strategies—15 for each of the three phases of the Sketch-Shape-Share process.
• Differentiation ideas to adjust each strategy for emergent readers, multilingual learners, students catching up, and neurodivergent learners.
• Online companion resources for every Sketch, Shape, and Share strategy in the book, with more than 150 additional engagement ideas to keep lessons fresh.

Regardless of the grade level or subject area you teach, Teaching Visual Thinking gives you a repeatable process — and the visual thinking strategies — to turn that mental jumble into work students can see, shape, and explain.