Transform Your Teaching

What is mind mapping? How can it be an effective tool for making connections between concepts? How can it help us process knowledge more effectively? Join Rob and Jared as they discuss how mind mapping can help students and teachers work through ideas.

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What is Transform Your Teaching?

The Transform your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Join Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles as they seek to inspire higher education faculty to adopt innovative teaching and learning practices.

Narrator:

This is the Transform Your Teaching Podcast. The Transform Your Teaching Podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Hello, and welcome

Ryan:

to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. In today's episode, Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles talk about mind mapping as part of our series called Have You Tried? Thanks for joining us.

Jared:

Welcome back, Rob.

Rob:

It's good to be back.

Jared:

Yeah. It's good to be seen and heard, I guess. For our listeners, definitely heard.

Rob:

Definitely heard.

Jared:

We are talking, about something visual today on an audio podcast. It's gonna be challenging. It's gonna be challenging. We should have some alt, text or some captioning or someone doing an audio description as we but we don't have anything visual. So but, anyway, I'm just making that up.

Rob:

We're gonna have to ask our listeners to imagine in their minds.

Jared:

Imagine us in this room talking

Rob:

Showing you visuals.

Jared:

Showing you visuals. But we are continuing our Have You Tried series with something that you and I are users of quite frequently, and it's mind mapping.

Rob:

Mind mapping.

Jared:

Which is it's a visual tool. It helps you visualize your thinking. I'm just a big, big fan of it myself. It got me through my especially the literature review of my dissertation. It's just super powerful and I think it's a great visual tool for both teachers and students to do to get their thinking out on something visual.

Jared:

And what's great about it is that you don't have to be an artist to do it. Like, that's always my big thing with, like I'm I'm not an artist. I can't draw at all. I mean, so you see these people with these Sketchnotes? Sketchnotes that was really popular, and people were posting it along, like, five or six years ago, how wonderful of a tool it is, and their stuff is always, like, so perfect, and mine's like, you can't even I can't even read my own writing after I write it kind of a thing.

Jared:

But an idea of a mind map is totally different, and I'm just a big fan of it, and it helps me visualize things.

Rob:

Well, and it it's a way of mapping what's already inside your your head, drawing connections

Jared:

Mhmm.

Rob:

Letting things you can do it for brainstorming. You can do it for outlining. It can be hierarchical. And most of the time, it is hierarchical. In other words, you start with some sort of point.

Rob:

Right? Like, for your dissertation, maybe you started with your research question. Mhmm. I'm not sure. What did you start with?

Jared:

So I really didn't really go through my research question. I went through my problem statement. Yeah. And I looked at each facet of that and broke it down into branching stuff. So, you know, as in any if you were to define a mind map, it's a visual way of organizing info, connecting ideas through branches and keywords.

Jared:

And the so in mine, I had these keywords that I used in my problem statement, and then I branched off of that and did like definition, concepts, literature on it, and then, you know, so I had this real I used, a tool that we'll talk about later called MindNode. It creates all these branching paths and you can expand and condense all the different facets, different branches that you have. So mine ended up being this huge, long, like, map of just all these connecting points. Then I know you said that connecting wise, it helps you already put onto, in a visual form, connections that are in your head. But for me it was more, you know, this is a great tool for, doing any kind of research that maybe your students have, especially with a lot of sources.

Jared:

You know, sometimes you'll read a source and you'll highlight some things, but by the time you read for me anyway, by the time I read the tenth or eleventh source, I'm forgetting what it is that I Uh-huh. Read. Or, like, I read that somewhere, but I don't know where, so I end up, like, rereading it. If I did a mind map, I could then go back and draw connections between the two. And so the other facet of a mind map is that you have these connection lines that you draw Mhmm.

Jared:

In between them, and you write the connection on the line itself.

Rob:

You can.

Jared:

That's what I do anyway.

Rob:

That's what can do get a That's more like a concept map. So concept maps, just for our audience, are a little bit more formalized, and that's what you were kind of doing in a way by by putting those. So just generalized my node and other types of software that you could use. You could do this on a piece of paper.

Jared:

Oh, yeah.

Rob:

Right? And so you can have everything from, you know, visual note taking, which could be a lot more free form.

Jared:

Mhmm.

Rob:

Whereas when we start talking about mind maps, they tend to be some sort of shape that you start with, like an oval or maybe a circle. Maybe don't use shapes at all. Maybe just use words. Yeah. And then, you know, you make connections.

Rob:

But but concept maps tend to be, at least my understanding, and I think literature probably bears this out as well, that they're more hierarchical. In other words, you start at the top and you work your way down. Mhmm. But you might be able to start at the bottom and work your way up as well. You might be able to do deductive and inductive with it, but it's much more coherent.

