Visual Thinking Strategies and Inclusive Pedagogy: From Early Years to Primary Education

Who Gets to Show That They Are Thinking?

In education, we often talk about inclusion in terms of where children learn, what support they receive, or how teaching is adapted for individual needs.

But there is another question that matters just as much:

Who gets to demonstrate that they are thinking, and who may be silenced by the way we ask them to show it?

A child who cannot yet write fluently may still have sophisticated ideas. A child developing English as an additional language may understand far more than they can comfortably articulate. Another child may need additional processing time, a visual starting point, or the opportunity to listen before contributing.

If participation depends primarily on confident verbal responses, rapid recall, reading ability or written literacy, some learners encounter barriers before the learning itself has even begun.

This is one reason I have become increasingly interested in Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS).

VTS is a structured approach to discussing visual material in which learners are invited to observe, interpret, justify and build upon one another's ideas. Rather than beginning with what the teacher wants children to know about an image, it begins with what learners themselves can see, notice and make meaning from.

For me, its relevance to inclusive pedagogy lies not simply in the use of pictures.

It lies in what happens when we reconsider who is permitted to contribute knowledge, what counts as evidence of thinking, and how many different ways a learner can enter a conversation.

What Is Visual Thinking Strategies?

Visual Thinking Strategies developed from work in museums and visual literacy, particularly the research of Abigail Housen and the educational work of Philip Yenawine.

At its core are three deceptively simple questions:

What's going on in this picture?

What do you see that makes you say that?

What more can we find?

The facilitator listens carefully to learners' responses, paraphrases their ideas, links contributions and encourages participants to return to the visual evidence.

What initially appears to be a conversation about an image can therefore become something much richer.

Children observe.

Interpret.

Question.

Listen.

Explain.

Reconsider.

And build meaning with others.

Yenawine (2013) describes VTS as a learner-centred approach that can be used across school subjects to develop close observation, discussion and reasoning. He later extended this work specifically to preschool education, exploring the use of art-based discussion to support literacy and social learning with younger children (Yenawine, 2018).

The simplicity of VTS is important, but it can also be misleading.

The three questions alone do not create meaningful dialogue.

Much depends on what the adult does with the answers.

Inclusion as Design, Not Repair

Inclusive education is still sometimes approached as a process of adaptation.

A lesson is designed.

A learner encounters difficulty.

Something is then changed or added so that the learner can participate.

Sometimes individual adaptation is essential. However, inclusive pedagogy also invites us to think earlier in the process.

Can we design learning with human difference already in mind?

This principle connects with Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

UDL recognises that learners differ in how they engage with learning, how they access and make sense of information, and how they communicate what they know. The framework therefore encourages multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression.

VTS has recently been considered alongside UDL because visual dialogue can potentially provide different routes into participation and meaning-making (Flood, Nolan & Boss, 2025).

The connection is compelling.

An image provides a shared point of reference.

Discussion offers an alternative to relying solely on written response.

Interpretation allows more than one contribution to be explored.

Evidence can be noticed before it has to be formally written.

Yet there is an important caution.

A picture is not inherently inclusive.

Neither is discussion.

A learner can sit within an apparently open conversation and still never feel able to contribute.

Inclusion is not embedded in the strategy. It is enacted through pedagogy.

Early Years: Beginning With What Children Notice

This is perhaps where I find VTS most interesting.

Young children communicate their thinking long before they can communicate through conventional literacy.

They point.

Gesture.

Name.

Wonder.

Notice.

Make connections.

Tell stories.

Ask questions.

Change their minds.

A visual conversation can begin with those existing capacities rather than waiting for children to demonstrate understanding through reading or writing.

The starting question is not:

Can you give me the answer I am looking for?

It is:

What do you notice?

That difference may appear small, but pedagogically it is significant.

One child might name an object.

Another may notice an emotion.

Another might describe a relationship between figures in the image.

Another could create an elaborate explanation of what happened before the scene or what might happen next.

A child might point first and speak later.

These contributions do not need to be identical to be meaningful.

