Book excerpt: Visual Leap is a how-to book for teachers, students and parents interested in making learning easier. In step-by-step fashion, it presents an effective, universal, visual method to teach students how to think independently and critically, and how to organize their ideas for any instructional purpose. The visual strategies are rooted in the science of human learning and are effective because they tap into the ways that we learn naturally. The Visual Leap method simplifies teaching the skills of the Common Core State Standards and gives teachers explicit ways to differentiate instruction to meet the needs of all learners. The strategies work across many grade levels and subject areas and for a wide variety of instructional objectives across the curriculum, such as vocabulary acquisition, reading comprehension, writing, speaking, and listening. Visual Leap offers easy ways to foster dynamic, creative, and critical thinking in the classroom, and provides teachers and students with a toolkit of problem-solving and learning strategies designed to serve them throughout their academic and professional lives.