In the late 1980’s, when Philip Yenawine was the Director of Education at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he was given a challenge. A major donor wanted to know if his investment in the museum’s educational programs effected change: did museum visitors grow in their understandings of modern art as result? Yenawine’s bid to answer that question led him to researcher Abigail Housen (Ed.D. Harvard Graduate School of Education) and together they dug deeply into the effectiveness of MOMA’s programs. To Yenawine’s dismay, no matter the considerable gifts of his staff, the teaching did not produce change. Housen’s research however explained why: before the facts and concepts MOMA’s talented lecturers shared would stick, visitors needed to further develop existing visual and cognitive skills.
Housen’s data also revealed how to make this growth happen. Housen and Yenawine set about creating a strategy that reliably enabled people to build on skills they possessed to jumpstart a productive and satisfying process they could use whenever they came upon unfamiliar objects. Years of field research led to the refinement of the strategy known as Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) and to a body of data that proved it worked; it nurtures visual literacy and much else. Instead of listening to lecturers share their knowledge, VTS asks people to talk about what they see and guides their looking with a pattern of three basic questions and a method of facilitation that involves listening, paraphrasing comments, linking related ideas, and framing the kinds of thinking shared.
VTS was designed to help museum visitors get more meaning and pleasure out of art, but Housen and Yenawine’s studies found that it could be applied across grades to develop thinking, language, and social skills prioritized by schools. Art museums often incorporate VTS in their teaching programs especially outreach to schools but it’s proved to be a useful in medical education and business as a means of increasing observation, evidence based reasoning, listening, empathic leadership, and restorative practice.
VTS is implemented by various organizations including the Watershed Collaborative (Yenawine is Creative Director) and Hailey Associates (Yenawine is a principal.) Trained facilitators work across the globe in independent but often coordinated efforts to work in all levels of education, medical schools, and a wide variety of businesses.
Yenawine continues to teach in schools, universities, and by way of both Watershed and Hailey Group. He also writes a great deal about art and eduction.