Yenawine's work on VTS in preschool settings supports the use of carefully selected visual material and facilitated conversation with younger children. However, I would resist claiming that VTS automatically creates inclusive early years practice.

Its value lies in the possibilities it opens.

The visual starting point may allow children to contribute before sophisticated literacy or vocabulary is available. But whether those possibilities become genuinely inclusive still depends on the practitioner.

Who receives time to answer?

Who is interrupted?

Who is confident enough to speak first?

Whose gesture is recognised as communication?

Who needs longer to process a question?

Who is listening before they are ready to contribute?

Inclusive practice begins not simply by inviting children to speak, but by becoming curious about the many ways in which they communicate.

From Answers to Reasoning

As children progress through primary education, classroom interaction can become increasingly focused on producing correct answers.

There are understandable reasons for this. Teachers work within curricula, assessment expectations and limited time.

But when correctness becomes the dominant form of classroom exchange, it can narrow what we recognise as successful thinking.

One of the most powerful questions within VTS is:

What do you see that makes you say that?

It shifts attention from simply producing an answer towards explaining the thinking behind it.

Two children may look at the same image and reach entirely different conclusions.

Instead of immediately deciding which interpretation is correct, the teacher can ask both children to return to the evidence.

What did you notice?

Why did that make you think this?

Did someone else see something differently?

This is where visual discussion begins to move beyond simply describing pictures.

It becomes reasoning.

Research examining VTS in European educational contexts has explored its use for collective thinking, paraphrasing and language learning, as well as its potential within primary education (Nolan, 2022, 2023).

These studies provide useful evidence, but the wider pedagogical question interests me more:

What happens to children's thinking when we become less interested in how quickly they can answer and more interested in how they arrived there?

That question extends well beyond VTS.

What Counts as Ability?

Schools inevitably make judgements about children's abilities.

But what we ask children to do influences what we are able to see.

A child who finds extended writing difficult may be capable of complex oral reasoning.

A multilingual learner may recognise considerable nuance in an image while still searching for the language required to explain it.

A child who rarely raises their hand during rapid whole-class questioning may contribute when the class has time to look, think and listen first.

This does not mean visual approaches remove every barrier.

They do not.

Children with visual impairments will require appropriate access. Some children communicate more effectively through alternative or augmentative forms of communication. Others may find whole-group discussion uncomfortable or overwhelming.

No single mode will suit every learner.

That is precisely the point.

If we offer children only one way to demonstrate understanding, we risk mistaking difficulty with the method of response for difficulty with thinking itself.

For me, this is one of the most important principles within inclusive education.

The Teacher Has Not Disappeared

Child-centred and dialogic approaches are sometimes described as though the adult simply steps back and allows learning to happen.

I do not recognise good pedagogy in that description.

Skilled facilitation requires enormous professional judgement.

A teacher has to listen closely enough to understand what a child means rather than simply waiting for the answer they expected.

They must paraphrase without taking ownership of the child's idea.

They need to connect contributions without forcing agreement.

They must know when to probe, when to invite another perspective, and sometimes when to allow silence.

VTS guidance itself emphasises that effective facilitation involves far more than simply asking its three core questions. Listening, paraphrasing and linking learners' ideas are central to the approach.

This is where VTS becomes particularly relevant to professional learning.

Learning three questions is easy.

Developing the professional practice underneath them is much more demanding.

It involves:

• listening without rushing to evaluate;
• asking questions that extend rather than close thinking;
• becoming comfortable with uncertainty;
• noticing patterns of participation;
• creating emotionally safe spaces for disagreement;
• valuing children's reasoning even when it differs from our own;
• and recognising forms of communication beyond the most confident spoken contribution.

The teacher has not disappeared.

The teacher's expertise has changed position.

Whose Voice Is Still Missing?

There is also a danger in romanticising classroom dialogue.

Talk is not automatically democratic.

Some children are accustomed to speaking publicly and having adults affirm their ideas.

Others are not.

Some process spoken language quickly.

Others need considerably more time.

