Chapter 4: Teach Students to Draw

Scott shares this story: It was 1977. “Star Wars” captivated the country. The children in my 1st-grade class fought with imaginary lightsabers with the power of Darth Vader and the heroism of Luke Skywalker. The kids chose the x-wing fighters, the Millennial Falcon, and Darth Vader’s helmet as subjects for our drawing studies. After drawing every day, within a few weeks, I noticed a significant jump in the class average reading ability. I observed individual children for clues to this correlation and identified a wide range of connections. Disparate needs were being met as various abilities simultaneously developed while drawing.

For many years I have tracked students as they learn to draw, and it is as if I can see the neurons firing to rewire the children’s brains right before my eyes! I teach basic drawing so children can learn how to learn while doing something essential that is fun, but the benefits in their development make it essential. As a teaching tool, drawing provides an immediate feedback loop for assessment with results that are visible to both the teacher and student. Success is evident, trial and error inherent, and the visual literacy skills directly apply to reading and writing skills. I was lucky as a child to have access to music and drawing to improve missing skills and abilities. I knew from my own experience that fixing the brain processing is like paving the road for learning. I measure my success as a teacher by my students’ ability to read, to think, and to learn, all of which improve markedly when they draw.

The Power of the Arts

For centuries, humans have communicated through the arts. Dance, drama, music, and visual arts are each human languages as valid as spoken words or written text. Each art form uniquely communicates nuances of life experiences. In both the performing and visual arts, works of art reveal the shared values and the essence of the people who lived and produced the art. A person is considered literate in an art form–dance, drama, music, visual art, film–when they have sufficient skills to communicate or understand an original idea through that art form. As the vocabulary of arts skills increases, more intricate ideas can be expressed as well as digested into meaning.

Children use the arts naturally while playing. They explore and discover their world through sensory experiences. They listen, observe, smell, touch, taste, and explore the space around them. From rolling to crawling and eventually to running, they find new places to explore. When they encounter limits, they use their imagination to find new solutions. Each experience searching for solutions contributes to their self-concept. As children’s ideas become more complex and they need more ways to express themselves, they need more ways to create, whether through words, music, dances, paintings, etc. The arts become vehicles for expressing ideas with personal nuance. As they continue to participate in the arts, their learning infinitely expands, and the new information extends their thinking and creativity. Arts activities engage students physically, cognitively, socially, and emotionally as described in the lists in Chapter 1. Observing students engaged in the arts reveals their ability in regards to developmental indicators while also reinforcing the improvement of developmental skills, optimizing performance. Children need to dance, sing, role-play, and draw regularly in ways that feel natural to the relationships and the content. There is something in each art form that every child can do successfully. As children engage in the arts, those with deficiencies work at their own pace with individualized strategies. Each art form includes skills that are essential to a complete education. All children benefit from participation in all art forms.

As we learned from Scott’s story of his academic challenges, developmental delays, stress, or physical restrictions can impact learning readiness. When left unattended, challenges are compounded exponentially with each passing year. Teachers need to focus on a child’s strengths and the weaknesses will improve organically. The areas of challenges my never become strengths, but life is about using our strengths to compensate. Daily participation and practice in visual and performing arts activities can help compensate for processing delays and other challenges.

This chapter will focus on teaching basic drawing, visual literacy and the connections to learning skills, as well as reading and writing skills. These skills will be applied simultaneously in Chapter Seven which is about mind mapping for learning. Many resources are available to help teachers use the arts in meaningful ways in their classrooms and suggestions are offered at the end of this chapter.

Observe learning skills through arts activities

Drawing has an extraordinary impact on developing thinking and learning skills. Studies have shown that comprehension improves for students of all ages when students draw and take notes as they are reading or listening. Drawing helps students learn to see and think carefully, which are essential skills for scientists and mathematicians. Surgeons who are training students in medical schools across the US and Britain have reported concerns that students have diminished dexterity for cutting and sewing in surgery because students are no longer getting sufficient experience performing fine motor skills like drawing, cutting, pasting, crocheting, or sewing. Children need to practice a wide range of fine motor skills that are essential in many professions and in daily living.

Teaching children basic drawing builds on the natural effectiveness of communicating through images. It supports the visualization of new ideas which propels the need to read and write to articulate those new ideas. But it goes beyond this. There is evidence that it improves learning in subjects requiring visual acuity and a lot of memorization, such as anatomy and biology. Jennifer Landin, Ph.D. wrote for Scientific American in 2015 about how she reimagined her biology classes when she realized the principle that when students draw, they remember better and stay engaged longer.

