Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a visual arts program for elementary school students and teachers that uses art to teach thinking, communication skills, and visual literacy. Growth is stimulated by three things: looking at art of increasing complexity, responding to developmentally-based questions, and participating in group discussions that are carefully facilitated by teachers.

VTS encourages...

• a personal connection to art from diverse cultures, times and places
• confidence in one’s ability to construct meaning from art
• active class discussions and group problem solving
• development of thinking and communication skills
• development of writing skills
• transfer of these skills to other subject areas

Background

VTS is based on the work of cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen and veteran museum educator Philip Yenawine. Housen has been investigating the nature of aesthetic development and its role in education for over twenty years. As part of her doctoral work at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the late 1970's, she developed a measure and method for assessing aesthetic development. In 1983, she published her doctoral thesis "The Eye of the Beholder: Measuring Aesthetic Development," which includes her well-documented stage theory. Yenawine has directed education programs at many museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Beginning their work together in 1988, Housen and Yenawine focused on studying the effects of specific treatments (such as VTS) on aesthetic development, and the relation of aesthetic thinking to cognition in general, using Housen’s method and theory as the basis of further experimentation. Also influential in the development of VTS is the work of psychologists and educational theorists Rudolf Arnheim (in whose honor the curriculum is named), Jerome Bruner and Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky’s research concerning the relationship of language to thought, and his findings concerning growth that occurs from interaction with others are particularly influential.

Field-tested since 1991 in the United States, Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, VTS is specifically designed to address the concerns and abilities of beginning viewers. It is easy for teachers to learn, inexpensive, and efficiently fits into school schedules. VTS creates partnerships between local schools and art museums, integrating museum visits into classroom studies.

VTS consists of ten lessons taught by classroom teachers (Kindergarten - Grade 5) spread over the school year. Each lesson lasts about an hour. Most lessons are conducted in classrooms. For Grades 3-5 an art museum visit is recommended in the final lesson.

Each lesson involves a discussion of carefully sequenced images chosen from many different cultures and times, and in various mediums. In Grades K-2, two poster-sized reproductions are used during each lesson, and in Grades 3-5, three slides.

Students are first asked to look at an image without talking. Then the teacher/facilitator asks certain non-directive questions. ("What’s going on in this picture?" "What more can we find?") These questions encourage students to examine what they see. Later more specific, probing and directed questions are added. From the beginning, students are also asked to back up interpretations with evidence; whenever they state an opinion, teachers ask them, "What do you see that makes you say that?"

The teacher ensures that every response is heard and acknowledged, by pointing to what is mentioned as students talk, and then paraphrasing what is said. As the discussion evolves, teachers link various related answers, helping to make students aware of their converging and diverging views, and of their developing skills at constructing shared, yet varied meanings.

Complexity of the images builds as students’ interests and abilities grow. In the later grades, students are asked to perform writing assignments, preferably using computers and the Internet.

When questions are asked, students are first asked if they can figure out the answer by looking. If unable to do this, they then are asked where they might look to find the answer. Only as a last resort does the teacher give the answer.

Discussions of any given image generally last roughly twenty minutes–long enough for students to look carefully, develop opinions, express them, consider multiple viewpoints, speculate together, argue, debate and/or build on each other’s ideas, and possibly revise their conclusions. All along, teachers are facilitators of the students’ process, never the expert.

In Grades 3-5, writing assignments are used as a way for students to begin to apply as individuals the skills learned while discussing images as part of a group.

Writing assignments

• Help students to connect verbal and written experience
• Are a useful and meaningful way to use computers and the internet
• Are useful tools for teachers to assess student development
• Allow students a choice of images

VTS is designed to promote growth in thinking and communication skills, as well as aesthetic development. Standard measures of achievement have limited use in assessing these different but related streams of growth. VTS assessment measures are built into the technique itself: listening to students, paraphrasing, and linking what is said. Paraphrasing is the main tool for keeping track of individuals in terms of oral language abilities, kinds of thoughts and concerns, information retained, and methods of processing information and ideas. Linking connected thoughts helps teachers understand how thinking progresses during any given discussion, how individuals relate to the group, and how a given student changes over time. Written assignments collected throughout VTS lessons concretely augment what teachers hear and recall.

During training, teachers are frequently asked to step back and consider what learning behaviors are encouraged by VTS, how these are manifested, and how to track them. Teachers are asked to keep an ongoing record of what they observe during VTS classes. Each lesson includes suggestions for different sorts of reflections on student behaviors.

Over time, students grow from casual, random, idiosyncratic viewers to thorough, probing, reflective interpreters. They go from finding only personal connections — appropriate when they begin — to searching out the intentions of artists and dealing with elements of styles. They are first encouraged to find meaning based on past experiences (legitimizing what they know), and to become grounded storytellers. After a certain amount of experience — when they begin to become dissatisfied with their own limitations — they are asked to develop their own voices through writing about art, either using images provided with the curriculum or via the Internet. The process first depends on group interaction and works toward individual problem solving motivated by personal interests. As students develop their connection to art, they exercise a wide variety of cognitive skills that are useful in many contexts. Indeed, in all locations where VTS has been tested, both classroom and test performance has been seen to improve, and the effect in all cases has been attributable to VTS.