Thanks to the Sonoma Valley Education Foundation, the Valley’s students have a whole new way to learn. The Visual Thinking Strategies program, a pilot at El Verano School in 2007, has now been rolled out at all five elementary schools. VTS uses art to develop vocabulary and literacy while helping students build critical and analytical thinking skills.
“This is a very innovative program for our students,” said Fran Meininger, executive director of the foundation. “It is a departure from ‘teaching to the test’ and it gives students the ability to use their powers of observation and wonder to hypothesize, draw conclusions and substantiate what they’ve learned.”
According to the VTS Web site, children want to understand what they are looking at and VTS harnesses that instinct in every child. Using fine art images of paintings, portraits, etchings, sculpture and more the program fosters students’ capacities to observe, think, listen and communicate. To help stimulate students’ natural curiosity, VTS-trained teachers ask a series of questions about what students think is happening in a picture, why it is happening and what else can be found. Over time and with encouragement, students learn how to use their powers of observation to develop critical thinking skills.
VTS was developed in the late 1980s by Abigail Housen and Philip Yenawine. Today, the program is well-known and is used in museums both locally and internationally, as well as in schools, colleges and universities. The program is, in fact, so innovative and the results so impressive that it has been integrated as part of a course at Harvard Medical School.
Robyn Muscardini is the program coordinator for VTS. She is also a part-time employee at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art involved with Art Rewards the Student. She discovered VTS while in graduate school and quickly realized the potential benefits for Sonoma’s children.
“VTS lays the foundation for art education and immediately allows students to have a meaningful relationship with visual art,” said Muscardini. “With young children this is very important. But even at the high school level, the Art Rewards the Student program has brought students together; has allowed them to voice their opinions and understand each other better. VTS has made this difference.”
What works about VTS, says Meininger, is teachers are trained to stay neutral. “Teachers engage and involve the students and their observations but help them realize that many times, there is more than one right answer. By staying neutral, they encourage participation from every class member.”
When students are first introduced to the VTS program, they are shown images to which they can relate: a barnyard for instance or a family. As they progress through school grades, the images get more sophisticated and so, too, do their powers of observation and critical-thinking skills. The program also builds writing and vocabulary skills in a creative way as teachers are trained to elevate language. For example, when a child says he can see through a wall, the teacher in turn uses the word “transparent.” Teachers also “scaffold” the thinking process, circling back to earlier observations as a discussion progresses, building on previous observations.
“All the teachers are really enthusiastic. The students are enthusiastic. VTS can be done at the spur of the moment and can instantly shift the climate in the classroom. It’s fun, it can be long or short, it’s a great creative break for students,” said Meininger.
Craig Madison is a third-grade teacher at El Verano School, where the program was piloted. He said because VTS facilitation on the teacher’s part asks for evidence, students become adept at stating what they see and providing their reasons. This, in turn, makes them better listeners because the teacher continually paraphrases observations back to the students, but with higher-level vocabulary which links to their original comments.
“Each of the students comments are accepted, if they are given with evidence, so the children become very comfortable sharing opinions in a group setting,” said Madison. “Not only does the VTS facilitation allow students to practice critical-thinking skills out-loud in a non-threatening way, it also promotes civil discourse and has an astonishing effect on their writing skills.”
Madison backs this statement up by comparing two writing samples completed by his students: one at the beginning of the year and another at the end. Students are asked to write for 15 minutes about what they see happening in an image. Early in the year, the responses are short, about a paragraph in length and fairly concrete; i.e., “I see a white dog.” After a school year’s worth of instruction, the students are asked to do the same exercise. This time, the results are profoundly different said Madison.
“Students will write two pages about an art image and are no longer describing it in concrete terms. Instead they’re writing about the story behind the image and what they perceive to be the character’s emotions and motivations. They’ll wonder in their writing about possibilities and play with different ideas. It’s really an amazing transformation.”
Madison also said that VTS is a powerful strategy in the school’s Science and English Language Development (ELD) programs as well. Any observed phenomenon can be treated as an art image with the same questions asked to prompt children to provide evidence for what they are thinking.
“VTS enhances communication, allows children the excitement of building meaning with peers, of sharing divergent thinking, of agreeing and disagreeing without hurting feelings and much more,” said Madison. “Our partnership with the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art and the De Young are also both invaluable. And because of VTS, the students can enter these museums, approach any art image and trust in the meaning they make of it. VTS gives them a key to the culture of humanity.”
The Education Foundation is the sole supporter of the VTS program with the exception of El Verano School, whose program has been funded by the Rotary Club of Sonoma Valley for the past three years. As such, VTS is “budget-proof” as it does not rely on funding from the Sonoma Valley Unified School District.
The total cost for the three-year program is $15,000 per school. Included in the cost is teacher training whereby lead teachers are trained in the VTS method and, in turn, train grade-level teachers at their schools. After the three-year period, VTS becomes the school’s program, allowing it to continue to use it indefinitely, even downloading additional images from the VTS Web site.
“VTS is about incorporating art into students’ lives thus enhancing every other aspect of what they’re learning,” said Meininger. “I’m so impressed when a child says, ‘I wonder.’ It means they’re really learning – they’re making a conjecture and are not hesitant to give an opinion. This is how research happens. VTS is one of the best things to happen to our school district in a long time.”
VTS Facilitation 101:
Visual Thinking Strategies uses art to foster students’ capacities to observe, think, listen and communicate. In VTS discussions teachers support student growth by facilitating discussions of carefully selected works of visual art.
Teachers are asked to use three open-ended questions:
• What’s going on in this picture?
• What do you see that makes you say that?
• What more can we find?
3 Facilitation Techniques:
• Paraphrase comments neutrally.
• Point at the area being discussed.
• Link contrasting and complementary comments.
Students are 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.
• Discuss many possible interpretations.
Sidebar source VTS Web site:
vtshome.org.