Visual art and music most closely parallel the development of reading and writing by reinforcing fine motor skills, visual tracking, and visual discrimination. When young students are not able to write on a line, it is not always a delay in fine motor skills; it is often a distortion of how they see the space, a skill developed when drawing. Because most children like to draw, it is an efficient way to explicitly teach a variety of skills to benefit all learning.

Learning to Learn

The list below identifies many of the skills, habits, and dispositions for learning that formal drawing instruction can develop. Steps to teach basic drawing are described later in the chapter.

1. Classroom skills:

Sit in a chair
Walk in a line
Observe, notice, and listen
Follow directions
Read the board and transfer the information to paper
Manage your desk, chair, and materials
Be where you are asked to be and touch only what you are invited to touch

2. Cognitive skills:

Respond to natural curiosity
Ask relevant questions
Distill information/paraphrase
Prioritize the important things
Solve problems
Self-evaluate, correct mistakes
Expand an idea creatively
Interpret context clues
Make connections
Apply information
Ask appropriate questions

3. Communication skills:

Ask for help
Listen and paraphrase what is heard
Use eye contact
Select what to say and when to say it
Raise your hand
Stay on topic, or deviate appropriately within the context of topic

4. Habits:

Review resources
Concentrate with focus and stamina
Clean up after yourself
Leave the space better than you found it
Regulate personal needs
Help others
Respect yourself and others

5. Dispositions:

Curiosity
Internal need to know
Self-responsibility
Sensitivity to nuances
Internal gratification through effort
Work ethic
Hope for a positive outcome

As teachers teach these skills, they can observe the challenges the students experience and provide activities to improve ability, then provide positive feedback for growth as students improve. Typically, the first half of the year is spent explicitly teaching students to listen, work independently, engage in conversations, and self-regulate for learning. The second half of the year, students discover new freedom as they apply the learning skills they have mastered to various content areas. To optimize the transfer of skills to other content areas, teachers articulate the skill and describe how it transfers to other content learning. For example: “Just as we identified and drew the buildings, trees, and stars in Starry Night, please use your “artist eyes” to describe the details in this story.” Visual art develops ability in physical, cognitive, social, and emotional realms that transfer directly to reading and writing when explicit connections are made.

Teach Basic Drawing

Drawing together as a class, in the framework described below, increases concentration and attentiveness, reinforces learning skills, and integrates developmental indicators in the neurophysiology of the brain and body. Creating a master study is a type of close reading, as the students visit the “text” repeatedly with a new question to solve during each visit.

Drawing is an opportunity to practice many skills such as observation, focusing on the task, fine motor skills, and visual discrimination. Students begin to understand spatial relationships as they arrange objects for a still life or select a scene to draw. Conversations while drawing not only influence what is being drawn, but also invite students to make meaning from the images and analyze and interpret lines, shapes, colors, spatial relationships, etc. Drawing can develop a variety of the following related skills when explicitly taught:

Increase concentration, focus, and attention span
Improve hand-eye coordination for holding a pencil and controlling the line made
Develop eye convergence, visual tracking, and left to right progression
Increase visual discrimination
Improve skills for observation and perception
Arrange spatial relationships with large and small objects
Break down objects into component parts
Reflect on the meaning of individual pieces
Assemble component parts
Increase the ability to see and interpret line, design, and symbols
Translate 3-dimensional objects and experiences into a 2-dimensional representation
Interpret lines and curves in symbol making
Improve judgment through choices and decision making
Develop self-authority and ownership of ideas and outcomes
Create imagery that supports the imagination
Read and write a series of symbols that have meaning
Extend verbal conversations into written conversations
Engage in analysis and deep thinking
Make meaning from abstract data
Look at things from different points of view

Guidelines for Basic Drawing Lessons

When drawing a still life or creating a master study of a work of art, a single art project can take anywhere from two to six hours, even when done with young children. Optimally the student’s concentration will work-up to two-hour increments, but an art project can be done in 45-minute sessions. Quality takes time. Be patient. As students increase their attention span and their ability to focus, they will learn more deeply and increase their perseverance,

The students follow along step by step, listening, and following directions. Go slowly so that students have time to think and make decisions. Interact with students while they draw. If they do not like their choice, they need time to look around at the work of others for options and try something different. Students learn from each other and expand on each other’s ideas. It takes reflection to see the big picture and sort and organize information. When the teacher goes too quickly, students copy and put items in the right order, but do not analyze and synthesize information. Quality should be emphasized over quantity.

