Alanna Gaylord's Art Education Portfolio

Description:

            Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a method initiated by teacher-facilitated discussions of art images and documented to have a cascading positive effect on both teachers and students. Many VTS interactions are question and answer based, where the teacher will ask students questions about a certain work of art and then the students will be asked to find answers using their own understandings. When students answer questions about an artwork, it requires them to apply their previous knowledge and expand upon it. These strategies provide simple ways for teachers and schools to provide students with key behaviors sought by Common Core Standards such as habitual thinking skills, oral and written language literacy, visual literacy, and collaborative interactions among peers.

 

Analysis:

            In a typical VTS exercise, the teacher will facilitate a discussion about a work of art in order to support student growth. To begin, the teacher will carefully select a work of art, which he or she plans to base the discussion off of. Then the teacher will ask the students three open-ended questions, for instance: “What is going on in this picture?” “What do you see that makes you say that?” and “What more can we find?” During this discussion, the teacher will paraphrase comments neutrally, point at the area being discussed, and link and frame student comments. During this discussion, the students will be asked to look carefully at works of art, talk about what they observe, back up their ideas with evidence, listen to and consider the views of others, and discuss many possible interpretations. VTS exercises such as this are meant to address Common Core Standards such as habitual thinking skills, oral and written language literacy, visual literacy, and collaborative interactions among peers, as well as VTS helps students observe, draw conclusions, inference, argue in evidence, and revise.

Although art is the fist essential discussion topic for VTS, these strategies provide a way to jumpstart a process of learning to think deeply in all areas of learning. Because art enables students to use existing visual and cognitive skills to develop confidence and experience, students learn to use what they already know to figure out what they don’t, which then prepares them to explore other complex subject matter. Because students are engaged by contributing observations and ideas, they participate in VTS-based lessons in very different ways from other lessons. Through VTS’ rigorous group problem-solving process, students are able to cultivate a willingness and ability to present their own ideas, while respecting and learning from the perspectives of their peers.

 

Reflection:

            My experiences with Visual Think Strategies have been very positive. I have found that when I display a piece of artwork and form open-ended discussion questions about the piece, it requires the students to apply their previous knowledge and expand upon it in order to answer the questions. In this way students are strengthening and gaining key behaviors and thinking skills, such as habitual thinking skills, oral and written language literacy, visual literacy, as well as collaborative interactions with peers.