Arts & Aesthetics

Six Key Principles of the Cultures of Thinking Project

1. Skills are not sufficient; we must also have the disposition to use them. Possessing thinking skills and abilities alone is insufficient for good thinking. One must also have the disposition to use those abilities. This means schools must develop students’ inclination to think and awareness of occasions for thinking as well as their thinking skills and abilities. Having a disposition toward thinking enhances the likelihood that one can effectively use one’s abilities in new situations.

2. The development of thinking and understanding is fundamentally a social endeavor, taking place in a cultural context and occurring within the constant interplay between the group and the individual. Social situations that provide experience in communicating one’s own thinking as well as opportunities to understand others’ thinking enhance individual thinking.

3. The culture of the classroom teaches. It not only sets a tone for learning, but also determines what gets learned. The messages sent through the culture of the classroom communicate to students what it means to think and learn well. These messages are a curriculum in themselves, teaching students how to learn and ways of thinking.

4. As educators, we must strive to make students thinking visible. It is only by making thinking visible that we can begin to understand both what and how our students are learning. Under normal conditions, a student’s thinking is invisible to other students, the teacher, and even to him/herself, because people often think with little awareness of how they think. By using structures, routines, probing questions, and documentation we can make students’ thinking more visible toward fostering better thinking and learning.

5. Good thinking utilizes a variety of resources and is facilitated by the use of external tools to “download” or “distribute” one’s thinking. Papers, logs, computers, conversation, and various means of recording and keeping track of ideas and thoughts free the mind up to engage in new and deeper thinking and help ensure that our thinking doesn’t get lost.

6. For classrooms to be cultures of thinking for students, schools must be cultures of thinking for teachers. The development of a professional community in which deep and rich discussions of teaching, learning, and thinking are a fundamental part of teachers’ ongoing experience provides the foundation for nurturing students’ thinking and learning.

Abriendo Puertas: Preguntas para Explorar, Ver, Pensar y Entender

Abriendo Puertas es un juego simple que te invita a disfrutar profundamente de una obra de arte, explorando, interpretando y reflexionando acerca de ella solo o con otros. El juego es para ninos, adultos, grupos o familias, con o sin experiencia en las artes.

ARTS SURVIVE: A Study of Sustainability in Arts Education Partnerships

This report shares findings and provides perspectives for partnerships to consider as they seek to build their capacity to survive and to thrive over time. It contains questions for partnerships to consider in building these capacities. Including sketches of the twenty-one arts education partnerships selected for this study, bibliographic resources, a research context for the study, and reflections from many Arts Survive! Advisory Group Members and Senior Consultants, the report provides tools for promoting the long-term sustainability of arts education partnerships between schools and arts organizations, artists, and/or cultural institutions. Whether you are an artist working in the schools, a teacher, an arts administrator, a parent, a school administrator, a school board member, or a funder, we hope these tools will be useful as you consider how best to sustain the life of your arts education partnership. 

Reviewing Education and the Arts Project (REAP) Executive Summary

The executive summary of research conducted to link academic success and art education. 

Investigating the Educational Impact & Potential of The MoMA's Visual Thinking Curriculum

Between October of 1998 and August of 1999, researchers at Harvard Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education conducted an intensive investigation of the Visual Thinking Curriculum (VTC), a school-based curriculum that was being used at the time by The Museum of Modern Art in 5^th and 6^th grade classrooms in New York City. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative research methods, the purpose of the research was to better understand the outcomes, strengths and weaknesses of the VTC.