Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) one of many approaches
the process of learning is critically important as well as understanding the way that students think and learn as one of the keys to educational improvement (impact)

Visual Thinking Strategies: Using Art to Deepen Learning Across School Disciplines (2013) by Phillip Yenawine

Philip Yenawine’s, VTS Co-founder, latest book explores how VTS can be easily and effectively integrated into elementary classroom lessons in just ten hours of a school year
The Process
A teacher facilitated student-centered discovery process focus on carefully selected images.
As an educator you help students:

• Look carefully at work of art
• Talk about what you observe
• Back up your ideas with evidence
• Listen to consider the view of others
• Discuss and hold as possible a variety of interpretations

Teach visual literacy, thinking, and communication skills, listening, and expressing oneself.
Growth is stimulated by…..

• Looking at art of increasing complexity
• Answering developmentally based questions
• Participating in peer group discussions, carefully facilitated by teachers

What is going on in this picture? (inquiry into meaning_
What makes you say that? (introduces reasoning, provide evidence and stay engaged)
What more can we find? (deepens meaning-making and looking)

• something worth while to examine (artist, concept/issue, process)
• know the work of art (everything-your resources)
• good prompts encourage wondering respond to all comments link one comment to another (individual contributions matter)
• pointing (visual paraphrasing) anchors words with images

An Activity

Try post a visual drawing 8″x10″ (simple and playful- you in the center mostly images and some words) to the blog next week with only 1-2 sentences of additional text explaining….demonstrating how you engage students in VTS, critical thinking, higher order thinking (Blooms Taxonomy), creative thinking, or some theory/strategy related to visual thinking and learning.