Visual Thinking Strategies: Using Art to Deepen Learning Across School Disciplines

2014 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice

"What’s going on in this picture?"

With this one question and a carefully chosen work of art, teachers can start their students down a path toward deeper learning and other skills now encouraged by the Common Core State Standards. The Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) teaching method has been successfully implemented in schools, districts, and cultural institutions nationwide, including bilingual schools in California, West Orange Public Schools in New Jersey, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

It provides for open-ended yet highly structured discussions of visual art, and significantly increases students’ critical thinking, language, and literacy skills along the way.

Philip Yenawine, former education director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and cocreator of the VTS curriculum, writes engagingly about his years of experience with elementary school students in the classroom. He reveals how VTS was developed and demonstrates how teachers are using art—as well as poems, primary documents, and other visual artifacts—to increase a variety of skills, including writing, listening, and speaking, across a range of subjects.

The book shows how VTS can be easily and effectively integrated into elementary classroom lessons in just ten hours of a school year to create learner-centered environments where students at all levels are involved in rich, absorbing discussions.

Philip Yenawine is cofounder of Visual Understanding in Education (VUE), a nonprofit educational research organization that develops and studies ways of teaching visual literacy and of using art to teach thinking and communication skills. VUE’s curriculum, Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), is in use in schools across the United States and abroad. Director of Education at the Museum of Modern Art from 1983 to 1993, Yenawine also directed education programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art earlier in his career. He was founding director of the Aspen Art Museum and consulting curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. He has taught art education at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and Massachusetts College of Art. He received the National Art Education Associations Award for Distinguished Service in 1993, was the George A. Miller Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois in 1996, and was the first Educator-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2012, among other honors. He is on the board of the Art Matters foundation. Yenawine is the author of How to Look at Modern Art, Key Art Terms for Beginners, and six children’s books about art. He helps with image selection as well as acts as a moderator for the NYTimes.com Learning Network feature, “What’s Going On in This Picture?”

Yenawine attended Princeton University from 1960 to 1963, and holds a BA from Governor’s State University in Park Forest South, Illinois, and an MA from Goddard College in Plainfi eld, Vermont. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Kansas City Art Institute in 2003.