Guided+Imagery

“Guided Imagery” is a strategy meant to stimulate visualization, which can help students engage more fully with their reading. The teacher establishes an environment where students feel comfortable actually closing their eyes to imagine. Once their eyes are closed, the teacher can do anything from orally giving the students a tour of where they are supposed to be imagining, to reading passages from the novel or piece of writing that illicit the students to envision sounds, smells, tastes, and sights. Then, once they return to reading, the story will actually be able to come alive for them.
 * Guided Imagery/Movie Clip Strategy **  (A Discussion Strategy)

The “Movie Clip Strategy” is an offshoot of “Guided Imagery,” where students attempt to pitch to a studio what they would put onscreen if the writing was to be turned into a film. This makes for great small group and large group discussions, and is something that more creative learners might really take to. I would primarily use both “Guided Imagery” and the “Movie Clip Strategy” at the start and finish of novels. With “Guided Imagery,” I would attempt to set the scene of the work in their heads, and after reading, they could take control with the “Movie Clip Strategy,” perhaps even having to provide textual evidence for their directorial choices. To make students more aware of the impact from subtle visuals taken in text, I’d like to show clips from various films based on the same book, proving to them that there is no one right answer of how something looks and feels.

In a British Literature class reading Chaucer’s //Canterbury Tales//, I would use “Guided Imagery” to set the scene of the wilderness of a pilgrimage, so that students grasp that the characters are not stagnant, but rather chatting as they are on the move. Since there is such a tapestry of visual description of each character, I would ask students to use the “Movie Clip Strategy,” explaining to peers what tone they would visually establish for each and why, and perhaps what real-life actors they would cast and why, backed up by textual evidence. Beuhl, D. (2008). //Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning// (3rd ed.). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.