Some children are comfortable disagreeing.

Others may have learned through previous experiences that remaining quiet is safer.

And there will always be differences in confidence, language, personality, neurodiversity, cultural communication styles and relationships with adults.

An open question therefore does not create an equitable classroom simply because everyone is technically allowed to answer it.

This is why I am cautious about describing VTS itself as an inclusive strategy.

Instead, I see it as a structure that can create possibilities for inclusion when facilitated thoughtfully.

The practitioner must still notice:

Who has spoken?

Who has not?

Whose ideas are being picked up?

Whose contribution disappeared?

Who is always first?

Who is always last?

Who appears to be listening intensely but rarely contributes aloud?

And perhaps most importantly:

Are we creating genuine opportunities to participate, or merely opportunities for the already confident to speak?

Learning to Look Slowly

There is another reason visual thinking feels particularly relevant to contemporary childhood.

Children are growing up within an intensely visual culture.

Images are part of advertising, gaming, television, social media, digital communication and everyday life.

Much of that visual information is encountered quickly.

Scroll.

Swipe.

Watch.

React.

Move on.

VTS asks for something very different.

Stop.

Look.

Look again.

Notice what you missed.

Listen to what someone else saw.

Return to the evidence.

Reconsider your first interpretation.

This slowing down has value beyond analysing art.

It asks children to resist immediate judgement and become more attentive to complexity.

In a culture increasingly organised around rapid visual consumption, learning to look carefully may itself be a valuable form of critical literacy.

Participation Is Not the Same as Belonging

There is, however, a deeper question underneath all of this.

A child can participate in an activity without necessarily feeling that they belong within it.

For inclusive pedagogy, the ambition should therefore extend beyond securing contributions from everyone.

It should involve creating learning communities where children recognise that their ideas have value.

That means a contribution is not simply tolerated until the teacher supplies the correct answer.

It is heard.

Considered.

Connected with someone else's thinking.

Sometimes questioned.

Sometimes changed.

Sometimes allowed to remain unresolved.

When children experience their thinking as worthy of attention, participation becomes relational rather than procedural.

This is where VTS connects with something much larger than visual literacy.

It asks us to consider the culture of the classroom itself.

What VTS Makes Visible

I do not believe inclusive education will ever be achieved through a single framework, intervention or classroom technique.

Inclusion is far too complex for that.

It is shaped by relationships, environment, resources, curriculum, assessment, language, policy, social inequality and the wider circumstances of children's lives.

VTS cannot resolve these structural realities.

What it can do is provide a small window into something that happens every day in education:

children trying to make meaning together.

And when we look closely at that process, important questions become visible.

Who receives an entry point into learning?

Whose interpretation counts?

How comfortable are we when children think differently from us?

What happens when there is no immediate correct answer?

Do children learn from one another?

Can a teacher genuinely listen without immediately evaluating?

What forms of thinking are we failing to notice because they do not arrive in the format we expect?

These are not simply questions about Visual Thinking Strategies.

They are questions about education.

Conclusion: Giving Children a Way Into the Conversation

For me, the most interesting aspect of Visual Thinking Strategies is not the image.

It is what can happen around it.

The teacher retains expertise, but does not have to control every interpretation.

Children do not simply receive knowledge.

They notice.

Question.

Reason.

Listen.

Justify.

Reconsider.

And contribute to a shared process of understanding.

From early years into primary education, this offers an important provocation for inclusive pedagogy.

Perhaps inclusion is not simply about ensuring that children are physically present in the same classroom or given access to the same curriculum.

Perhaps we must also ask:

Do they have a meaningful way into the learning?

Are we noticing thinking when it appears differently from the forms education traditionally rewards?

And do children experience themselves as people whose ideas are worth listening to?

Visual Thinking Strategies does not solve inclusion.

Nor should any educational approach make that claim.

But it can remind us that meaningful participation begins when children are given ways into the conversation and when the adults around them are genuinely prepared to listen.

Sometimes, changing what we ask, how we listen and what we recognise as thinking can change far more than the conversation itself.