Virtual Speaker Series: Let’s Get Visual!

Using Visual Supports for Clearer Instructions with Aaron Lanou

Information:

Date: March 20, 2026

Time: 1:00-4:00pm

Platform: Zoom

Cost: $65/person

Let’s Get Visual: Using Visual Supports for Clearer Instruction

Looking for a better way to hook and engage your class? Are Google images not cutting it for adding visuals to slides and handouts?

Visual supports are a powerful, UDL-aligned practice that makes ideas more concrete, yet they’re often underutilized or misused in inclusive classrooms. In this workshop, we will explore the four P’s of visuals:

• Purposes: How visual supports benefit student learning and classroom success
• Principles: How to ensure visuals are clear, connected, and consistent
• Practice: Which visual supports to use to support classroom routines and lessons
• Production: How to use high-tech and low-tech resources to create useful visuals

Join us to learn how meaningful visuals can clarify directions, simplify concepts, and create predictable structures to help all students be successful in inclusive classrooms.

At the conclusion of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Describe the learning benefits of using visual supports
• Discern between more and less effective visuals
• Identify how and when to use visuals in support of student learning and smooth classroom functioning
• Create digital and physical visual supports to use in classrooms
• Utilize free digital resources to use to continue to create visual supports in their settings

Aaron Lanou is an educational consultant supporting schools and organizations to reach all kids with inclusive, strengths-based practices. He coaches teachers and others to teach and support autistic students and all kids with a variety of academic, executive functioning, and social support needs. A member of Carol Gray’s Team Social Stories, Aaron also provides Social Stories workshops and collaborates with Carol and the team to continually update and refine the Social Stories philosophy and approach. Through the lens of Universal Design for learning, Aaron works with educators to consider the kid in context, examining the environment, demands, and expectations as the starting point for helping students be successful. He specializes in helping teachers use clear and purposeful visual supports, focused graphic organizers, clarity and structure in instruction based on principles of learning and memory, and a range of executive functioning supports and other scaffolds. Committed to centering disabled perspectives, Aaron has learned from and alongside his students with disabilities and has collaborated frequently with autistic colleagues and presenters.

A former special education teacher, Aaron was previously Director of Professional Development and Executive Director of the Nest Support Project at New York University, leading the nation’s largest inclusion program for autistic students, the NYC Department of Education’s Nest Program. He has been adjunct faculty at Hunter College and NYU, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on instructional methods for students with learning disabilities and teaching students with complex support needs.

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