Arts & Aesthetics

10 Ideas to Start Building a Culture of Thinking at Your School

10 detailed activities designed to promote Cultures of Thinking, where a group’s collective as well as individual thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted.

Places to Play in Providence: A Guide to the City by our Youngest Citizens

The guide that resulted from a collaboration between the Making Learning Visible team at PZ and a school-readiness initiative, Ready to Learn Providence (R2LP). The publication was created by preschool children and teachers from eight inner city programs and programs and features children's illustrations and descriptions of their favorite places to play in the Rhode Island capital.

Cultures of Thinking Student Recording Sheets

A set of worksheets for students to evaluate their own thinking and rationale in a CoT classroom.

A Typology of Classroom Questions

A Typology of Classroom Questions: A look at the types of questions teachers ask and the answers/logic that they produce.

Recalling and reviewing of Knowledge and information

• Terminology

• Procedures

• Content

• Events and context

Procedural: Directing the work of the class

• Going over directions and assignments

• Clarifying

• Checking for attention, agreement.

• Task completion

• Organizational and management related

Generative: Exploring the topic

• Authentic questions or wonders that teacher doesn’t know the answer to.

• Essential questions that initiate exploration of a topic

Constructive: Building New Understanding

• Extending & Interpreting

• Connecting & Linking

• Orienting and focusing on big ideas, central concepts, or purpose

• Evaluating

Facilitative: Promotes the learner’s own thinking & understanding

• Requesting elaboration, reasons, evidence, justification

• Generating discussion among the class to hear different perspectives

• Clarifying and Uncovering

The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education

Many children in the United States have little or no opportunity for formal arts instruction, and access to arts learning experiences remains a critical national challenge. In addition, the quality of arts learning opportunities that are available to young people is a serious concern. Understanding this second challenge: the challenge of creating and sustaining high quality formal arts learning experiences for K12 youth, inside and outside of school is the focus of our recent research initiative, The Qualities of Quality, commissioned by The Wallace Foundation and conducted by Project Zero. The study focuses on the character of excellence itself and asks three core questions:

How do arts educators in the United States including leading practitioners, theorists, and administrators conceive of and define high quality arts learning and teaching?

What markers of excellence do educators and administrators look for in the actual activities of arts learning and teaching as they unfold in the classroom?

How do a programs foundational decisions, as well as its ongoing day-to-day decisions, affect the pursuit and achievement of quality?