In the past few months, it’s great to see more and more colleagues using visualiers in their day-to-day practice. The benefits of using a visualiser are huge, summed up nicely by @teachertoolkit who shares: ‘Using a visualiser can transform subject-knowledge into real, evident understanding, using examples from (students/work in) the classroom. Most importantly, a visualiser allows you (the teacher) to animate the work in the classroom – completing the same learning-process you have asked students to attempt – by completing a live demonstration…’

Over the last few rounds of lesson visits we have seen visualisers being used effectively in the following ways:

• By David in product design, to lead students through past papers. Every two weeks, David takes his class out of the workshop and into a classroom setting where he uses a visualiser to model exam technique.
• By Liam in geography. Liam and the team use their visualiser every week for Year 11 walking talking mocks at lunch. Every two weeks in class the students have the same lesson too. Regular, modelled perfect answers is building students’ exam confidence effectively.
• By Sarah in science to structure her students’ feedback on assessments. Sarah displays the assessment and leads students, using the visualiser, in their purple pen improvements.
• By Stuart in Science. On the last round of learning walks we dropped into Stuart’s Year 11 science lesson. The class were being taken through an annotated diagram detailing a scientific experiment. Stuart used targeted, no hands up questioning to check knowledge and drill understanding.  

The Humanities team last year used Foundation Governors funding to buy six visualisers. The team bought AVER versions, which plug directly into VGA ports for easy use. They’ve been so successfully embedded, the team have got two more this year.