Rob:

Whereas with mind mapping, it doesn't always connect hierarchically. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Like, you could start with, like, your problem set. Yep.

Rob:

Your problem statement.

Jared:

Mhmm.

Rob:

But you could also, in that same mind map, start another node Right. That maybe doesn't have anything directly connected to that yet. Mhmm. But it's a concept that you're working on. So, like, let's say risk aversion.

Jared:

Oh, boy. Let's talk about risk aversion.

Rob:

Yeah. So you're like, do they have any connections? So what do you know about risk aversion? You can use mind mapping to, you know, map all that out, look at the literature, doing the same thing that you were doing. But and then maybe you'll start seeing where you can make connections.

Jared:

Mhmm.

Rob:

Right? So it's a way of getting what's in your head out and then also making connections physically as you can see the whole thing from Sure. Macro to micro.

Jared:

Yeah. I'm a big fan of that

Rob:

Yeah.

Jared:

As well. Yeah. It actually comes from this guy named Tony Buzon. Tony Buzon popularized it in the nineteen seventies as a technique for improving memory and creativity. He wrote a book on the concept.

Jared:

But also, these learning strategies can improve comprehension and recall. There's a study by Nesbitt and Adasope that talks about concept mapping improving learning outcomes compared to text based note taking. Yeah. So visualizing note taking instead of just doing the normal, you know, hierarchical Roman numeral a b c Yeah.

Rob:

Note taking stuff. This leads us to why is it beneficial to do, and it reminds me of the conversation that we had with doctor Lane. Yes. And you remember that question that she asked us. What's more difficult for you to sing a song out loud or to imagine singing it?

Jared:

Mhmm.

Rob:

And her answer was to imagine singing it.

Jared:

Right? Because you're difficult one.

Rob:

Right. Yeah. Because you had to visualize this thing in your head. If you can map things out and you can see them, and you can also visualize that connection, not only what you have in front of you in the screen, but you also can visualize it in your head

Jared:

Yeah.

Rob:

That's more akin to probably how your brain connects things anyway. Right? With neurons Right. They they have to kinda, like, intermingle and overlap, and that's how we store memories.

Jared:

Yeah. Barbara Oakley would tell you that as well. The idea of, like, multiple connections, more connections you can make in your brain.

Rob:

Right.

Jared:

The better it's going to be.

Rob:

You had a particular person that you found whose theory you thought was very interesting when it came to this. Yeah. And and really talked to that whole thing about why is mind mapping so good for education.

Jared:

And I think this is just a setup for me to butcher this name. So thanks for that setup, Rob. I appreciate You're welcome. I believe it's Paivios, p a I v I o, theory.

Rob:

That would be apostrophe s.

Jared:

Yes. P a I v I o apostrophe s theory. It's like this is spelling in second grade again. Something called dual coding, which is connecting visual and verbal information. According to Pyvio, there are two ways a person could expand on learned material, verbal associations and imagery.

Jared:

So dual coding theory postulates that both sensory imagery and verbal information is used to represent information. So if you want to attach something to the senses, it helps you hold onto it better. So in this case, a mind map would help you visually plus textually, verbally understand the content. Same with music. Right?

Jared:

Putting things to music helps you understand it or to retain it better. We try to figure out how to make taste involved in that, and I couldn't figure out how to, like, help me taste act two of Macbeth. I don't think that would work as well. But, yeah, the idea of doing

Rob:

You might imagine the scene. You could you could probably smell the scene, at least.

Jared:

I mean, the the brilliance of Shakespeare and Macbeth, not to go on a rant here about Macbeth, but he uses the the act two soliloquy where Macbeth has a fever dream and pictures the dagger floating in front of him. The dagger is the symbol of the violence and his ambition. The dagger is pointing the direction towards where he's going to go kill the king and become king himself, and it's just a visual representation of that. So Shakespeare uses and again, back in Shakespeare's day, there wasn't a physical dagger that someone hung from a string and brought down the globe. It was the actor visually and verbally telling you there's a dagger.

Jared:

And because of that, I think it sticks a lot better in people's brains when they watch it or when they read it.

Rob:

Well, and and we know that metaphor is very important.

Jared:

Mhmm.

Rob:

Doctor Oakley also has brought that out in her book, others as well. Doctor Shultz. Doctor Shultz. Right? Painting a picture in the mind.

Rob:

And I think there are different things, like you were saying, and why this theory makes sense to me and why mind mapping works really well, especially for those maybe who have challenges learning or maybe have some challenges in in other ways with their learning. This could be something where you could encode information visually.

Jared:

Mhmm.

Rob:

I think all of us are visual in one way or another. We may not think we are, but pretty much every person, if they try, can imagine something. Like, if I said to you, imagine a large bright red apple.

Jared:

Okay.

