Dual Coding

Oliver Caviglioli's Dual Coding for Teachers is appropriately pleasing to the eye. He is uniquely positioned to write the book, the son of an architect, former headteacher and now information designer, he brings that wealth of experience to go beyond simply discussing dual coding as a teaching strategy (for that, the learning scientists summary is perfectly sufficient), but explains how the principles of graphic design can be implemented in all aspects of our teaching, from designing documents, PowerPoint slides, displays and walkthroughs.

The second half helps to ground the book in the classroom and includes contributors from teachers working across different sectors and departments, about their experience using visuals in their teaching, as well as input from teacher developers, psychologists and information designers.

I'm only starting to digest what's in here, but here are my first thoughts -

Improving Design

Caviglioli runs through a number of different ways to improve the design of everything we produce, from presentation slides to handouts. This generally involves cutting rather than adding, for those concerned about workload, and can be summed up with these four strategies:

• Cut: Avoid minimal margins, insufficient spacing between lines, an overly decorative typeface.

• Chunk: Clearly label how the information is organised with paragraph titles and column numbers.

• Align: Avoid random placement and instead ensure text is aligned.

• Restrain: Avoid a range of typefaces, stick to one, and make their use consistent. Avoid blocks of colour with text on top, leave it black and white with a small graphic element to colour code it.

I must admit, I have been guilty of many of these design crimes on the website as you can see below!

Gone are the colour-saturated tables, which were difficult to read, and instead information has been reproduced as a clean set of black on white text, with information clearly chunked together with titles and subtitles and supported with clean-looking illustrations from Wix's vector art bank. Also much better for mobile users.

Gone also is the range of different fonts that littered each web page. Each web-element on Wix defaulted to a different font, but all have been replaced with the highly legible Avenir Light.

The next step must be now to extend these principles into my ageing revision booklets, designed when I first started teaching, and presentations.

Diagrams

Caviglioli goes through a number of different diagrams but they can be grouped into four categories:

Chunking - for example tree diagrams - clearly map out relationship between information.

Compare - for example Venn diagrams - a great activity to help pupils organise information and identify similarities and differences, and good assessment tool to identify misconceptions.

Sequence - for example flow charts - good to visualise a sequence of ideas or argument

Cause and effect - for example fishbone diagram

Why bother thinking more deeply about visuals? Well one reason, especially clear in the newly uploaded Tree Diagrams, is that it helps pupils to build schemas by organising what can be an overwhelming amount of information: theories, technical vocabulary, scholarly views, philosophical and theological concepts. The more organised information is when encoded, the easier it is to retrieve and use it in working memory.

That should interest everyone.

The diagram here helps explain the relationships between different parts of Butler's and Freud's consciences, presented together, it encourages pupils to think about similarities and differences.

The Surface Pen feature has proven a useful tool when teaching online, allowing teachers to draw supporting images just like in the classroom.

Cats in suits occasionally appear in lessons.