Gestures
Overview
Using motions to explain new concepts or ideas supports the ability to process new information and to convey thinking and conceptual understanding. When teachers supplement information presented verbally with actions, learners can more readily attend, engage, and encode new knowledge and ideas. When learning more complex content, teaching with gestures has been shown to help reduce the cognitive load on students and enhance spatial learning. Using gestures alongside visual and verbal explanations can be a crucial support for students with learning disabilities and multilingual learners, helping them understand challenging material. Teachers can use designed gestures, which are formulated in advance, to convey a particular idea or new vocabulary to help with encoding in Long-term Memory, particularly when paired with other multi-modal instructions such as visuals and sound.
When learners are engaging with new concepts or developing vocabulary, their use of spontaneous gesturing, the use of hand motions to convey ideas, often precedes their ability to communicate through spoken language. As such it is important to encourage and allow for gestures as a form of Communication in the classroom. Gesture-speech mismatch can indicate a student is in a transition period with their thinking and at a critical stage of learning readiness. Gesturing can be a particularly important strategy for developing an understanding of abstract scientific concepts, spatial reasoning, problem-solving, understanding and communicating Emotion, and learning a new language.
Example: Use This Strategy in the Classroom
Watch how this teacher uses whole brain teaching strategies, including gestures, to lead his high school students through a sequence during a trigonometry lesson to aid with memory and understanding.
Design It into Your Product
Additional Resources
Additional examples, research, and professional development. These resources are possible representations of this strategy, not endorsements.
Factors Supported by this Strategy
More Multisensory Supports Strategies
Communication boards are displays of graphics (e.g., pictures, symbols, illustrations) and/or words where learners can gesture or point to the displays to extend their expressive language potential.
Creating visual representations such as drawings, diagrams, graphs, and concept maps, whether student or teacher-generated, can help students process abstract concepts, enhancing understanding and retention of information.
Music and dance supports learners in a myriad of ways, including supporting their engagement and motivation, connecting with cultural background, and offering structure during play.
