Posts

I keep coming back to a recent post by Nina Simon: Arts Assessment: Let’s Stop “Proving” and Start Improving. I think Nina really hits the nail on the head. Indeed, when I think of what kinds of assessment will help me improve my own practice as a teacher, it rarely looks like the kinds of quantitative educational data that funders expect. Nina’s post is a reminder to ask questions that make sense to ourselves as educators, because this is where we can really improve our own practice....

I was clearing off my desk yesterday and found a pile of scrap paper left behind by kindergarten students’ collage making. There was something intriguing about the aesthetic of these odd pieces of paper—with their awkward cuts and imperfect edges. I hopped over to the photocopier and scanned them in. Five minutes later, an impromptu eBook was born. [ ](http://gollmar.org/media/SCRAP eBook.pdf) I’d like to return to this idea again at some point....

The phrase problem finding caught my eye as I was recently reviewing the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Critical Thinking Skills Checklist, in which it is included as one of seven habits of mind that constitute critical thinking: Problem Finding - Notes or requests information or identification; identifies information needed to form a conclusion/opinion; may propose a hypothesis in conjunction with stating the problem.[1] ISGM’s framework for assessing critical thinking has, most recently, been mentioned in a New York Times column on a study undertaken by another museum, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art....

Without launching into a detailed description, Visual Thinking Strategies is a great way to get learners of all ages and abilities to talk about and learn about visual art together. In fact, seeing it in action–seeing children as young as kindergarten or first grade quickly start to develop their visual literacy–is so inspiring that it makes me wish there were an analogous tool in music education. What would it take to adapt VTS’ approach of close looking to close listening?...

I’m beginning to think that this question is more interesting than the question that I posed back in July, “How is experiencing a work of art like reading?” (A question that I can’t claim to have come up with on my own, as it is a guiding question behind Words & Pictures.) This question asks us to consider the objectness of a work of art. As Olga Hubard remarks in “Complete Engagement: Embodied Response in Art Museum Education” (2007), “Unlike the contents of written texts, artworks present themselves as physical (or virtual) entities that exist in the same space as we do....