Storyboarding to Build Understanding

The next time you deliver a lecture or assign students to read a long passage, encourage them take notes using a storyboard format. A storyboard is a timeline of events that are visually displayed for use in movies, commercials and animations. Storyboarding notes during the lecture or while reading involves the students creating a series of frames with images to represent a sequence of events or topics. Under each frame students should place a caption that describes the particular event in the sequence. The storyboarding process will encourage students to meta-cognitively process the information in the lecture and/or passage. The following shows an example of storyboarding a basic photosynthesis process.


Tips for success with storyboarding:

• If this is the first time you have students take “notes” in this way demonstrate what you expect them to do for the first few frames by showing them an examples.
• If this is the first time that students are learning the content make sure to share the number of “frames” students should have in their storyboard. This will help scaffold their understanding as they complete the task.
• This approach works especially well when the content of the lecture or passage is a process or procedure.
• If you use this technique with a lecture pause intermittently throughout the lecture to let students capture the information in a frame.

Classroom Engagement Tip for 10.31.08