Rob:

You know? Yeah. And imagine see it in your mind's eye and see your see yourself grabbing it with your hand and taking a bite.

Jared:

Yes. Done that.

Rob:

Can you imagine what it tastes like?

Jared:

I can.

Rob:

Now imagine that that bite you took actually had a worm in it. Can you taste the worm?

Jared:

While I was throwing it up? Yes. I can taste the worm. Thank you for that.

Rob:

Well, you know, that's a way of tying something to to something we've already experienced back to that whole idea of

Jared:

never I've never had a worm in

Rob:

my You've never had a worm in an apple? No. Never. Okay. 43 You could still imagine it though.

Jared:

I could and it was disgusting. Thank you for that. It kinda hits on the multiple intelligences idea as well with Gardner where there's I know that's been debunked, but the idea that, you know, just I should say that it's debunked the idea that we all have one intelligence that we stick to, and that's our preferred way of doing

Rob:

it. Correct.

Jared:

Everyone is visual in some capacity or auditory or kinesthetic in some way, but you could tap into that visual part of it. For example, going back to Macbeth, if I can share a story that I use at this semester. I believe I kinda shared it a bit in a previous episode, but it just fits perfectly with using it in the classroom. There's one chapter out of the book from Foster that we're reading How to Read Literature Like a Professor, and he talks about don't stand too close to the hero. And it's an idea of, like, characters that are in proximity to the hero are going to get killed or damaged or injured in some way.

Jared:

So you can look at Star Trek and the red shirts. And if you look at the Marvel movies and superheroes and stuff, it's always the smaller characters end up being killed to show the risk that the hero faces. Mhmm. So with Macbeth, I had them do a mind map where we put Macbeth in the middle, and then we put I guess this could be more of a concept map. But the idea was that putting Macbeth in the middle, putting the other characters that are around him, directly around him, and then as you read through the story, you realize that every single one of those characters die.

Jared:

And doing that visually, then you can see the the characters that branch off of those main characters that don't really have a connection to Macbeth. You see that they're still alive, and they have an impact on killing Macbeth. Spoilers. But, everyone directly close to, just like Foster said, ends up dead, in this in the play. So it's just a way of visually showing them.

Jared:

Like, when we show it, like, we're finishing Macbeth tomorrow, we'll pull the concept map. We'll pull the mind map back out and say, look, everyone's dead that's exactly random, just like Foster postulated. So it's pretty cool.

Rob:

Is cool. And there are a lot of other things that I think teachers can do in terms of of using mind mapping, not just from Macbeth, but other things in terms of summarizing material or even assessment, especially if you use visuals. Right? You could take it a whole another step instead of just ovals. Maybe you've instead of doing a a an outline for your students, you do a mind map and you keep working on that mind map as you go along.

Rob:

But when you do an assessment, you have them reproduce the mind map.

Jared:

Oh, that's cool.

Rob:

And you could use kinda like shapes. You could use you could either use shapes or you could have them create their own shapes or maybe put pictures that are personal to them behind. That's what you can do with some of the software that that kinda tells a story itself. So you you're kinda doing, like, the you're you're bringing in, like, mind palaces.

Jared:

Oh, yeah.

Rob:

You've heard of those?

Jared:

About that. Yeah.

Rob:

Where basically you go through a room in your house and you tie things to that area in your house. So like a your front room or something and you just go around the room. Because we are spatial creatures, we can remember where things are in a room. Yeah. And if we place them there and they're really super odd Mhmm.

Rob:

We tend to remember them. Right? Yeah. Yep. So that's one of the many strategies that that, like, memory experts use.

Rob:

Yeah. They use kinda like really weird and strange stuff that's weird and strange to them, much like using music for doctor Lang. You know, she said it needs to be appropriate for the person. So I would say, you know, create maybe a basic framework

Jared:

Yeah.

Rob:

With a mind map for students with your content, but then allow them to go in and bedazzle it, if you will. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. In a way that would tie it to them. And I think students will remember that a whole lot more in the long run.

Rob:

And I think mind mapping is a is a really good tool. So let's talk practical.

Jared:

Yep. What do you use? I mentioned MindNode before. That's one of my, favorite ones to use because I can do branching paths and zoom in and zoom out and do the macro and the micro view of it. I've also used Trello.

Jared:

That's a good one. I like the idea of, like, having to do branching paths and stuff with that. But honestly, one of my other favorite ones is just a plain old whiteboard. You don't need to have a fancy app or a fancy computer or a tablet. Just get yourself a whiteboard and some dry erase markers and go nuts.

Jared:

And I think it's it's something about writing it out is a big helper for me too. So I'd like, if I'm really needing to focus or really need to do some mind mapping, I will pull out a whiteboard and just sit or stand and just write and write and write.

Rob:

It's a lot faster.

Jared:

Think. That's true. Yeah. I agree.