The cycle of decision-making and reflecting is one of the most important skills students learn during the drawing process. Set a very high standard of excellence for students to achieve and allow the students to decide for themselves how they meet the standard. Remind them to do their best work. The sensory and tactile experience of drawing is soothing to the neurological system. Invite them to relax, reflect, and respond to their ideas to get in the flow of creativity. When they get in the flow, the ideas and images authentically emerge with surprising results. As ideas flow, students experience free association. Conversations diverge and creativity expands. If you notice students who cannot achieve flow or get stuck in flow in a dissociative state, there is likely an underlying vulnerability. Ask them what is going on and work together to optimize their ability in a safe way.

Additional examples can be found at scottflox.org

Use direct instruction to teach procedures and skills. Use strict classroom guidelines for behavior. Have the students work independently in their seat with little talking. Once they are engaged, they can walk around, look at the work of others, relax and re-enter their artwork at their own discretion. Clearly define and teach the procedures to handle all materials such as passing out and caring for paper, chalk, and markers. Explicitly teach students to listen, follow directions, look from their paper to the board, take time to make choices, think, analyze, commit to a decision on paper, reflect on the result of that decision, then move on to sequential decisions.

For example, the teacher might give explicit instructions, such as, “Look at your paper, measure down 3 inches from the top of your paper and 4 inches in from the left side. Sketch an oval the size of your hand. Use light sketch pencil marks in case you need to erase. Now look at the image or at the still life. What do you think we should do next?” As a class, always discuss and reflect on each step of the process and on the final product. Emphasize basic drawing concepts specific to each art piece. Fundamental examples include form, contour, line, shape, shading, color values, outlining, perspective, shadow, foreground, middle ground, background, depth, perception, view, angle of perception, lighting, reflective light, etc. There are many online tutorials expanding on each of these concepts. This format of teaching with direct instruction is developed for generalist teachers. It prioritizes general learning skills and developmental skills for reading, as well as arts skills. Additional lessons to focus on arts skills and creative expression should also be provided but are not included here. Step by step instructions to teach master studies in this direct instruction format can be found at scottflox.org.

Project guidelines for drawing master studies with chalk pastels

Use large good-quality art paper. 18”X24”. Large paper increases the quality of the outcome for children and helps them use space.
Determine the order for drawing the picture--generally, begin with the largest shape or object of the picture to use as a reference point.
Sketch the entire picture with a pencil and eraser. Model each step for the entire class as you draw for the students as they follow along. Go slowly, step by step, so the children can have time to erase and make corrections to meet their own satisfaction. (If a student is struggling, you can draw half of the sketch for them and have them copy it for the other side. Do what you need to help you students be successful.)
After the picture is sketched, outline everything with a fine point black marker by tracing over the pencil lines. Pentel markers work well and don’t bleed. Then erase pencils lines, as pencil lead can repel the chalk.
Add color using pastel chalk in a variety of colors. Hard chalk is easier to control than soft chalk. It is usually best to begin at the top and work down so that students do not accidentally smudge their chalk work.
Teach students to use chalk differently than crayons with varied pressure. Outline each section first with the selected color. Create contour with shading and blending. Teach them how to blend with their chalk to fill the space, rather than color.
Continue dialogue with the class and with individuals while drawing in order to increase their engagement and expand their vocabulary.
When finished, spray with fixative and/or laminate to preserve the work. (Note that you should not use fixative spray with black paper.)

Reflection

List 3 practices using direct instruction to teach basic drawing and identify a benefit of using it.
Compare and contrast teaching visual art this way to the teaching of music, science, or another subject area.
How would you teach basic drawing differently to adapt these strategies to your strengths?
How would you adapt these strategies to meet the needs of your classroom?

Want to Know More?

Studio Thinking from the Start: The K-8 Art Educator’s Handbook by Jillian Hogan, Lois Hetland, Diane Jaquith, Ellen Winner

Visual Thinking Strategies: Using Art to Deepen Learning Across School Disciplines by Philip Yenawine

Making Thinking Visible : How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners by Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, Karin Morrison

The Surprisingly Powerful Influence of Drawing on Memory by Myra A, Fernandes, Jeffrey D. Wammes, Melissa E. Mead. Research article August 30, 2018