Unlocking Creativity and Focus: Exploring the Educational Benefits of Doodling
Doodling, often dismissed as a mindless activity, is emerging as a valuable tool in education. Far from being a distraction, doodling, sketching, and visual note-taking can inspire creativity, improve focus, and enhance memory retention for students of all ages and learning styles.
The Power of Visual Learning
Educators have long recognized the benefits of multisensory learning, and doodling serves as a readily accessible visual learning tool. It allows students to capture complex information quickly and concisely. For instance, drawing an animation of mitosis might prove more effective for a biology student than simply reading about it for hours. Studies consistently show that the more senses involved in learning, the better the concept is cemented in the learner’s mind.
Visual Note-Taking: A Synergistic Approach
Visual note-taking combines written notes with drawn images to reinforce key concepts and connect big ideas. This approach supplements traditional note-taking methods, providing a more engaging and memorable way to process information. Students can use visual cues to represent key ideas, creating a visual map of the lesson that is easier to recall.
Doodling as a Mnemonic Device
Putting pen or pencil to paper - whether doodling, sketching, or note-taking - while taking in audio information can be used as a mnemonic device. This process connects images with information and significantly increases our ability to remember what we’ve heard. Doodling is actually a form of mnemonics, connecting images with information and significantly increasing our ability to remember what we’ve learned.
Enhancing Recall and Retention
Several studies have demonstrated that doodling can improve recollection of the material the student is learning while drawing. A study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology found that participants who doodled while listening to a boring recorded telephone conversation remembered 29 percent more information than those who did not doodle. This suggests that doodling can help maintain focus and improve memory retention, even during monotonous tasks.
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Engaging the Brain and Boosting Creativity
Doodling can guide the brain into outside-the-box thinking and kick-start the creative process, especially for students struggling with verbal reasoning and text-based lessons. It is a low-stakes activity that empowers students to explore material without fear of judgment or failure. Any poet or writer knows that the fastest way to stymie the creative process is to critique as you go, and doodling avoids that pitfall.
Overcoming Learning Differences
Conventional learning methods don’t work for all students, especially those with language-based learning differences like dyslexia. Doodling offers an alternative way to engage with the material, providing a visual outlet for understanding and processing information.
Practical Applications in the Classroom
Teachers can incorporate doodling and sketching into their lessons in various ways to enhance student engagement and learning.
Encouraging Spontaneity and Representation
Before you begin a lesson, encourage your students to spend a couple of minutes doodling or sketching. This will get their creative juices flowing. You could even pop on some classical music in the background to stimulate their brain even further. Challenge your students to create doodles and sketches that represent the content of the lesson. Having your students create comic books to represent content learning is a great (and fun) idea!
Understanding Students' Subconscious
Doodles and sketches offer us insight into the subconscious brain of our students. You can ask your students about the doodles and sketches they’ve created and why they made the choices they did. You can also offer time and opportunity for students to share their doodles and sketches with each other.
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Creating a Supportive Environment
Your students may have been discouraged from doodling[ in the past, so they could be apprehensive to start. Consider providing your students with colorful or fun-sized doodling notebooks and colorful gel pens. Looking for a FUN doodling and sketching activity to help your students strengthen their morphological awareness and vocabulary? With over 130 comic book pages, these doodling and sketching activities can be done as a whole class book or can be assigned one page at a time.
Sketch-noting: A Structured Approach
Some teachers have encouraged students to draw as part of their note taking in class. Lori Rice, a teacher in Wamego, Kansas, teaches her students to use sketch notes, a way of incorporating drawings and symbols into note taking. “I feel student engagement and learning increases with sketch-noting,” Rice told Education Dive.
Doodling and Focus: A Counterintuitive Connection
Even the best of teachers is not going to be able to hold every single student’s attention all the time. Different presentations appeal to different students, which is why individualized education has received so much attention lately. When the brain doesn’t receive adequate stimulation, it will begin producing its own content, thereby diverting the thoughts into the world of fantasy. The researcher speculated that doodling took just enough attention to keep the listeners’ minds from wandering, but not so much as to be distracting. The doodling gave a kind of “mental break” from the task of listening. In this way doodling might improve working memory.