Rob:

I think it's a lot faster to go from that and you've got the kinesthetic as well that's activating your brain.

Jared:

Yeah.

Rob:

Not that typing can't.

Jared:

Mhmm.

Rob:

But there's definitely something to big motions with a, you know, a a pen in your hand or a whiteboard Yeah. Pen in your hand. Right.

Jared:

But you can use it for lesson designing. You can do mind maps for a new unit or something like that as you're I've done that before with, to teach a new class. You can have students create learning maps to show understanding, like you said before Mhmm. Using it as an assessment piece, both formative and summative ideas. Other technical tools you could use are Canva or or Lucidchart.

Jared:

Google Slides, I mean, you can get really granular with a Google Slide and zoom all the way in and have it function as a mind map so you have enough real estate to to play with as well. But then, you know, as an educator, you can also reflect using it for curriculum planning, professional learning. Yeah. There's plenty of usages of it. I think I might post a picture of my Macbeth mind map and let all the literature professors that listen go, well, that's wrong.

Jared:

That's wrong. But just a way of, if you if you don't judge the content, judge the, what's the word I'm looking for? Don't judge the content, judge the

Rob:

Innovation.

Jared:

Judge the innovation, judge the technique and the the mechanics that I use to

Rob:

There's another one we don't have on here, but one that I started off using quite a while ago, and it's a open source. It's kind of like I don't know if I call it the granddaddy of these things, but XMind is the name of the

Jared:

I've never heard of that.

Rob:

So even before OneNote became popular way back in the February, I was using XMind. So it's been around for a while.

Jared:

It's still out there?

Rob:

I believe so. X-mind. There's there's probably

Jared:

probably yeah. Is.

Rob:

There's probably

Jared:

xmind.com.

Rob:

Yeah. There's probably a lot of oh, is it just xmind, one word? Yeah. One word. Okay.

Rob:

It's gone through a lot of iterations since then.

Jared:

Yeah. It's like a

Rob:

Yeah. I found it very helpful. And if you're looking for something that's free, open source, pretty powerful, and you're not afraid of open source software, then highly recommend it.

Jared:

Yeah. I might try it out. So just as an application wise Yeah. If you're thinking about using this, I'm going to ask myself the question of, if there's a person listening who wants to try mind mapping, what should they do? And I think you could start with an area of your teaching where there's a complex idea.

Jared:

When I think about literature like Shakespeare, a lot of complex stuff going on there, either in the language or the themes or the symbols and metaphors or similes and all the new phrases that Shakespeare invents Mhmm. I think using a mind map for some sort of complex idea would be used. Maybe it's a maybe it's a new concept you're exploring in a new unit. You're going to teach it in sizable chunks Yes. But you really want to flesh out what those sizable chunks are.

Jared:

There's a good chance to use a mind map to kinda develop that idea.

Rob:

I think for me, one thing that I've done, instead of just mind mapping by itself, you know, because I've been using it for a while now, the thing that I have kinda paired it with that's been very useful and effective for me personally has been time based sessions. So just like I would do free writing, which I know you love, you know, just as just like I would do free writing, I would do mind mapping in the same kind of atmosphere where I give myself a timeline, and I've already chosen the topic. Yeah. Right? Whether it's a problem that I'm dealing with or it's just something that I'm wanting to explore, and then I get that pressure of time.

Rob:

I don't know. I I find that kind of focusing. It helps focus me. And when I say, okay. I got three minutes.

Rob:

Go. And then I start you know, That's when whiteboard is a lot easier for me. Mhmm. Unless you're, like, really good with mind node and you can you know how to do, you know, enter tab and and just create things with your keyboard really quickly. Yeah.

Rob:

Otherwise, if you don't know how to do that and you're not fluent with it, it can be a little bit of a challenge. So, you know, I would say to our listeners, if you haven't ever tried it and you wanna give yourself a little bit of focus with it, do like you said, use a whiteboard. Get a big one. Stand in a room. Yep.

Rob:

If you have one, or it could be a little one. Although you're gonna find that frustrating after a while. Right? Mhmm. I think you and I both have experienced that.

Rob:

Yeah. And give yourself a timer on your phone or a watch or whatever. Three minutes, go and see see what you come up with.

Rob:

I want a whole wall of whiteboard in my office. So if you use mind mapping or if you wanna try it out, feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn, send us a message or send us an email. Ryan will share the email and his wonderfully constructed outros that he always does. But yeah, mind mapping, big fan. Thanks for joining this episode of Transform Your Teaching.

Ryan:

If you have any questions or comments about mind mapping, we would love to hear from you. Feel free to send us an email at CTLpodcast@Cedarville.edu, or you can send us a message on LinkedIn. Finally, don't forget check out our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog. Thanks for listening.