I had a boss a few years ago who would make incredibly complex doodles in meetings. In my rarefied, text-based working world, we all thought this was a little odd. Until the day he referred to a sheet of doodles and quoted nearly verbatim what was happening in the meeting at the time he drew that doodle. Personally, I was floored. He was magic!

Move forward a few years. My daughter does the exact same thing. My son does the same thing. Their friends do the same thing.

Yet, they are often told “STOP DOODLING” in class. WHY??

I assume that sometimes the doodling really is distracting the kids. I’m hoping that sometimes the teachers are allowing the kids to doodle, if that’s what works best for them. By not allowing doodling, we are truly denying some kids – all kids, actually – the right learn visually. And that is how some kids work best.

Check out this blog post about an informal doodle test done by a teacher:

My little informal experiment showed that students, who doodled their notes, retained more details of the content they heard and were able to narrate and explain content, connections and sequence better than their counterparts who took text with bullet type notes.

This video (also linked on the blog post) is a great validation of doodling.