The Science Behind the Scribble
When you're bored, your fight-or-flight system will do all that it can to rally and stay alert. Doodling (a form of fidgeting) may be a last-ditch attempt at staying awake and attentive. Doodling keeps you from falling asleep, or simply staring blankly when your brain has already turned off. In addition, paying continuous attention places a strain on the brain, and doodling may be just the break your brain needs to keep attending without losing total interest. Spontaneous drawings may also relieve psychological distress, making it easier to attend to things.
Doodling as a Stress Reliever
In our experience, students who are doodling are still being productive in class, either finding a way to ease stress or tension while remaining present or processing information in a creative way.
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A Window into the Unconscious
Although doodles may look like a scribble, random words that make no sense, or a partial face that suddenly becomes something extraterrestrial, they are not quite as random as we might think. Dr. Robert Burns, the former director of the Institute for Human Development at the University of Seattle, uses doodles to diagnose the emotional problems of his patients. He believes that doodles can reveal what is going on in the unconscious.
Challenging the Negative Perception
Doodling may still have a bad rap in education, but attitudes are shifting. It’s important to note, doodling and sketchnoting are not synonymous. Doodling infers creating repetitive images such as spirals, circles, and boxes, or perhaps stick figures and flowers. It is used primarily to help maintain focus and retain information.
Addressing Concerns and Misconceptions
This is my first year including doodling and sketchnoting in my classroom, and it hasn’t always been easy. For one, I never realized how firmly wrong ideas about the purpose of doodling are entrenched, nor did I anticipate getting flak from colleagues who felt I was encouraging students to daydream.
Shifting Perspectives
Have you ever found yourself listening to something really boring, then wafting off into your own mind, your hand scribbling random things on a piece of paper in front of you? Whether it's a conference call or a tedious lecture, being all ears can be a challenge when your hands want to be a part of the moment. Nobody is immune to this either. Even American presidents have found themselves sketching away: 26 of 44 American Presidents doodled, from Theodore Roosevelt, who doodled animals and children, to Ronald Reagan, who doodled cowboys and football players, and John F. Kennedy, who doodled dominoes. Traditionally, we have thought of these doodles as a sign of distraction - an indication that your mind was not where it was supposed to be.
Recent Research: A More Nuanced View
Doodling and fidgeting-traditionally viewed in educational contexts as markers of inattention and poor classroom behaviour-have more recently been considered as possible routes to improve performance by reducing boredom and its negative impact on memory.
Examining the Impact of Doodling on Cognitive Functioning
The present research tests competing hypotheses about the extent to which different methods of doodling may be helpful for cognitive functioning during an experience of boredom. The “fidgeting reduces boredom and increases attention” hypothesis posits that doodling is a beneficial form of fidgeting that can reduce boredom and increase attention to promote better learning (Andrade, 2010). In contrast, the “fidgeting reflects inattention” hypothesis maintains that doodling is merely an indication of the mind taking a mental break, thereby reflecting the absence of task-focused attention (mind-wandering; Boggs et al., 2017) and would therefore be linked to relatively poor learning.
Challenging the Notion of Doodling as a Universal Panacea
Consistent with the fidgeting-reflects-inattention hypothesis, research indicated that doodling neither reduced boredom or mind-wandering, nor increased attention or retention of information when compared with the other conditions.
The Importance of Context and Individual Differences
Sketchnoting and doodles aren’t for everyone. One of my seniors gets reprimanded each time she tries to incorporate sketchnoting in her government course. The images help her remember events and dates for when she’s testing. But her teacher firmly believes she is daydreaming, even though she has asked him to call on her more frequently so she can demonstrate that doodling is the antithesis of daydreaming.
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