CAPMAPS Visual Notetaking

One man’s doodles are another mans’ way of learning – and educators need to put themselves in the picture about different learning styles, say Perth eductor Glenn Capelli. Keith McDonald reports.

When Glenn Capelli gives hour long corporate presentations he may go to the podium with just a page of what look, at first like nothing more than multi coloured doodles. But he prepares as thoroughly as traditional speakers who, more commonly, talk from written notes, The difference is that, like many others, Mr Capelli learns visually and so he bases his presentations on a mixture of drawings and keywords known as visual notetaking. It means, for example, he might draw a South American carp, which has four eyes, to make a point about how teachers and parents need to keep ‘two eyes’ above the waterline and ‘two’ below it.

His wife, Lindy, a former television director, is also a visual person. When she was studying at university, she drew a mackerel to remember the names of five particular psychologists. Their names were Maslow, Abrahams, Kelley, Rogers and Laing. The first letters of their names spelt MAKRL and hence the mackerel drawing.

The Capellis now run The True Learning Centre in East Perth and travel the world encouraging people to discover new ways of tapping into their brain power. Mr Capelli, a former Perth high school teacher, set up the business on the very day in 1987 that the stock market crashed. It was also the day he met his future wife. Lindy was the producer/director of a Channel 7 show on which he appeared. They are both visual learners – Lindy doodled, drew pictures and in her work used storyboarding – and they clicked immediately. “Drawing was just something I did” Mr Capelli recalled. “I hadn’t been taught to do that. A couple of my teachers at schools thought ‘Here’s someone sitting in class drawing pictures’, but I wasn’t mucking around. I was trying to stay awake and compute the information doing it.”

Now educators are increasingly recognising that visual notetaking is a valid way of learning for some people, as they discover more about how the brain works and realise that one universal learning method doesn’t suit everyone. Mr Capelli said that in the old days teachers did some terrible things to students who didn’t fit their mould – like sending them to stand in a bin for singing off-key. But although he welcomed the switch to more enlightened thinking at schools and universities, he said the corporate world – driven by a need to get the best return on its investment in employees – was embracing new learning styles faster than eductors. He identifies five learning styles: visual, audio, kinaesthetic, print oriented and interactive. As well as visual notetaking, the visual learning style includes working with pictures, drawings, symbols and graphics; drawing and doodling; graphs, pie charts and graphics that explain information in a pictorial way; posters, visual overheads, colours, information mapping; and visual demonstrations of how things are done.

In his book, The Thinking Learning Classroom – which he co-wrote with Sean Brealey – he describes visual learning as perhaps the major highway of learning. “For many of us, our eyesight is our most predominant sense and as such, it is our strongest sense when learning,” he writes “In many cultures, young people learn from elders or mentors by watching and experiencing core life. They learn solely by observing their role models, and when the right time comes, begin to apply all that they have learnt through their observation.” He sees drawing as a creative way of learning “It helps people tap into their innate creativity,” he explained. “We work with children to keep them open to creativity and we have to dissolve barriers with adults who think they can’t do that.”

Ms Capelli said we were afraid of our creative side. “We all have a creative element in us that we don’t let out because we are fearful that it’s not ‘right’,” she said. “It’s sad we have lost permission to be creative. Our analytical side has taken over.” At the same time, she stressed that she was no artist, but artistic skill was not a prerequisite for visual notetaking. You just needed to be able to draw a dot, a line, a circle and write your name so you could include some keywords. She gives examples at presentations of how we can draw faces by combining simple circles, dots and lines. At university lectures she started off writing notes on a laptop computer but she soon abandoned that. “It was just words coming out of the lecturer into the laptop and it was bypassing my brain,” she said. “I felt I would have to be able to type again in the exam to re-create the memory of learning the information from those lectures.” Instead, she resorted to visual notetaking and spent the first 10 or 15 minutes of an exam re-creating the visual notes relevant to the questions being asked. “These were my anchors,” she said. Modern technology can help visual learning, if used correctly but Mr Capelli was critical of the way many people did powerpoint presentations. “It is the most misunderstood learning technique on the planet,” he said. “People just read out bullet points, If you use technology to teach the way you always have, but a bit quicker, it’s no good.”

The Capellis link the keeping of journals to learning styles. Both Glenn and Lindy keep personal journals to delve more into their emotions. “Every conference I speak at, whether it’s teachers or CEO’s, if there’s one thing to take away as a learning tool, I say that it is to keep a journal.” Mr Capelli said. “These enable you to see your growth as a human being. ” Ms Capelli said that keeping a journal was creative. “You can add photos, quotes or magazine articles,” she said. “Even scraps of fabric from a favourite outfit.”

Article from The West Australian Newspaper Monday May 13th 2002 Reprinted by permission, The West Australian Newspaper, Perth WA.

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