500-Word Mission Statement & My Personal Creative Credo

One of my favorite past times is flipping through magazines.  From fashion, to home, to cooking... the theme of the magazine doesn't matter.  What gets me are the pretty pictures, the aesthetically pleasing designs, and oh, those glossy pages.  I find myself engrossed and engaged with the content with each flip of the page.

There is no denying that we live in a very visual world; simply put, images speak to us and we speak through our images.  From the proliferation of social media like Instagram and Tumblr to the bombarding of our daily psyche with advertising campaigns; images and visual design deeply engage us in our environment.

For years I have dabbled in graphic design as a hobby, always dreaming up new businesses just so I could create a logo or building websites to quench my graphic design fix.  But I did not make the connection between my classroom and graphic design until very recently.  Hitting me like a brick, I realized that my students were disengaged simply because my instructional tools did not hold a candle to the gazillion other beautifully designed and highly visual distractions they consume every day.

How sad is this slide from one of my past PowerPoint lectures?
Yes, this is a critical period in our teaching.  It is the 21st Century and no person
on the face of this planet would ever be engaged by this!

Why would a student want to pay attention to a PowerPoint lecture that is mostly bullet points and words?  Why would a student want to submit a project that was so glaringly ill-planned and poorly executed?  Because I was presenting my content to them every day through poorly designed teaching and learning tools.  No wonder their natural response was to begin daydreaming, doodling, or sneaking peaks at their fantasy football league on their phones.

Although I enjoyed graphic design as a hobby, I began to look for ways to incorporate it into my classroom.  Re-adjusting the fonts on a worksheet, presenting a concept via a graphic organizer,  adding more images than text to my presentations...These were all simple ways I improved my teaching tools and the rewards were almost immediate.  I observed my students tuning in more to my lectures, taking more care on the worksheets, and connecting more to the content presented graphically.

Same slide from above after my visual epiphany.  I only made small changes and worked within PowerPoint but the results are huge.  You do not have to be a graphic design whiz to make these small changes in your teaching!

I don't know why it took me so long, but once I started I couldn't stop.  I was beginning to use the same visual foundation and graphic elements that magazine editors, publishers, and advertising uses to get millions of people to buy their products... and it was working!  I was selling ideas, content, history and my students were engaged... they were buying it.

There is a lot of brain-based research to support the notion that students need visuals to learn better, research that I will explore throughout this blog.  But for today, I wanted to share with you my heart for engaging students in our classrooms through the implementation of graphic design.  No, you don't have to be a creative-soul like me.  In fact, you don't have to have a creative bone in your body.  I am dedicated to task of bringing easy graphic solutions to your busy classroom.  Our students are bright, but they are bored.  I am on a mission to change that!   I hope you join me.